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      For Corey Pavin, the Right Club for a U.S. Open Win

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      He took the 1995 U.S. Open when he picked a 4-wood on the final hole and hit a shot that is still remembered.The United States Open, which begins Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club, has featured plenty of memorable shots over the years. One was the 4-wood struck by Corey Pavin on the final hole of the 1995 Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southhampton, N.Y.Pavin, clinging to a one-stroke lead, knocked his approach from about 2225 yards away to within five feet of the pin. He missed the birdie putt but prevailed by two.“The shot of his life,” Johnny Miller of NBC called it at the time.Pavin, 63, who played on the golf team at U.C.L.A., recently reflected on what happened in 1995 and on the course that players will encounter this week.The conversation has been edited and condensed.Where’s the 4-wood these days?The 4-wood is in a nice case in storage at the moment. I had it in a house on display. When we moved, we didn’t have enough room for it.Did you use it after the Open?I used it for a couple more years and then switched to a different club.What options did you consider for the shot?I was carrying a 2-iron in my bag, as well. I said, [to his caddie] “Do you think I can get a 2-iron there?” He said, “No, I don’t. I think it’s a 4-wood.” I said, “I agree.” That was our conversation. It was very short, to the point, with no doubt on what club I should hit.Did you know right away that you were on target?When I made contact with the ball, I knew it was really good. I hit it just the way I wanted to. I had the exact same shot on Friday and hit a 4-wood onto the green, as well. So I had a good picture in my head because I did it on Friday.Did the shot receive so much attention because it was hit with a 4-wood?A fairway wood is somewhat unique to hit a second shot on a par-4 on the 72nd hole. I was 35, had won 12 tournaments at that time and hadn’t won a major, that was a factor as well.“If I had gone my whole career and hadn’t won a major, I would have been bothered by it,” Pavin said.Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWas it eating away at you that you hadn’t won a major?It was one of my goals, certainly, at that point in my career. I don’t know if eating away is the right way to say it, but I wanted to win a major very badly. If I had gone my whole career and hadn’t won a major, I would have been bothered by it.How do you assess your career?When I started on tour, if somebody had told me, “You’re going to win 15 tournaments with one of them being a major,” I would have told them they were probably crazy. I never had a long-term goal like that. My goal every year was to win at least one tournament, play consistent golf at the highest level I could.Did you play the Los Angeles Country Club when you were in college?We played just a couple of times. It’s a beautiful golf course. I think it’s going to hold its own pretty well.Is there a unique challenge for the guys or is it a typical Open layout?One challenge is that nobody has ever really seen it in tournament conditions. I’m not sure how it’s going to be set up. Chipping out of [the Bermuda rough] is very difficult. And hitting full shots out of it is very hard.Why did the Ryder Cup bring out the best in you?I love the Ryder Cup. The pressure there is 100 times stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. When I feel that pressure it makes me concentrate and focus even better. You don’t get a chance to represent your country very often.Any regrets about your time as captain in 2010?It was a fantastic experience. Of course, I wish we would have won, but I have no regrets on how I went about it. I was as thorough as I could be, gathered as much information as I could and made decisions based on that information. More

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      PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan Steps Back after ‘Medical Situation”

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      The tour did not elaborate on Jay Monahan’s condition but said two other executives would oversee operations during his absence.The PGA Tour said Tuesday night that Jay Monahan, its commissioner, was “recuperating from a medical situation” and that two of its other executives would oversee the tour’s day-to-day operations for the time being.The tour’s four-sentence statement came one week after Monahan, 53, announced that the tour had reached a partnership deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which bankrolled the LIV Golf league that has clashed with Monahan’s circuit for more than a year.Monahan, the tour’s commissioner since 2017, was one of the lead negotiators during the secret talks, which led to a deal that has stirred a furor among players, outrage on Capitol Hill and the prospect that the Justice Department will seek to block the arrangement. He has spent recent days crafting a response to a crush of opposition to the deal, including a session with players he called “heated,” a contentious news conference, a town-hall meeting with tour employees in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and a pointed letter to lawmakers in Washington.The tour did not elaborate on Monahan’s condition but said that its board “fully supports Jay and appreciates everyone respecting his privacy.”The tour did not give a timeline for Monahan’s return and said that Ron Price, the circuit’s chief operating officer, and Tyler Dennis, the president of the PGA Tour, would take charge in the interim.Monahan has worked for the tour since 2008, with stints as its chief operating officer, its chief marketing officer and as executive director of the Players Championship. Under the deal that Monahan helped broker this spring after he spent months condemning the rush of Saudi cash into men’s professional golf, the moneymaking components of the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour are to be housed in a new company.Monahan is expected to be its chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund, is in line for its chairmanship. Monahan and his lieutenants have insisted that the company’s structure, which allows for extensive Saudi investment, will give the PGA Tour ultimate authority over the most elite tiers of professional golf. But al-Rumayyan’s role and the potential for significant infusions of Saudi cash have helped stir doubts about the extent of Monahan’s authority.It is not clear when the deal will close, but the agreement has been the subject of intense discussion and skepticism among players at the U.S. Open, where competition is scheduled to begin Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club. More

