Bryson Very, Very Briefly Posts Video To Confirm He's Not Using Steroids**

This is one of those instances where you wonder how much thought and analysis went into the conceptual phase, only to have to embarrassingly remove it within minutes of posting.

Given the camera assistance and potential spon-con play with Quest Diagnostics, there appears to have been a “team” decision for Bryson DeChambeau to debunk any rumors of steroid use. And judging by the Twitter comments posted before the video came down, DeChambeau also revealed he’s a cat person. This could be the real reason the post came down, not some a frantic call from Cult Ponte Vedra warning that the video was a terrible, terrible PIP play was he’s closing in on the same fifth place finish headquarters penciled him in for at the season’s start.

Either way, it was “uploader” deleted:

Thankfully, G.C. Digital is not taking the holiday week off and posted this description of the short-lived video:

DeChambeau said he had bloodwork and a urine sample done before the video cut to him doing an intense speed-training session. The video then transitioned to a shirtless DeChambeau scrolling through his emails on his phone at 10:30 one night during the Hero World Challenge earlier this month in the Bahamas. DeChambeau held up the email of the results on his phone, while the PDFs were also posted to the video.

"All negative," DeChambeau exclaimed, as the lab report showed a long list of negative results, including for amphetamine, methamphetamine, anabolic and masking agents, dozens of anabolic androgenic agents and growth hormone. "Nothing!"

DeChambeau then capped the video sitting next to Greg Roskopf, found of Muscle Activation Techniques, while saying, "This is better than steroids."

Subtle plug there.

As for the Twitter comments during the short time the video was up, they’re, uh, informative..

**It lives!!! Warning: this is six minutes you’ll never get back!

Video: Brandel’s For Bifurcation…Of Rules On Marijuana Use In Golf

We had him for a time on bifurcation of equipment rules, but as Brandel Chamblee his ownself eloquently explains there is one b word he’s for: the complicated issue of marijuana as a performance enhancer. Noting that “science says the medical efficacy of marijuana is undeniable” Chamblee pointed out that “cannabinoid receptors that control behavior and mood” could make it easy to “argue it’s a better place to perform” when under the influence.

And he points out the big picture issue of whether we want golfers to "come “to an ideal athletic state through a chemical metamorphosis” or “through natural processes, discipline, self discovery”.

The full discussion on Golf Central was very interesting. Also noteworthy, in the wake of Matt Every’s post round comments that prompted the discussion embedded below: the PGA Tour had no comment.

What Would Arnie Do After An Opening 65? Probably Not Lobby For Cannibis!

That was Matt Every (65), unlikely Bobby Jones Award winner in this or any lifetime, gunning for his third Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by Mastercard win. And using his platform as first round leader to make a case for scrubbing marijuana off the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned substance list.

Evin Priest with this in his report from Bay Hill where Every, after serving a 12-week suspension for prescribed marijuana use, lobbied the few writers who hadn’t moved their game to Rocco’s for a margarita.

"I think it would be cool if we were proactive about it and made some changes," he said.

"Anxiety is a real thing and the way I treat it is the healthiest way possible for my body.

A case could be made for yoga.

"It bothers me that (cannabis) is even an issue (and) on the list of banned substances," he said on Thursday.

"You could fail for heroin and marijuana and the penalty is the same. If anyone wants to make the argument that that is performance enhancing, they have never done it before."

These guys are good!

Garrigus: "It’s OK to take Oxycontin and blackout and run into a bunch of people, but you can’t take CBD and THC without someone looking at you funny."

While he has his facts wrong on a few fronts, recently suspended CBD user Robert Garrigus scores a few points with his very legit gripes about the consistency of suspension penalties and the overall treatment by WADA and the PGA Tour of various substances.

From Adam Schupak’s reporting for Golfweek:

“I get suspended in the middle of the year. Matt Every gets suspended at the end of the year and he misses three tournaments,” Garrigus said. “There also needs to be some discrepancy there. There’s a gray area there, but the Tour has always been black and white.”

