Tell Us How You Really Feel
‘Stop the fake news idiots’: Alejandro Tosti responds to Houston Open controversy with profanity-laced tirade
Icon Sportswire
If we told you a few weeks ago that we traveled into the future and saw Min Woo Lee win his first PGA Tour title, chances are you would imagine a celebratory scene, one full of laughs and comically large chef hats. To be fair, you wouldn’t be wrong. What you probably wouldn’t have imagined, however, is that the fan favorite’s long-awaited breakthrough was also rife with controversy.
As the affable Aussie fought to hold onto his lead at the Texas Children’s Houston Open with the likes of Scottie Scheffler and a resurgent Gary Woodland breathing down his neck, his pace-of-play slowed to a crawl. At the par-5 eighth, Lee’s drive came to a rest under a bush. After a lengthy debate about how to play the shot, Lee took a drop and eventually settled for a par … 30 minutes after his tee shot had left the clubface.
Lee’s playing partner Alejandro Tosti was seen conversing with a course marshal during the saga and NBC’s Jim “Bones “ McKay later said that Tosti had been “disrespectful “to the group’s third, Ryan Fox, during a drop at the first. The pace of play seemed to anger Tosti, whose own speed became conspicuously erratic. Tosti was seen lagging far behind the group on the 12th hole, prompting this observation from McKay:
Many speculated that Tosti was passively aggressively protesting Lee’s slow play by marching to the beat of his own drum, a theory that the Argentinian shot down with a bazooka during a Monday morning tirade on X. Tosti deleted his reply about an hour later, but screenshots live forever.
This reads like the winning card in a game of angry-Internet-reply-guy bingo. We have an “OMG,” a few intentional profanity typos to throw off the content cops and even a “fake news” accusation. Tosti pulled no punches, saying he didn't intentionally “ice,” Lee as many alleged, but simply needed to use the bathroom and hydrate (though tennis fans will tell you neither of these things, however natural, are excluded from controversy).
We’ll probably never really know whether Tosti’s play, which resembled an 85-year-old behind the wheel at times on Sunday, was fully intentional, a sub-conscious reaction or purely innocent. But one thing is certain: This won’t be the last time we hear about slow play this season … and it won’t be the last time we hear from Tosti either.
UPDATE: After Tosti deleted his initial tweet, he issued a slightly better worded (but still bleeped-out) statement. Here's what he had to say about Sunday's events from his perspective.