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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Agree to Merger

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      In a stunning announcement, the tour, along with the DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said the rivals had agreed to create a “new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.”Ending a bitter split in men’s professional golf, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the insurgent league bankrolled by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said Tuesday that they had agreed to a merger.The announcement was at once stunning — the two sides had angrily clashed for months in litigation that will now draw to a close — and an end result that many in golf had believed was a distinct possibility from the time LIV burst into the sport last year.In a joint statement on Tuesday with the DP World Tour, which is also covered by the agreement, the wealth fund and the PGA Tour said the former rivals would “implement a plan to grow these combined commercial businesses, drive greater fan engagement and accelerate growth initiatives already underway.”“Going forward, fans can be confident that we will, collectively, deliver on the promise we’ve always made — to promote competition of the best in professional golf and that we are committed to securing and driving the game’s future,” Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said in a statement.Under the terms of the tentative agreement announced on Tuesday, the Saudi wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, will at first be the exclusive investor in the blended operation, along with the established tours and LIV. Monahan is expected to be the new group’s chief executive, with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, installed as its chairman.LIV charged into professional golf last year, luring some of the world’s most prominent players, including Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson, with guaranteed contracts sometimes said to be worth $100 million or more and tournament prize funds that were the richest in golf history.The PGA Tour, long the dominant force in professional golf, furiously retaliated and argued that the Saudi-backed league was compromising the sport’s integrity and acting as little more than a front for Saudi ambitions to repair the kingdom’s reputation. More

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      Stanford Golf Star Rose Zhang Is Ready for Her Professional Debut

