Bryson DeChambeau Faces Legal Drama Before The Open

The last thing that professional golf needs right now is yet more unseemly headlines. But that is exactly what we have had.

Just when you thought that things might be settling down a golf instructor called Mike Schy, who worked with Bryson DeChambeau until 2018, has been accused of attempting to extort the US Open champion out of a seven-figure sum.

We should be focusing on this week’s Open Championship but you can bet your mortgage on the fact that DeChambeau will have to answer some uncomfortable questions when he arrives at Royal Troon.

Last year Schy approached DeChambeau about creating a series of junior golf tournaments, which, at DeChambeau’s suggestion, were named the Jon DeChambeau Memorial Junior Tour after Bryson’s late father.

Initially all went well, with Schy organising a successful series of test events in 2023, and when DeChambeau asked how much money would be needed to keep it going this year, Schy told him that $125,000 would cover two years.

And this is where things become nasty. Schy claims that DeChambeau said he would provide the funding via a "a non-recourse loan." However, DeChambeau’s agent, Brett Falkoff, claims that Schy didn’t properly set up the 501-C3 organisation in California for the tour, which was missing appropriate bylaws, nor had he provided a viable business plan.

Schy has a different version of events, claiming this was an indication that DeChambeau didn’t want to support the tour at all. "I know Bryson and I knew he didn’t really want to give the money," Schy told Golfweek. "And I certainly knew he didn’t want to give it for a long period of time."

DeChambeau’s lawyers then drafted and revised the necessary bylaws at DeChambeau’s expense, and just before the 2024 US Open began they prepared "a line of credit to facilitate the funding had been prepared."

But with events set to begin in June, and without hearing from DeChambeau, Schy scrapped the junior tour, and took to Instagram to attack the golfer

He wrote: "Bryson stated how much he hates non profits and would only loan money to his father’s name sake and needed to make money on it. Yet even that never came close to materialising and the longer it took the more uncomfortable myself and others were with taking on debt. Needless to say I am very disappointed and I’m sure his father would have been disappointed as well."

DeChambeau told Golfweek that Schy tried to extort the golfer and his team for $2 million after DeChambeau won the US Open in June and accused Schy of lying.

"It’s a disgruntled former employee, unfortunately, and it is what it is," DeChambeau told Golfweek. "We’ve had numerous conversations and it hasn’t worked out from a business standpoint. It’s quite disappointing how he’s turned this and spun this. It’s a non-recourse loan that was going out. I gave him my dad’s name, image and likeness for free on the assumption we’d have a good business plan and it just hasn’t worked out. I’m going to be doing a lot for my community, just in a different fashion with a proper business plan and done correctly."

Quite clearly, DeChambeau is not short of a bob or two and stressed that his decision was not about the money but about how it was going to be spent.

He said: "I can give that money tomorrow. The point is I want to make it sustainable. I don’t want to be divvying out money and giving it away fruitlessly. He said I hate non-profits, no, I said I hate the way they are usually run. That’s what I actually said. Everything I said is misconstrued and twisted in a way that is absolutely false."

I live in hope that this sorry saga is not given more oxygen at Troon but I seriously doubt that will be the case.