Before becoming a popular and irreverent broadcaster and analyst, David Feherty forged a pretty a successful playing career that saw him win five times on the European Tour while also making the 1991 Ryder Cup team.
Feherty calls that his career highlight, despite a losing effort for the Europeans, as he took down Payne Stewart in a tense Sunday singles match that helped lead to drama later that day.
The U.S. prevailed by a 14½ to 13½ margin (check out SI's game story from 1991 here) only after Germany’s Bernhard Langer missed a 6-foot putt on the final green of the final hole of the final match against Hale Irwin.
The situation could not have been fraught with more drama.
And that’s when Feherty’s mind goes to the places where others might not travel.
“There was a photographer named Lawrence Levy,” Feherty says. “I’m sitting beside Lawrence (by the 18th green) and he looks at me out of the one eye that wasn’t in his viewfinder. Bernhard is taking forever. He’d take an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes. And he says to me, ‘You know it occurs to me, the last German under this kind of pressure shot himself in a bunker.’ Still the most inappropriate thing I’ve heard on a golf course. I blew a snot bubble. And Langer came back and won the next week. Amazing.”
That Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island was known as the “War by the Shore” and Feherty now is playing a role in a different kind of conflict.
About to complete his third season of broadcasts for the LIV Golf League near his home in Dallas, Feherty has had a unique view of LIV as it unfolded.
The lead analyst to play-by-play announcer Arlo White and alongside former Golf Channel reporter Jerry Foltz, Feherty has taken his place inside the LIV Golf broadcast booth for what will be his 34th event this week at Meridoe Golf Club.
He has said previously and made no qualms about his reasons for leaving NBC and signing on with LIV Golf at the height of the controversy: the money. He was made an offer he could not turn down.
“It wasn’t hard,” Feherty says during a recent interview with Sports Illustrated. “Greg (Norman, LIV’s commissioner and CEO) called me out of the blue. It was the Open Championship at St. Andrews, the one that Cam (Smith) won. That was my last event as it turned out at NBC. I wasn’t supposed to start until the beginning of the following season. It was supposed to be a secret. Someone at NBC leaked it. And I ended up at Bedminster (for LIV’s third event) a few weeks later with a new gig.
“It wasn’t difficult at all. Greg has been a friend of mine for nearly 40 years. I knew he had a vision because he’s had it so long. Hell, it was the late ‘80s where he was thinking about a world tour or spreading the game globally. He asked me and I said yes.”
Feherty, 66, signed a five-year deal that has two more to go. And he’d like to continue beyond that.
“I don’t know what the hell else I would do,” he says. “I’m in halfway decent shape. Cognitively I’m still all right. I take my Prevagen (a memory medication). Although I keep forgetting to take it. Is that a bad sign? How can you forget to take a memory supplement. Jesus Christ. No, I would definitely like to do this. I could see doing this into my 70s. I just turned 66. I’ve been 51 years in the game, since starting as a caddie and turning pro at age 17.”
Part of Feherty’s style involves the dark humor, and he’s dealt with his share of troubles.
A son lost to drug addiction in 2017. His own battles with depression and alcohol. A bad marriage that he said led to him looking for something else, hence a golf broadcasting career. A serious bike accident that resulted in broken bones and difficulty even playing recreational golf today.
It was about a decade earlier when Feherty was playing a PGA Tour event and approached by CBS executives about doing TV work.
He had no idea who they were and thought the reason they sought him was far different.
“I was in the middle of a horrifying divorce. Drugs and alcohol. It was a horrendous time in my life,” Feherty says about the time he was in a hotel bar. “I don’t remember what I shot in the first round. Lance Barrow and Rick Gentile from CBS came across the bar. I’m drinking Vodka and Gatorade—because I’m still an athlete. Lance sticks his hand out and says ‘We’re from CBS.’ I thought ‘Oh f---, 60 Minutes.’ This will be some fearless expose on drugs in sport or alcoholism in golf. Something like that.
“It turns out they were looking for someone to replace Ben Wright. Someone with a foreign accent and knew the players on both sides of the Atlantic. I just happened to be holding up the bar at the right time.”
This was around the time period in which Tiger Woods turned pro late in 1996.
Feherty, in his on-course duties for CBS, was often assigned to walk with Woods’s group.
“Three amazing things happened to me,” he says. “I met my (current) wife (Anita), I got offered the job at CBS and Tiger Woods turned pro. It was the frickin’ trifecta. I’ve been lucky so many times in my career. I’ve been the right idiot in the right place.”
Regarding Woods, he said: “Initially, I had difficulty describing what I was seeing. People would say to me: ‘I don’t know how he makes a swing with you so far up his a--.’ I kept saying, ‘This is so different than anything else I’ve ever seen. I don’t care what you think of me.’ This is like watching a creature from a different planet. Some of the shots that I saw, what he would take on, one foot up a Christmas tree at Castle Pines ... hitting a cut out over the water and back in to 3 feet ... there were a couple of times where he made me look stupid. I played the game at the highest level. I know what any given player could do from any given spot at any given time. That’s my job is to be able to predict that. I’d be f----- if I could do it with him. The amount of times I said, ‘well, I didn’t see that coming.’”
Feherty was with CBS through 2015 and then went to work for NBC, leaving after that 2022 Open at St. Andrews.
Looking back, Feherty says he believes he was underutilized at the network and that his LIV experience—serving as lead analyst in a five-hour broadcast window—has allowed him to expand.
“Look, I loved it. I had a great time there, I really did,” he says. “But at Cameron Smith’s Open, I barely made the air on that. I was in one of the towers. It didn’t feel frustrating at the time. It’s only in retrospect that I look at it and feel like I should have done more there.
“There were times when I felt like I had something to say. One of my strengths is to observe body language. That’s an advantage we have here at LIV. We seem to get a lot more body language. And that’s what we’re promoting and who these players really are.”
Asked if there is a misconception about LIV Golf, Feherty doesn’t hesitate.
“We hear from time to time that it’s exhibition golf,” he says. “Trying telling that to those guys out there. You hear Bryson talk about the team aspect. They really care about this s---. Brooks Koepka and Jon Rahm (in a recent playoff). It’s far more than an exhibition. It’s the same quality of field every week. We’re getting great players out there in contention. We have the occasional outlier, too, who will come in and win.”
Feherty was the outlier when he was part of that Ryder Cup team all those years ago.
“We lost and I helped us lose that one,” he says. “But I love being a member of that club and it was very special to me. Still is. I have great memories of that week. It was a mind-bender of a Ryder Cup, the way it finished. It was special."
This article was originally published on www.si.com as David Feherty Has No Regrets About Joining LIV Golf.