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      Zhang’s career is likely to become a case study in athletic development, long-range planning and skillful marketing, now that college athletes are allowed to make money.Not long before Rose Zhang clutched a microphone on Tuesday, Michelle Wie West laughingly made an observation: Zhang might have logged more weeks as the world’s No. 1 amateur women’s golfer than Wie West spent as an amateur, period.It was an exaggeration — even though Wie West became a professional at 15 years old and Zhang spent more than 140 weeks in the top spot — but it also wryly underscored how Zhang’s rise in women’s golf is playing out differently from how other ascending stars built their careers.In Zhang, who will make her professional debut this week at the Americas Open in Jersey City, N.J., women’s golf is getting the rare prodigy who has played for an American college. And Zhang’s career, however long it lasts and whatever victories it yields, is essentially certain to become a case study in athletic development, long-range planning and skillful marketing, especially now that college athletes are allowed to make money in ways that were forbidden as recently as two years ago.“I believe that if you’re not able to conquer one stage, then you won’t be able to go on to the next one and say it’s time for the next step,” Zhang, 20, said on Tuesday. “So I wanted to see how I fared in college golf, and it turned out well.”To put it mildly.Zhang’s victory in April at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, where she posted a tournament-record score one day and broke it the next, let her complete women’s amateur golf’s version of the career Grand Slam since she had already won the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the U.S. Girls’ Junior and an individual N.C.A.A. title for Stanford.Zhang after winning the Augusta National Women’s Amateur tournament.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnother Stanford golfer, Tiger Woods, achieved a similar feat in the 1990s. But this month, Zhang added a second individual championship in N.C.A.A. play.Woods competed for Stanford in a wholly different time for college sports, a time when N.C.A.A. athletes were barred from selling their autographs or cutting endorsement deals. When Woods turned pro in 1996, the sponsorships promptly rained down on him. Zhang’s timeline has moved even faster: Wednesday is the first anniversary of the announcement that Adidas had signed her.The economic possibilities in college sports have lately enticed top athletes to pursue degrees and cultivate their talents while earning money and curbing the immediate allures of turning pro. Those possibilities had less of an effect on Zhang, who is from Irvine, Calif., and who chose to attend college before a wave of state laws pressured the N.C.A.A. to loosen its rules in 2021.But they could help shape women’s golf going forward, particularly if Zhang proves that the American college game is far from an athletic dead-end and that pre-prom professionalism is not the surest path to stardom. For some time, it has often seemed that way: Of the women ranked in the top 10 on Tuesday, only one, Lilia Vu, played N.C.A.A. golf (at U.C.L.A.).Representing Stanford, Zhang walked the course at the N.C.A.A. Division I women’s golf championships at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., this month.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesZhang, who plans to continue her Stanford studies but will no longer be eligible to play N.C.A.A. golf, believes that her stint on campus has hardly been time wasted. She said in April that her tenure as a college athlete had been “such an important stage for me” because she craved figuring “out who I really was and my independence.”She added: “It really allowed me to get my own space and really understand what I’m about, and that allows me to improve on my golf game because I realize that a profession is a profession but yourself is also something that you need to work on.”Her professional prospects had not been far from mind, though. She recalled Tuesday that she told her Stanford coach from the beginning that she was aiming to become a professional, even if her schedule for doing so was hazy.In her first season at Stanford, she said, she did not consider professional golf at all. As her sophomore year progressed, she said, it “felt like it was time for the next stage.”“I feel like right now the mind-set is also very simple: try to adjust as much as possible to tour life and figure out what it means to be a professional, what I want to do out here,” said Zhang, already adorned with the logos of Adidas, Callaway, Delta Air Lines and East West Bank. “I feel like I have a lot of time to experiment what I want to do, so that’s kind of the mind-set that I have going throughout my career and even going forward.”Zhang hitting from the fairway during the final round of the N.C.A.A. women’s golf championships.Matt York/Associated PressZhang is entering the professional ranks while women’s golf has no shortage of elite players. Nelly Korda, the Olympic gold medalist from the Tokyo Games, has routinely lurked around the top of leaderboards. Lydia Ko, who in 2015 became the youngest person to reach the world’s No. 1 ranking in professional golf, remains such a dependable power and brilliant player that she was the L.P.G.A.’s money leader in 2022. Minjee Lee has won a major in each of the last two years, and Jin Young Ko returned to the top of the women’s golf ranking this month when she edged Lee in a playoff at the Founders Cup.Zhang, though, may be the player facing the greatest public pressure since Wie West became a professional almost two decades ago. (Wie West will step back from competitive golf after this summer’s U.S. Women’s Open.) Zhang insisted Tuesday that she did not feel particularly vulnerable to expectations, which she tries to perceive as more of a compliment — “They think I have the ability to go out there and win every single time” — than a demand.“Growing up, my family and the people around me have given me high expectations for what I should do as a person, not just as a competitor or a golf player, so I kind of fall back toward those morals and who I am as an individual,” she said. “That allows me to go out there on the golf course and think: ‘OK, today is another round of golf. I’m going to need to do what I need to do on the golf course. If it doesn’t work out, I still have a lot of things going for me in life.’”Zhang celebrated with her Stanford teammates after winning the NCAA women’s golf championships.Christian Petersen/Getty ImagesAfter the inaugural Americas Open, which will be contested at Liberty National Golf Club, Zhang is expected to compete in the events that make up the rest of the year’s majors circuit for women’s golf. The Women’s P.G.A. Championship will be played at Baltusrol in June, followed by the U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble Beach in July, when the Evian Championship will also be held. The Women’s British Open, scheduled for August at Walton Heath, rounds out the majors.Zhang played in three majors last year, with her best finish a tie for 28th at the Women’s British Open. (She did not enter this year’s Chevron Championship, where she tied for 11th in 2020, and instead played for, and won, the Pac-12 Conference’s individual championship.)She does not, she said, have any short-term expectations for performance. This year is about finding her way — and then letting the world watch to see if her way can work. More

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      LIV Golf Wants to Talk About Sports. Donald Trump Still Looms.