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      Tiger Woods, Forced to Miss the U.S. Open, Is Everywhere

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      Who can forget Woods’s U.S. Open win by 15 strokes at Pebble Beach in 2000, or his 19-hole playoff in 2008 at Torrey Pines? “It does feel wrong that he’s not here,” his fellow Californian Max Homa says.The U.S. Open will be played in Los Angeles this week for the first time in 75 years, and there is a predominant California theme to the event. Many of the top contenders at the tournament grew up nearby. More than a dozen in the field were raised in California or call it home.All of which makes it seem almost wrong, or cruel, that the best California golfer in history will not be competing. Tiger Woods, who grew up in Cypress, Calif., about 30 miles from the site of this year’s national golf championship, is unable to play at the Los Angeles Country Club after ankle surgery in April. It will be the ninth major championship Woods has had to skip, or leave prematurely, since the harrowing 2021 car crash that nearly led to a leg amputation and has significantly inhibited Woods’s ability to play, and walk, a golf course since.Not surprisingly, even in absentia, Woods’s presence is felt. Especially here. Especially at the U.S. Open, which Woods has won three times — usually in dramatic, unforgettable fashion.Although, as Max Homa, a California native and the world’s seventh-ranked golfer, said as he practiced his chipping on Tuesday morning: “Tiger is so transcendent that you could argue that he’s especially missed at any event anywhere. But yeah, it does feel wrong that he’s not here. That’s fair to say if you look at the history of the game.”Fans in Tiger Woods branded gear around the course at the U.S. Open.Meg Oliphant for The New York TimesCollin Morikawa, who was born in Los Angeles two months before Woods won his first major championship in 1997 and who has since won the P.G.A. Championship and British Open, said Woods’s influence on golf was so great that he wondered how many of today’s best players would even be playing the game this week if not for him.“He’s maybe not the sole reason why we got involved in the game,” Morikawa said of Woods, and then added, “But for me growing up, he’s all I cared about.”With a smile, Morikawa went on to describe how he had enjoyed getting to know major champions like Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas in recent years.“But I didn’t care about them when I was growing up — I really didn’t,” Morikawa said. “People ask me about the history of Rory winning this or certain guys winning that. I didn’t really care. I only cared about Tiger.“So, yeah, I think he’s always missed. But he’s always going to impact this game in ways that we can’t even describe, in ways that we don’t even know.”Woods, whose total of 15 major championship victories is second only to Jack Nicklaus’s 18 titles, has also seemed to save some of his most memorable performances for when the U.S. Open arrived in his home state.In 2000, at Pebble Beach Golf Links, he won by an astounding 15 strokes, which set the event record for largest margin of victory. Eight years later at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, Woods, who had not played for two months because of two stress fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left leg, managed to tie for the tournament lead with Rocco Mediate after four grueling rounds.Woods on his way to winning the 100th U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in 2000.Elise Amendola/Associated PressA playoff the next day put Woods through 19 more taxing holes before he claimed the championship.Those were Woods’s U.S. Open highlights, but he has also had six other top 10 finishes. The last decade, however, has largely reflected the decline in Woods’s physical well-being. Now 47, he last played the U.S. Open in 2020, when he missed the cut. In the previous nine U.S. Opens, he was in the field only five times. He missed the cut twice, and his best result was a tie for 21st.Since his inspirational victory at the 2019 Masters, Woods has only completed four rounds at a major championship four times. Which brings to mind Woods’s plaintive comment on the eve of this year’s Masters: “I don’t know how many of these I have left.”In that way, his absence at this week’s U.S. Open is another reminder that Woods is being forced to cede the spotlight he has commanded for more than 25 years.But those following in his considerable wake are not allowing him to be forgotten.“His presence in the game of golf is always known because he’s impacted this game in ways that some of us could only dream of,” Morikawa said. “For him, it’s just about getting healthy at this point. Who knows when we’re going to see him or not? I don’t think any of us take that for granted anymore.”Late Tuesday morning, practicing with the Los Angeles skyline in the background, Homa was asked if California golfers had a sense of pride that Woods was one of them.“Maybe it goes deeper,” Homa answered. “I find a sense of pride in the fact that the best golfer of all time grew up playing on a very average municipal golf course. So did I.“I don’t know if it’s a California thing — but I do think that’s just cool.” More

