A golf analyst who said he’d rather kill himself than watch the WNBA said his firing from SiriusXM is an example of “cancel culture.”
“It’s really cancel culture,” Mark Lye said to the Naples Daily News, referencing some posts he saw on Twitter about his comments.
Lye, a former PGA Tour golfer, alleges that he was told that he couldn’t appear on the Saturday night show and was fired on Sunday morning. He said he was trying to “glorify” women’s golf by comparing it to women’s basketball.
“In a way to glorify women’s golf I made a comparison by comparing it to another sport that maybe isn’t so successful,” Lye said Tuesday. “Now as I look back on it, it was a hurtful thing.”
The controversy started during an episode of “The Scorecard” on SiriusXM’s PGA channel when Lye, 69, said he’d rather “shoot myself” than watch the WNBA.
“The LPGA Tour to me is a completely different tour than it was 10 years ago. … You couldn’t pay me to watch. You really couldn’t. Because I just, I couldn’t relate at all,” Lye said on the show. “It’s kind of like, you know, if you’re a basketball player — and I’m not trashing anybody; please, don’t take it the wrong way — but I saw some highlights of ladies’ basketball. Man, is there a gun in the house? I’ll shoot myself than watch that.”
The fact that I can’t relate to WNBA does not make me sexist in any way. All you haters should listen to the whole segment, where I completely glorified womens golf, which I love to cover. Thanks for listening.
— mark lye (@letitflye) February 6, 2022
“It just didn’t come out of nowhere,” said Lye, whose one PGA Tour victory came at the Bank of Boston Classic in 1983.
“I was trying to make the point that the LPGA is a living, thriving, credit to women’s sports in general, and that the WNBA was at the other side of the spectrum.”
• Jacob Calvin Meyer can be reached at jmeyer@washingtontimes.com.
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