Mark Lye, the SiriusXM golf analyst who was fired for ripping the WNBA, has spoken about his termination.
In an interview with the Naples Daily News in Florida on Tuesday, Lye explained his side of what happened.
“It’s really cancel culture,” Lye told the outlet.
“In a way to glorify women’s golf, I made a comparison by comparing it to another sport that maybe isn’t so successful. Now as I look back on it, it was a hurtful thing.”
In a segment for SiriusXM’s PGA channel that went viral over the weekend, Lye was praising the progress that the LPGA has made over the last decade, and then went into an aside where he juxtaposed women’s golf with how he felt about the WNBA.
“Is there a gun in the house?” he asked, implying that he’d rather kill himself than watch the women’s basketball league.
Amid backlash over his comments, Lye tweeted on Sunday that his comments were not rooted in sexism: “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.”
“The reason [the comments on Twitter were] blowing up is they took the most unflattering part of that sound bite and they cut it off in a spot that buttressed their point of view, which is that men hate women’s sports or Mark hates women’s sports,” he told the Naples Daily News.
Lye said there were contextual reasons for bringing up the WNBA.
“We were cross-referencing sports,” he said. “We talked about baseball. We talked about football. We talked about some of the tough things facing those sports, the challenges, and the challenges that the PGA Tour has against [Saudi Arabia’s Super] Golf League.
“That’s what made it germane. That’s why I talked about the WNBA. It just didn’t come out of nowhere. I happened to watch WNBA highlights on ESPN. I saw nobody in the stands. I said, ‘Wow, that’s a problem.’ 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.
“I love watching ladies’ tennis, ladies’ golf, ladies’ volleyball. I can’t stand men’s volleyball. There are certain ladies’ sports that I really like watching. I like fast-pitch [softball].”
Lye, 69, played full-time on the PGA Tour from 1977 to 1991. His one PGA Tour tournament victory came at the Bank of Boston Classic in 1983.
Lye, who coaches his daughter’s high school golf team, said he is “not the most politically correct guy in the world” but that he tried to make his shows interesting for common golf fans. He lamented that the hardest thing about the whole situation was the impact it is having on his wife and kids.
“My kids are going to get exposed to this today [at school] and it breaks my heart that this is happening,” he said Tuesday. “My wife is in tears. I feel awful for my family.”