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      At The U.S. Open, Golfers Are Focused On LIV’s Merger With PGA Tour

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      Golfers competing in Los Angeles this week were caught off guard by the news that the PGA Tour and LIV had planned to join forces. Now they have to try to win a major.Jon Rahm was at home last Tuesday, preparing coffee with his children underfoot, when the news arrived in a flood of text messages. Collin Morikawa glanced at Twitter and saw the word there. During breakfast at Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Brooks Koepka peered at a television and glimpsed a headline.What was clear Tuesday — one week after the PGA Tour said it intended to join forces with the Saudi wealth fund whose LIV Golf league had fractured the sport — was that the deal Rahm, Morikawa and Koepka heard about in real time had been golf’s version of a flash grenade: stunning, staggering, disorienting.And now, the effects lingering, they need to play the U.S. Open, a major tournament, which will begin Thursday at Los Angeles Country Club. Some escape, huh?“I think there’s more guys that are puzzled about what the future holds,” Jason Day, who had a stint as the world’s top-ranked player soon after he won the 2015 P.G.A. Championship, said in an interview by a practice putting green.“Some guys are emotional, I think, on both sides, which is very much understandable,” added Day, a PGA Tour fixture who turned professional in 2006. “I think we’ve just kind of got to let things settle and see where things are spread out on the table once we kind of know where things are progressing.”It is hardly an optimal outlook just before the third men’s major championship of the year. But it is a pervasive one, and it will assuredly aid the United States Golf Association’s preference for Opens that compel players to use their minds as much as their clubs.No Open in recent memory may demand more compartmentalization from the field.“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Jon Rahm said.Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s a lot of not-answered questions,” Rahm, who opened the 2023 majors cycle with a victory at the Masters Tournament in April, said on Tuesday. “It’s tough when it’s the week before a major. Trying not to think about it as much as possible.”For many of the elite players who could contend for the trophy this weekend in Los Angeles, turbulence in their professional lives, aside from driving, chipping and putting, has been historically scarce.The PGA Tour was unchallenged as the world’s premier circuit for most of a period that began during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and the players who kept their tour cards were rewarded handsomely for performing well in events from Torrey Pines in San Diego to Sea Pines in Hilton Head Island, S.C.LIV’s thunderous emergence last year proved a most severe test of the tour’s supremacy and cast a haze over professional golf. For the first time in generations, the PGA Tour was not the unrivaled signature show in American men’s golf.Now, with the PGA Tour and LIV poised to amass their moneymaking ventures inside one new company led by the tour commissioner and chaired by the Saudi wealth fund’s governor, the dimensions of professional golf are hazier, even for the sport’s biggest names.Will LIV exist in a year’s time? How might players who defected from the tour to LIV be allowed to return? Should golfers who remained devoted to the tour be compensated for their loyalty? And what about all of that money, said to be $100 million or more in some instances, that the wealth fund promised LIV golfers?The deal emerged from seven weeks of secret talks that began with a WhatsApp message on April 18, continued in London, Venice and San Francisco, and culminated in an announcement in New York last Tuesday. Much about the framework agreement, though, is unclear, with bankers and lawyers still rushing to fill in blanks on matters as weighty as asset valuation. Golf executives have suggested that months could pass before the deal closes, and some are privately acknowledging that the shoals before and beyond a closing may not be easy. (“I don’t have enough information about the deal yet to have an unfavorable or favorable view about it,” Patrick Cantlay, a player who is on the PGA Tour’s board, said on Tuesday.)In the meantime, some players suggested that they would simply settle for an answer, or answers, to their most essential questions.“We all want to know the why,” Morikawa said. “We’re so interested in the why. For us, for me right now, it’s just like what’s going to happen? I don’t know. But we always want to know that why answer — like, what’s the purpose behind it? But I think there’s so many different parties involved that there’s too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella.”Substantive answers are unlikely to emerge between now and Thursday’s first tee shots, leaving players to wonder and worry ahead of a tournament that can earn any one of them a spot in history.For Collin Morikawa, the question in the air on the merger seemed to be “Why?”Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Rahm said. “You’re going to need to access every single aspect of your game to win a championship like this. I think it becomes more of a mental factor, not overdoing it at home. You can never really replicate U.S. Open conditions.”Koepka, among the finest major tournament golfers ever, signaled that he had tried to excise any talk of the deal during his preparations for a course he played years ago, and primarily remembered for the Playboy Mansion’s presence on the back nine.“There’s four weeks a year I really care about and this is one of them and I want to play well, so I wasn’t going to waste any time on news that happened last week,” said Koepka, the LIV star who tied for second at the Masters in April and then won the P.G.A. Championship in May near Rochester, N.Y.Last Tuesday, he recalled, he saw the news and then went out to practice.The sport itself, after all, is to come center stage on Thursday, and the questions are not fading — or being answered — this week or next or the next.“There is potential of it being a really, really good thing for golf,” Day said. “But I feel like it’s too early to kind of even say anything like that because you just don’t know where things are going to fall.”For now, he said, “I’m trying to win a tournament.”On that much, PGA Tour and LIV golfers agree — once they stop thinking about last week. More