He needs to spend more time in California, because this sure isn’t the case, but I don’t doubt it is the way things are in most areas:

“The fact that it is socially unacceptable for cannabis and CBD right now blows my mind. It’s OK to take Oxycontin and blackout and run into a bunch of people, but you can’t take CBD and THC without someone looking at you funny. It makes no sense,” Garrigus said.

An (Eye Opening) Majority Do Not Think Marijuana Is Performance Enhancing

In 2019 Robert Garrigus and Matt Every failed PGA Tour drug tests and as Rex Hoggard notes, the views are mixed, with an amazing amount of social media hostility toward the PGA Tour. Even though, as PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan reiterated in Japan during this week’s Zozo Championship, this is not a Tour policy:

On Wednesday at the Zozo Championship, Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was asked about the policy.

“Ultimately, we don't determine what is a banned substance and what's not, we rely on WADA for doing that,” Monahan said. “We'll continue to stay very close not only to that substance but any potential substance that would come on or come off the list.”

In voting for this site—the early returns are overwhelming. A stout 80% of you do not believe marijuana can be performance enhancing.

Granted, this is a sport that has seen major changes to courses to accomodate distance gains and where huge numbers of seemingly bright people convinced themselves that athleticism was the sole cause. So maybe golfers aren’t the best a self reflection, or maybe marijuana really isn’t performance enhancing.

At some point the PGA Tour may have to study the matter and consider breaking from WADA if society continues to embrace marijuana and golfers insist it’s not performance enhancing. But for now, with only a Garrigus and an Every as the poster children, and golf’s Olympic-eligibility tied to WADA rules, I wouldn’t count on any change in policy.

Garrigus: PGA Tour Should Remove Marijuana From Banned Substance List

After serving a three-month ban after going over the limit in his medical marijuana use, Robert Garrigus tells Golf Channel’s Todd Lewis that the PGA Tour should consider removing marijuana from its banned substance list because it “doesn’t help you get the ball in the hole.”

Worth listening to if you have an interest in the Tour’s drug policy or the debate over what helps a player and what does not.

WADA Kills Rumors Of Positive Drug Test At The Ryder Cup

Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch reports on the red-hot rumor mill that had players gossiping in recent weeks about a positive test result at the Ryder Cup. Lynch explains on the surprise (Bonjour!) test administered at the team hotels by France’s AFLD, still smarting from the Tour de France issues over the years.

Good news, everyone passed!

“All the results are in and there were no positive tests,” said Maggie Durand, a spokeswoman for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), to which the French AFLD affiliate reported its findings. When asked about the method of testing, WADA confirmed it was urinalysis. And about the players tested?

In the event of a negative test, public disclosure is up to the athlete, WADA echoed.

But drug testing is golf’s third rail that no one wants to touch. That was apparent when I asked managers for every Ryder Cupper if their man had been tested. Even a clean slate of negative results didn’t encourage transparency among the tested.

But it was interesting to see who responded to Lynch about even being tested at all.

In the end, managers for just four of the 24 Ryder Cup players were willing to directly address the events of that Tuesday evening in Paris. Representatives for Tommy Fleetwood and Thorbjorn Olesen said that neither had been asked for a sample. Agents for Rory McIlroy and Ian Poulter confirmed they were among the eight men tested.

Blood Testing (Finally) Comes To The PGA Tour

Rex Hoggard explains for GolfChannel.com how the PGA Tour's new blood testing will impact the players and perceptions of the sport.

Hoggard says most players he spoke to felt the time had arrived for this more complete program, an amazing shift compared to a decade ago when Tim Finchem was resisting testing and players generally declared golfers clean and therefore not needing testing of any kind.

This was interesting:

“Why can’t we do hair samples, because then you can actually trace further back?” asked Casey, who is also an amateur cyclist. “There are certain drugs that are flushed out of the system within a day or two days, hair actually holds that drug in the follicle longer.”

Golf’s return to the Olympics last year will ensure the game remains vigilant when it comes to testing and officials haven’t ruled out new tests as the science and doping evolves. But for now, the circuit is content with the new testing methods.
“There is a lot of alternative testing methods, including hair, but the efficiency of these tests is really not at a level that would warrant use in a sport anti-doping program at this time,” Levinson said. “Urine is the most effective method of detecting most of the substances we are looking for.”

