PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Collin Morikawa walked into the TPC Sawgrass media center Tuesday morning, less than 48 hours after his deflating missed opportunity Sunday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, with a hundred reporters homed in on one question asked in a dozen different ways.
Why didn’t you win?
And Morikawa owned his loss. Thirteen out of 16 questions were about his struggles down the stretch at Bay Hill, Russell Henley’s winning, or playing like a top-five golfer at times with one win since 2021 to show for it. He answered them all. He talked eloquently about his shifts in mindset since his two major championships. He said he wants the eyeballs and pressure. How he doesn’t think criticism of his not winning is unfair, because he thinks he should be winning these, too.
He gave every reporter what they were looking for. But for certain voices in golf, it was two days too late, and Morikawa’s eventual response to their response only served to highlight a tension point that has emerged this week on the PGA Tour.
That was the first time Morikawa spoke since the loss. In the aftermath of his defeat in Orlando, he declined to do a post-round interview, shades of Rory McIlroy’s doing the same thing after his painful loss at the U.S. Open last summer. Some reporters were a little miffed, but it would have been over soon enough. Except for one misstep. When asked why he didn’t talk, Morikawa said:
“Yeah. Just heated. Just pissed. Like I don’t owe anyone anything. No offense to you guys, but for me in the moment of that time, I didn’t want to be around anyone. Like, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t need any sorries. I didn’t need any ‘good playings.’ Like, you’re just pissed.”
In the room, it was said with a smile. It didn’t come off as aggressive. But in dry, unnuanced print, it looked bad. Bad enough that six-time winner Rocco Mediate unloaded on Morikawa on Sirius XM. Then Golf Channel analysts Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley tore into him more on the popular “Live From” broadcast. Their criticism became its own story.
Then, Morikawa elongated the entire saga.
After his second-round 65 to skyrocket up the Players Championship leaderboard Friday, he stopped his post-round interview to say one last thing. Forgive the length, but the entire quote feels necessary.
“I might bite my tongue after saying this, but to the Brandel Chamblees, to the Paul McGinleys, to the Rocco Mediates of the world, I don’t regret anything I said. You know, it might have been a little bit harsh that I don’t owe anyone, but I don’t owe anyone.
“I respect the fans,” he continued. “I’m very thankful for them. I’m grateful. It makes me emotional, but it’s just — it hurts to hear people say this, and especially you guys, because I finished the round and I went to go sign for 10 minutes, 15 minutes for all the people after. Not a single person from media went to go follow me because, I don’t know. But that’s me. So for people to be calling me out is — it’s interesting. It just, it doesn’t show anything. I mean, look, I get what you guys are saying. But I was there. I was signing for every single person right after the round, whether they wanted it or not. I finished second. They could care less. But yeah, I’m going to leave it at that, all right? So thank you guys.”
As Collin Morikawa’s media scrum wrapped, he stopped and said he wanted to address criticism he received for not speaking to media after his runner-up at Bay Hill.
“I don’t regret anything I said… it hurts to hear people say this”
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— Paul Hodowanic (@PaulHodowanic) March 14, 2025
It’s Friday of the biggest PGA Tour event of the season, and things are just all around weird between the media and golf’s biggest stars.
The “media” doesn’t deserve anything. Sportswriters are, as a broad group, a pampered, cynical and silly collection of misfits that do plenty of things to garner frustration all on our own. Sometimes we ask dumb questions. Sometimes we miss the mark. And at the end of the day, we’re writing and talking about a game, and none of this should ever feel like covering the White House. So no, the quote-unquote “media” doesn’t deserve players to answer their questions. The readers do deserve it. Translation: the fans deserve it. And that’s where the largest disconnect seems to exist.
Would it have looked better if Morikawa spoke Sunday? Sure. Phil Mickelson spoke after Winged Foot. Greg Norman spoke after the Masters. Tom Watson spoke after Turnberry. It wasn’t a great look when McIlroy didn’t speak at Pinehurst, and it’s not a good one for Morikawa, either.
Yet sometimes saying nothing tells us more than anything that could be said. McIlroy’s closing the trunk and skirting out of the parking lot will be far more remembered than any generic platitude he could have mustered about Bryson DeChambeau. As long as they eventually speak about it, and Morikawa came to Sawgrass on Tuesday fully prepared to open up and discuss his loss. Just like McIlroy did at the Scottish Open.
But the whole back-and-forth between Morikawa and the “Live From” guys is magnified by what’s going on around them — there’s something strange happening at Sawgrass this week with the best players in the world.