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      The Titanic PGA and LIV Golf Deal Stokes Anger on Capitol Hill

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      American lawmakers and officials are studying the pact between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.One of golf’s greatest tests will unfold starting on Thursday, when the U.S. Open begins at the Los Angeles Country Club. It might be an easier lift — it will assuredly be a shorter one — than the test that is emerging in Washington.The abrupt announcement last week that the PGA Tour will tie itself to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and its LIV Golf league is provoking American officials in ways as predictable as they might be persistent in the months ahead.Antitrust experts are insisting that the Justice Department should consider suing to stop the agreement, which calls for the business operations of LIV and the PGA Tour to be brought into one new company, if the deal closes in the coming months. Lawmakers are complaining that the Florida-based PGA Tour is lurching into business with an arm of the Saudi state that it roundly condemned until last week. Political strategists are scrambling to shape perceptions of an agreement that was forged in secret and, upon its release, promptly criticized as a well-heeled exercise in hypocrisy and whitewashing.Whether the commotion will amount to anything beyond a few news cycles of fussing — a successful assault on the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status comes to mind — may not be clear for months. But a week into golf’s latest maelstrom, a deal that could eventually prove lucrative for players and executives is already promising a booming era for lawyers, lobbyists and political sound bites, too.Although golf had been under pressure inside the Justice Department, where antitrust regulators were looking at the PGA Tour, the announcement last week brought the tumult to Capitol Hill.In the House, Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, swiftly introduced a bill to revoke the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status. And in the Senate, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, announced on Monday that a subcommittee he chairs would conduct an inquiry into a deal that he said “raises concerns about the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.”At the U.S. Open in Los Angeles this week, PGA Tour golfers like Jon Rahm will be playing with men like Sergio Garcia, who defected to LIV last year.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesThat there would be a battle was never much in question. The principal short-term matter to resolve was who, exactly, would be picking which fights.The golf side of the battle features two forces with formidable records across decades in Washington. Even though Saudi Arabia has had plenty of bipartisan tangles, the kingdom’s officials and allies have often enjoyed an uncommon rapport with their American counterparts, as was on display during a visit from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week. And the PGA Tour has usually found the capital to be a wellspring of courtesy, especially when its supporters helped short-circuit a Federal Trade Commission inquiry in the 1990s.The trouble for the wealth fund and the tour is that Washington also has a bipartisan affection for lawmakers imitating sports executives, and browbeating actual ones, in public and in private. It can be good politics to glower at the commissioners who draw more jeers than many elected officials, and headline-making hostility from Congress could complicate the golf industry’s quest to sell the deal to the public — and then move past it.The tour and the wealth fund can take some comfort in history, which suggests a successful congressional effort to thwart the deal directly is unlikely. The Hill, though, could still seek to make the transaction painful beyond a feisty public hearing or two. A change to the tour’s tax status, like the one envisioned in the bill introduced in the House, could cost it millions of dollars a year because it has been structured as a “business league” that is exempt from taxes under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.Groups like the PGA Tour have combated legislative headaches surrounding their tax-exempt status in the past, with one effort to end the practice for sports leagues vanishing from a 2017 tax bill at the last moment. In the past 18 months, years after the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball surrendered their exempt statuses, public records show that the tour has spent at least $640,000 on lobbying, with much of that work tied to “tax legislation affecting exempt organizations.”As a part of his inquiry, Blumenthal on Monday demanded documents related to the tour’s tax-exempt status and, in his letter to the tour, wondered whether the deal would allow a foreign government to “indirectly benefit from provisions in U.S. tax laws meant to promote not-for-profit business associations.”Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, similarly seethed that the tour had “moved itself right to the top of the leaderboard in terms of most questionable tax exemptions in professional sports.”But Wyden has also suggested that the deal should run into resistance before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a Treasury Department-led committee that examines national security implications of foreign investments in real estate and American companies.Whether there are serious national security concerns about a deal involving golf tours, or whether the committee will even review the agreement at all, is unclear. Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, said last week that it was “not immediately obvious” to her that the agreement related to national security. But Wyden, who is planning a congressional investigation of his own, has signaled his interest in the department’s exploring whether the deal could give “the Saudi regime inappropriate control or access to U.S. real estate,” most likely through the tour’s Tournament Players Club collection of golf courses.And those are just the spats that have erupted since last Tuesday.The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, left, and Jimmy Dunne, a board member, were closely involved in the merger negotiations.Getty ImagesUrged on by LIV’s lawyers, Justice Department regulators have spent months examining whether the PGA Tour’s tactics to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league were illegal, and whether the tour’s coziness with other leading golf organizations — like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament — violated federal law. Instead of quieting misgivings about golf, the deal has only intensified them and might have even armed the department with a new lever: suing to stop the pact, which the tour and wealth fund deny amounts to a merger.“Generally, we want to encourage parties to settle their disputes outside of the judicial process, but it doesn’t mean that settlements are immune from antitrust,” said Henry J. Hauser, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who now practices at Perkins Coie, one of the capital’s best-connected firms. “If companies try to resolve a legitimate dispute by agreeing to common conditions that stifle competition, that could be a problem.”The Justice Department has declined to comment.The tour is moving aggressively to curb Washington’s irritation, going as far to suggest that Congress and other parts of the federal government could have done more to help it rebuff a Saudi challenge.“While we are grateful for the written declarations of support we received from certain members, we were largely left on our own to fend off the attacks, ostensibly due to the United States’ complex geopolitical alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, wrote in a letter to lawmakers last week. “This left the very real prospect of another decade of expensive and distracting litigation and the PGA Tour’s long-term existence under threat.”In the penultimate sentence of his letter, Monahan described the tour as “an American institution,” just as Blumenthal would on Monday. But like many executives before him, Monahan is finding that Washington is forever eager to scrutinize American institutions, especially when sports are involved.He may ultimately find that the shouting has only just begun.Lauren Hirsch More

