Former PGA Tour golfer Mark Lye was fired by SiriusXM Radio after he made sexist comments about the WNBA and women’s basketball during a show on PGA Tour Radio on Saturday.
Lye, who was hosting “The Scorecard” on SiriusXM’s PGA Tour Radio on Saturday, started slamming women’s basketball while talking about the LPGA. Watching women’s basketball, he said, would make him want to shoot himself.
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“You know the LPGA Tour, to me, is a completely different Tour than it was 10 years ago,” Lye said on the show, via Golf.com. “You couldn’t pay me to watch. You really couldn’t. Because I couldn’t relate at all. It’s kind of like, you know, if you’re a basketball player — and I’m not trashing anybody, please don’t take it the wrong way — but I saw some highlights of ladies’ basketball.
“Man, is there a gun in the house? I’ll shoot myself [before] I watch that.”
Lye then tried to defend himself on Twitter, and somehow claimed that his comments didn’t “make me a sexist in any way.”
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.
— mark lye (@letitflye) February 6, 2022
The 69-year-old has replied to several people on Twitter on Tuesday, too, continuing to try to defend himself.
Lye confirmed to Golf.com on Sunday that he was fired almost instantly.
“I was terminated about comments made about the WNBA, which I apologized for starting the next segment,” he said.
Lye made over 500 starts in his Tour career from 1977-95, and claimed his only win at the Bank of Boston Classic in 1983. He had 41 top-10 finishes in his career, and later played on the PGA Tour Champions from 2003-08. Lye spent nearly two decades working as an analyst for the Golf Channel after his playing career, too.
