After winning LIV Golf’s team championship in Miami last fall, Pat Perez said, “I’m paid. I don’t give a damn” in the victory press conference.
Ahead of the upstart circuit’s first event of the season in Mexico at Mayakoba, a former PGA Tour venue, Perez explained his joy at being there as, “I love it because we’re here and the Tour is not. End quote.”
So it should come as no surprise that the 47-year-old took credit for some salty comments made at the expense of PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan that were misattributed to Perez’s 4Aces teammate, Dustin Johnson.
“It was me,” Perez said in a text to Sports Illustrated when asked who made the comments about Monahan after the 4Aces won LIV Golf Adelaide in Australia on Sunday.
The Australian Associated Press reported on Monday that Johnson had said the following about Monahan: “We don’t give a damn how he feels. We know how he feels about us, so it’s mutual.”
Johnson denied making the comments and Perez backed him up.
“DJ said nothing, it was all me,” Perez said to SI. “I said we don’t care what Jay thinks cause we know how he feels about us and when I say WE, I mean me. I can’t speak for the whole group.”
The interaction was removed from the press conference transcript by LIV Golf, which aided in the flurry of bad reports over the last two days.
Dustin didn’t say it, Pat did. AAP reported it incorrectly.
— Jane MacNeille (@TheRealJaneSays) April 24, 2023
“We are trying to avoid that kind of hostility in our press conferences,” MacNeille told SI. “The question created an eruption of chatter and everyone said ‘no comment’ but one player (Perez) and it was indiscernible as it was kind of a chaotic scene. So we decided to remove it from the transcript.”
The Greg Norman-led and Saudi Arabia-backed league is back in action this week with LIV Golf Singapore at Sentosa Golf Club.