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      Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Smith Don’t Know What’s Next After The LIV-PGA Tour Merger

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      “I just don’t know what’s going on,” Fitzpatrick, the reigning U.S. Open champion, said Monday of the PGA Tour’s merger with LIV Golf. “I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on.”A year ago at the U.S. Open, the field was distracted by an entirely new phenomenon in men’s professional golf: Several players who had turned their backs on the PGA Tour to defect to the insurgent LIV Golf circuit would, for the first time, be competing against their former brethren.Golfers had chosen sides in a sport known for individualism, fueling an unfamiliar team-against-team tension.Twelve months later, and days after the seismic news of the American and European tours forming a partnership with LIV Golf, the disruption at the 2022 U.S. Open now seems like an almost inconsequential diversion. Just ask Matt Fitzpatrick, who won that tournament in Brookline, Mass., for his first victory at a major tournament win and also on the PGA Tour.“I seem to remember last year just thinking about the tournament, just the U.S. Open,” Fitzpatrick said on Monday. “It was easier for me to mentally focus on that and be in a better place than obviously all this confusion that’s going on this week.“The whole thing is confusing.”Asked to elaborate on what he found most confusing, Fitzpatrick could not help but chuckle.“Well, I think I just don’t know what’s going on,” he answered. “I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on.”Fitzpatrick mentioned the Saudi Public Investment Fund, known as PIF, whose staggering riches have backed LIV.“Are we signing with the PIF, are we not signing with the PIF? I have no idea,” he said, adding: “It’s pretty clear that nobody knows what’s going on apart from about four people in the world.”To prove that disorientation was universal across golf, Cameron Smith, who joined LIV not long after winning last year’s British Open, followed Fitzpatrick into the interview room at the Los Angeles Country Club and essentially admitted he was clueless as to what was coming next in his chosen occupation.Smith might rate as something of an insider since he at least received a phone call from Yasir al-Rumayyan, who oversees the PIF and would be the chairman of the new company formed by combining the tours, about the blockbuster deal announced last week.It was a good thing al-Ruymayyan called because Smith said his first reaction to the news was that, “it was kind of a joke.” But al-Rumayyan informed Smith otherwise — without much detail.“He didn’t really explain too much,” Smith said. “I think there’s still a lot of stuff to be worked out, and as time goes on, we’ll get to know more and more. I think he was calling a few different players, so the call was kind of short and sweet.”Despite a lack of clarity about the future of professional golf, both Fitzpatrick and Smith were nonetheless asked about two hot topics since the PGA Tour-LIV deal was announced.For Fitzpatrick, there was the question of whether he thought players, like himself, who were loyal to the PGA Tour should be compensated for turning down the gobs of money LIV was offering.At first, Fitzpatrick appeared ready to address the issue, which is perhaps the most charged and dicey detail to be hammered out in the coming weeks or months. But then Fitzpatrick paused. And paused. He smiled and then exhaled. His eyes roamed the room. Finally, he said with a thin smile: “Yeah, pass.”Fitzpatrick last Friday at the Canadian Open, where he finished eight under for the tournament in a tie for 20th.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty ImagesSmith was asked if he had been given any indication that the LIV tour would continue to exist after this year. He replied: “I really know as much as you guys know, to be honest. I haven’t been told much at all. I guess if anything comes up, I’ll let you guys know.”He refused to answer a question about whether he would want to return to the PGA Tour if LIV was dissolved after this season, calling it “hypothetical.”But he added: “I think I’ve made the right decision anyway. I’m very happy with where I’m at. I obviously made that decision for a few different reasons. Like I said, I know as much as everyone else, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the next few months, maybe even year, kind of plays out.”Smith’s attitude was jovial, which matched the mood of several LIV players who slapped hands with each other and smiled on the practice range on Monday.“I haven’t been told much at all, but I’m just taking it as it goes along,” Smith said. “But there’s definitely a lot of curious players, I think, on both sides as to what the future is going to look like.”Fitzpatrick had an eye on the future and also the past, recalling last year’s U.S. Open fondly.“An amazing week,” he said, hoping to rekindle the magic he discovered.But then, so much has changed in a year. On Monday, there remained one question above all the others. What next for golf?Fitzpatrick shook his head.“I’ll be completely honest, I literally know as much as you,” he said. “I’m sure everyone has gotten questions about it. I found out when everyone else found out. Yeah, honestly, I know literally nothing.” More