Former WADA Chief On Golf: "There’s a problem there."

Moira Gordon quotes former WADA chief Dick Pound, hosting a lecture at Stirling University, explaining golf's attitude toward drug testing.

Long opposed by PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, he recounted this conversation.

“We have all seen the shape changes in golfers and the distances they are hitting now and we know that the equipment is better and the balls are better but it isn’t just that,” said Pound, who recalled a conversation with the commissioner of the PGA Tour, Tim Finchem, stating that the sport which “has a great reputation for calling faults on yourself” could set an example to others by outing the cheats. But, the reply he received was disappointing. “He said: ‘Ah, but if I do that then they are all going to think my guys are just like those baseball players and football players and I don’t want that’. But if you follow some of the shape changes in the golfers and follow how, at a certain point, if they happen to come off them, you see how many more injuries they get. There’s a problem there.”

Vijay! "Singh's battle against the Tour comes into focus"

The lawyers are racking up big billable hours right now in Vijay vs The People Who Helped Make Me Rich, with the PGA Tour and the legendary golfer filing motions for a voluntary, non-binding dispute resolution hearing with a mediator.

As Rex Hoggard reports for GolfChannel.com, "the lawsuit reached a milestone last week with a flurry of filings," with over 130 filings posted to the public record with no shortage of redactions. Still, Hoggard was able to go through the filings to find some intriguing elements to the messy case brought by Singh.

There was this:

Some of the discovery offers a glimpse into the nuanced world of anti-doping, like an email exchange between Ty Votaw, the Tour’s executive vice president of communications, and a golf writer from the Associated Press who asked, among other things, if deer antler spray was on the Tour’s list of banned substances.

Votaw responded that, yes, deer antler spray is on the Tour’s banned substances list, when in fact it is not. The substance IGF-1, an ingredient found in the spray, is on the banned list, but not the product itself. It’s a nuanced distinction but central to Singh’s claim that the Tour was negligent in its handling of his case.

And then in the TMI HOF files, there was this image of Jason Dufner in the men's room reading the tour's warning regarding use of deer antler spray.

“[Dufner] said it was accidental how he read it,” Singh said in the deposition. “He was sitting in a can having a you-know-what and it was laying on the floor so he picked it up, and he was surprised that it was on it.

“He said if he hadn’t been in the can at that moment in time, he’d have never known that it was [on the banned list].”

Many items were redacted according to Hoggard. Just not that one.

U.S. Anti Doping CEO: Tour Drug Policy Has Loopholes

As the world's top golfers are about to be subjected to more stringent drug testing in the lead-up to the Rio 2016 Games, Rex Hoggard takes a comprehensive look at what players will experience.

The biggest changes: "Whereabouts Testing" that requires players to inform the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency where they will be for one hour a day, seven days a week.

USADA officials say a smartphone app will allow competitors to report their locations instantly, but the penalty for a missed test can be severe – three whereabouts testing “failures” will count as a positive test.

Also of note: blood testing. The only way to test HGH, the most likely substance that would be abused.

But regarding the PGA Tour's policy to date, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's Travis Tygart suggests the tour policy has loopholes.

“If you have the obligation to not give a sanction or to stick the file in the drawer and not go forward, I’m not in any way suggesting that’s what [the Tour] have done, but the policy allows for that. Without any accountability elsewhere it’s hard to know for sure,” Tygart told GolfChannel.com.

“We’ve certainly seen other high-profile sports, cycling in the past, where in ’99 with Lance Armstrong’s corticosteroid positive, that’s exactly what the sport did. After the report that just came out detailing that sad saga it was clear they did it because it was going to be harmful to them and to the sport.

“That’s the pressure and the tension that you have going back to the fox guarding the henhouse. It’s awfully difficult and in our experience impossible to both promote and police your sport because you have this inherent duty to make the brand look good and not have any bad news out there.”

Oh not our fox!