McIlroy was playing a Tuesday practice round when he hit his tee shot on 18 into the water and a young fan shouted, “Just like 2011 at Augusta!” McIlroy hit another tee shot, and before walking off he walked over to the fan, grabbed the friend’s phone that was filming and walked away. It turned out the kid who yelled this was Texas golfer Luke Potter, who won the amateur tournament in town just days earlier. Security kicked Potter and his friend out.
A third party filmed most of the interaction, it went viral, and here’s how it went when McIlroy was asked about it Thursday.
Reporter: “Can I ask you about the shenanigans with the kid on (18)?”
McIlroy: “No, you can’t.”
Reporter: “Why not?”
McIlroy (while laughing): “Because I don’t want you to.”
A different reporter: “The whole thing was made stranger by the fact that it wasn’t a civilian, that it was a player. Did you know that, and did it surprise you when you learned that?”
McIlroy: “I’m really happy that I shot 67 today.”
Since his return from hand surgery, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler has taken a noticeably snarky position with reporters. Scheffler has been well accustomed to the way to speak as a superstar for three years now. He’s always been completely skilled at giving basic, inoffensive answers that move the conversation forward and get him out of there. At the risk of being cynical, that’s a skill most players of his ilk develop. But the past five weeks have involved Scheffler’s challenging reporters and needling them. Again, reporters can ask some dumb questions, but all of these were in response to pretty benign, basic questions.
When a local reporter (so not somebody he knows enough to joke with), asked about some putting misses Thursday, he said: “So the hole is about this big. Sometimes when you’re putting from 10 feet it could go in here and then other times it ends up right there. So you tell me.”
When another asked about the greens’ not firming up: “Sounds like you’re trying to write something about the golf course, so I’m not going to bite. But I appreciate the effort.”
Two days earlier, when asked about returning after back-to-back Players wins, he got fiery: “I mean, what does last year’s tournament have to do with this year? You tell me. … What does that have to do with what I’m trying to do this week?”
So by the time Scheffler stepped up Friday to speak about a frustrating second-round 70, he was met with silence. No reporter stepped up to ask a question for an awkward few seconds. It wasn’t intentional. It was just uncomfortable.
But back to Morikawa and his battle with “Live From.” Even if it’s a niche audience within the overall sports landscape, Chamblee and McGinley carry enormous weight in golf. They are closer than you might think to being golf’s version of TNT’s “Inside the NBA.” Chamblee quickly called Morikawa “disrespectful.”
“When I found that he had refused to do the interview, I was thinking about the players who had suffered far more devastating losses, far more momentous losses, who regained their equilibrium and with class gave the media — and it’s not just giving the media, it is giving the fans and the sponsors and the entire ecosystem of the golf world an explanation of the humanity of losing,” Chamblee said.
He referenced Watson’s going up to a room of sorrowful-looking reporters after his heartbreaking 2009 Open loss and joked, “It’s not a funeral, you know.”
“The public are not really behind them,” McGinley said of this era of players. “There’s a sense of greed and a sense of entitlement that the public has a perception of them. … I don’t know if history is going to reflect back on this generation of players as being good for the game.”
That didn’t sit well with Morikawa, leading him to decide the best course of action was that extra statement after his Friday interview.
The challenging part was that many people defended Morikawa after the “Live From” segment. The criticism felt a little extreme. For a player often known for being robotic in interviews, Morikawa has evolved over the past year into a thoughtful, intelligent person to discuss golf and its issues of the game with. Nobody would have remembered his skipping the interview in the long term.
But now the story’s tail is longer. Now it lives another few days, and now the criticism from some will be larger than it ever was. Maybe it’s an unfortunate lesson in the warped, cyclical world we live in of comment-blowback-statement-blowback.
The misunderstanding between athletes and the media isn’t about the questions themselves, it’s about their underlying purpose. When confronted about their setbacks, athletes often perceive criticism where none exists, failing to recognize that thoughtful reporters aim to illuminate these moments of vulnerability, not to exploit them. The best narrative journalism humanizes its subjects through their struggles, transforming disappointments into relatable narratives that bridge the gap between superstar and spectator.
Collin Morikawa’s assertion that he owes the media nothing might seem justified. Yet what is unfolding at Ponte Vedra is how this adversarial stance diminishes everyone involved. As the walls between athletes and journalists grow higher, both sides retreat to their corners, creating a lose-lose situation that serves neither the sport nor its audience.
(Top photo: Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)