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      Senate Opens Inquiry Into PGA Tour Deal with Saudi-Funded LIV Golf

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      The PGA Tour and LIV have been asked to provide documents and communications tied to the agreement announced last week.The PGA Tour and LIV Golf have not yet closed a stunning partnership agreement announced only last week, but vows from Washington to slow or stop the deal — or at least make it uncomfortable for golf executives — crystallized on Monday, when the Senate opened an inquiry into the arrangement.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and the chairman of the chamber’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said Monday that he had demanded that both the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian-funded LIV give up a wide array of documents and communications tied to the agreement. Blumenthal also asked for records related to the PGA Tour’s nonprofit status, suggesting an appetite to challenge the tour’s tax-exempt standing.In a statement issued three days before the start of the U.S. Open in Los Angeles, Blumenthal decried Saudi Arabia’s “deeply disturbing human rights record at home and abroad” and said the agreement raised concerns “about the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.”LIV declined to comment on Monday. In a statement on Monday afternoon, the PGA Tour said it was “confident that once Congress learns more about how the PGA Tour will control this new venture, they will understand the opportunities this will create for our players, our communities and our sport, all while protecting an American golf institution.”Congress cannot block the agreement simply by opening an investigation, and any legislation to derail the deal would almost certainly provoke a court challenge. But congressional scrutiny and, perhaps, public hearings could tarnish the deal and make the months ahead even more unpleasant for the leaders of professional golf.Blumenthal has shown a willingness to spar with sports executives. Lately, he has pressed American universities for information about their sports betting partnerships, and he has lashed the N.C.A.A. leadership for years over conditions for college athletes.Although the planned deal has caused some heartburn and saber-rattling on Capitol Hill, Congress has not shown unanimous interest in haranguing golf leaders over it. Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who is the ranking minority member on the panel that Blumenthal chairs, said last week that Congress should stay out of sports.The PGA Tour’s agreement with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, whose LIV circuit made its debut last year, would bring the business dealings of the rival tours into a new company. The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, is in line to serve as its chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will be its chairman.Under the terms of the agreement, the Saudi wealth fund will have exclusive rights to invest in the new company, positioning it for significant influence over golf’s financial future. PGA Tour officials have insisted, to widespread doubts, that they will be the ultimate decision makers because their allies will hold a majority of the new company’s board seats.Professional golf attracted the gaze of Washington regulators before last week’s announcement. Antitrust investigators from the Justice Department have spent months asking questions about the tour’s efforts to deter player defections to LIV and examining whether the tour’s top leaders were too close to other prominent golf organizations, like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament.The department has brought no public allegations of wrongdoing and has not commented on last week’s announcement of a deal. But antitrust experts have warned that the department is virtually certain to study it closely and may even step in to try to block it.Tour executives have expressed confidence that the agreement will withstand any legal challenges. More

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      How Will Jay Monahan of the PGA Tour and Yasir al-Rumayyan Work Together?

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      The stunning golf merger announced last week has raised many questions, and one big one is how will the Saudi wealth fund boss and the tour commissioner manage to work together?After more than a year of high-stakes jockeying and long-distance accusations, Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan finally met in May, an arranged blind date in some Venice cafe or hotel.Now the oddest of bedfellows will attempt to remake the future of professional golf and repair the damage done by a yearlong civil war they had once waged against each other.The 53-year-olds in charge could not be more different: Monahan, the American commissioner of the PGA Tour since 2017, and al-Rumayyan, the trusted confidant of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and overseer of his country’s massive Public Investment Fund.It is that fund, claiming to be worth somewhere close to $700 billion, that bought its way into golf last Tuesday. It ended a sniping, court-complicated fight between the PGA’s American and European tours and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. It instantly solved the PGA Tour’s financial struggles.Now al-Rumayyan will be chairman of this entity. Monahan will be his chief executive. And among the many complex questions this raises is one of internal logistics. How will this unlikely duo manage — manage the game of golf, both on the course and off it, and manage to get along?“Money can change everything,” the legendary golfer Gary Player said in an email exchange. “And all we can do now is hope the outcome moving forward is positive for all.”Monahan has deep New England roots and a background in sports marketing. His leadership style is as hushed as a golf crowd awaiting a winning putt.“I enjoy all forms of human interaction,” he told Golf Digest in 2017. “Talking with people, listening to them, often just observing them. Even unpleasant people, I enjoy discovering what makes them tick. It’s sort of a requirement of the job I’m in now because the range of people is so broad, their situations so dynamic. Their needs and goals can be material, but it’s the human interaction that gets us there.”Al-Rumayyan, the cash-carrying disrupter with a deep passion for golf, is a stern test for Monahan’s people skills. Certainly his “needs and goals” are material.While al-Rumayyan will hold just one of the (now) 11 seats on the PGA Tour board of directors, he and the wealth fund have the exclusive right to invest in the new entity. That means they control the finances, and they plan to pump in billions of dollars.Yasir al-Rumayyan and Monahan sat side by side during an appearance on CNBC.CNBCIn his only public appearance since the merger was announced last week, a televised consummation on CNBC where the two sat chummily side by side, al-Rumayyan said he would let Monahan lead the operation.The “voting system” and the majority of the board, he noted, “is not going to be with us.”But al-Rumayyan’s very presence — and the deal itself, for now only a framework that could take months to formalize — is a heavy reminder that money can trump it all.“The Saudis will want to dominate this,” said James M. Dorsey, adjunct senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. “They don’t like to play second fiddle. And they believe, not without reason, that money talks.”What kind of takeover leader al-Rumayyan will become is unclear. His PIF portfolio is massive, and he chairs dozens of state-owned firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco and the mining firm Ma’aden. He largely lets executive teams run them as they see fit.But the relationship with Newcastle United, the English soccer team, might provide the best clues for golf.The PIF bought an 80 percent share of Newcastle United in 2021. Fans of the English club immediately welcomed the ownership change, as the prospect of on-field success overrode hard questions. Infused with PIF money, doled out by al-Rumayyan, Newcastle has surged toward the top of the English Premier League.At Newcastle, he has left day-to-day decisions to others, though he has quickly approved expenditures for talent upgrades and has not been invisible.He shows up to matches on occasion. (Compare that with mostly absentee ownership of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, who made news on Saturday by going to the team’s Champions League final.) He has kicked the ball around the team’s field and been photographed in the dressing room.Al-Rumayyan with the Newcastle players, coaching staff and families after they qualified for the Champions League.Scott Heppell/ReutersYet al-Rumayyan is more passionate about golf. Around LIV, his pet project, he is known as H.E., for His Excellency, and has been a considerable public presence. At last year’s LIV event in Bedminster, N.J., al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump, the course’s owner. For a time, al-Rumayyan wore a “Make America Great Again” cap.But most do not expect him to be an overtly public presence in golf or a familiar figure around the trophy ceremonies. Part of it is his portfolio; he has plenty of other business responsibilities.“How much time does he have to allocate?” Dorsey said. “This is a man at the top of an empire. He oversees a vast array of things. I think you’ll see a lot of his lieutenants and not a lot of him, at least once this settles down.”Part of it is Saudi culture; he has to “walk a fine line,” according to Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, given the autocratic leadership of Prince Mohammed.“If you seem to be too big, and you seem to be Mr. Saudi Arabia, bin Salman doesn’t take well to people stepping on his toes,” Ulrichsen said. “But we’ve also seen that al-Rumayyan is probably the most trusted and most competent member of his inner circle.”Al-Rumayyan was a little-known banking executive in 2015, when King Abdullah died. Power consolidated around Prince Mohammed, who soon started Vision 2030, an ambitious makeover for Saudi Arabia and its reputation. Part of that involved building the PIF as a diversifying vehicle for growing global capital, financially and culturally.At last year’s LIV event in New Jersey, al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPrince Mohammed, looking to flush out the aging elite that he felt limited the country’s ambitions — locking up and abusing hundreds of them — handed responsibility of the fund to al-Rumayyan.Continued human rights violations and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, on orders, the Central Intelligence Agency has said, from Prince Mohammed, have made the Saudis global pariahs.But under al-Rumayyan’s direction, the investment fund grew exponentially.Investment in sports, in particular, has proved an effective reputation launderer that some call sportswashing. The culmination of that effort may be the takeover of golf, announced the same week Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.“This was part of establishing Saudi Arabia on the global stage,” Ulrichsen said of the Saudi push into international sports. “And in this case, it shows that Saudi Arabia is welcome again at the highest kind of table in the United States, especially after what happened post-2018. That period of isolation is now definitely over.”For Saudis, the golf deal is more a global news event than a national one. Wednesday’s front page of Arriyadiyah, the kingdom’s top sports daily, was dominated by the news of the French soccer player Karim Benzema moving to Jeddah-based Al-Ittihad, the latest prize for the top Saudi league, which already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, among others. The announcement of the golf merger was nowhere to be found in any of the paper’s pages for that day, and merited only a brief mention on Page 11 on Thursday.But al-Rumayyan is on a one-man mission to use golf for Saudi benefit. He helped establish the Saudi Golf Federation and the Saudi Golf Company, founded in 2019 to promote the game in the country.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive. Tax records obtained by ProPublica show that he was paid $14 million in salary in 2021 for his role as PGA Tour commissioner. He spent most of 2022 and early 2023 trying to fend off LIV through insults and lawsuits.That litigation will be withdrawn, saving the cash-poor PGA Tour money while shielding al-Rumayyan and the wealth fund from depositions and discovery.Was it all gamesmanship that can be forgiven now? Or might al-Rumayyan work behind the scenes to find a leader more aligned with his goals?Monahan wants golf fans, sponsors and his own players to resist the reflexive, collective wince at this new arrangement, painted by many as a money-over-morals transaction, and to think of where global golf can be in 10 years.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive.Eric Risberg/Associated PressIt most likely depends on whatever al-Rumayyan wants.It could be mere tweaks in payouts, schedules and formats to lift a sagging, traditional enterprise — the way he has handled Newcastle. Or it could be an overhaul. A possible comparison, without ties to the PIF, is the way international cricket introduced Twenty20 to counter dragging, multiday contests with something shorter, livelier and more consumable, which is similar to what LIV has tried to do.For someone like Player, 87, a nine-time major tournament winner from South Africa, the hope is broad, global growth, not just on the PGA Tour.“The women’s game and the weekend golfer should not be forgotten with all this money pouring in,” he said. “Allow the ladies to earn a better living. Use the money to make golf accessible for the masses. Let’s make it a point to share this new era to all who love our sport.”At the heart of all the possibilities, for now, is the relationship between two men — an impossibly rich backer from Saudi Arabia and a tradition-rich sports executive from Massachusetts.“We just sat down, him and I, in Venice for about two hours, trying to understand each other,” al-Rumayyan said. “He talked about his aspirations, his life. I did the same. Even my family was with me in Venice. We had a lunch with a big group of people. The understanding and the positive thinking is what really unites us in growing the game of golf. The passion that we have, both of us, is what really cemented this kind of agreement.”Springtime in Venice has a way of sparking such enchantment.Skeptics may point out that Venice is a series of islands and an easy place to lose your sense of direction. Cynics might note that it is sinking.Ahmed Al Omran More