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      It was only on Sunday evening that LIV Golf, the men’s league awash in billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, met its greatest athletic triumph to date when one of its headliners, Brooks Koepka, emphatically won the P.G.A. Championship.By Thursday morning, though, LIV’s road show had been reinfused with the political bent that has trailed the second-year circuit as it has convulsed professional golf: the loquacious, limelight-seizing presence of former President Donald J. Trump, who is hosting one of the league’s tournaments this weekend at a course northwest of Washington.Whether LIV can outrun Trump’s shadow, and whether it even wants to, could do much to shape how the league is perceived in the years ahead, particularly in the United States, where it has struggled to gain a meaningful foothold against the PGA Tour.But for now, besides major tournament winners like Koepka and Phil Mickelson who have joined the circuit, there is probably no figure beyond golf more publicly linked to LIV than Trump, who has repeatedly and enthusiastically cheered Saudi Arabia’s thunderous, flashy entrance into sports. At its events, he often seems like an eager M.C. whose role is at once decidedly conspicuous and deeply mysterious — neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events — as the league looks to make inroads in a hidebound sport.The former President Donald J. Trump played with Patrick Reed during a pro-am event Thursday.Trump talked to the news media throughout his round of golf.“They want to use my properties because they’re the best properties,” Trump said on Thursday, when he spent five hours appearing in a pro-am event with the LIV players Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed (and staging what amounted to a rolling news conference about politics and an infomercial about his property over 18 holes along the Potomac River).The Trump portfolio does indeed feature some exceptional courses, including the Washington-area location, which once held a Senior P.G.A. Championship, and LIV executives have said in the past that they were drawn to them because many top-caliber properties in the United States were not willing to host a circuit intended to rival the PGA Tour. But Trump’s persistent, growing place in LIV’s orbit also invites sustained skepticism of the motives and intentions of the league, which some critics see as a glossy way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its image.The former president is unbothered by the league’s patron, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the kingdom’s budding place in professional golf, despite its record of human rights abuses. He is still casting aside objections from family members of Sept. 11 victims, some of whom believe Saudi Arabia played a role in the 2001 attacks, because, as he said Thursday, LIV tournaments are “great economic development.” He is openly admiring the millions and millions of dollars that the Saudis are raining down onto players and, of course, properties like his, even though he asserted Thursday that hosting tournaments amounts to “peanuts for me.” This year, LIV will travel to three of his properties, up from two in its inaugural season.He has remained steadfast in his loyalty even though a special counsel from the Justice Department, Jack Smith, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to LIV.In an interview as he walked between holes on Thursday, Trump described Smith’s aggressive approach as “retribution” because the Biden administration wants “to do something to take the spotlight off what’s taken place.” He said he did not know why his ties to LIV had drawn the special counsel’s scrutiny.Trump’s affection for LIV can be traced, at least in part, to years of friction with golf’s establishment.Graeme McDowell, right, who played with Trump Thursday is among the past major champions to have left the PGA Tour for LIV.Neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events on his courses.In 2016, the PGA Tour ended a longstanding relationship with Trump’s course in Doral, Fla., near Miami, because of what its then-commissioner described as “fundamentally a sponsorship issue.” And in 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the P.G.A. of America — which is separate from the PGA Tour — abandoned its plan to host its flagship men’s championship at a Trump property in New Jersey in 2022.Trump has not fared much better abroad. The R&A, which organizes the British Open, has signaled it does not intend to take the tournament back to Trump-controlled Turnberry, where LIV’s commissioner, Greg Norman, won one of his two Opens.LIV has embraced Trump, though, and in return gotten a former president’s imprimatur, along with bursts of news coverage for events that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. He brings prestige and power, diluted as both might be by the divisiveness in which he revels.“They have unlimited money and they love it,” he said Thursday, “and it’s been great publicity for Saudi Arabia.”But for every day Trump appears at a LIV event, it is a day that LIV might as well write off as one in which it will not escape the pointed questions that it has spent a year trying to move past, or at least saying it wants to move past.It has been hard enough for the league, even on a day when Trump is not playing a round, not to have its players confronting questions about the morality of accepting millions in Saudi money.“We’re contracted to play golf,” Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner who finished in a tie for fourth at the P.G.A. Championship last weekend, said on Wednesday. “I think the most important part is to provide great entertainment wherever possible on whatever platform that is, whatever platform that provides it. When you can talk about ethics, that’s people’s perception. I completely disagree with it, but everybody has the right to their own opinion, and I’d say, was it worth it? Absolutely.”Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But DeChambeau hardly has the same megaphone or presence as a former occupant of the Oval Office. When Trump appears at a LIV event, even winners of the Masters Tournament or the U.S. Open are relegated to supporting actors.LIV executives have generally brushed aside questions about whether the former president is good for business, or merely essential for it, given their troubles landing quality venues. They seem convinced that, at some point, sports will overtake politics, which might be wishful thinking since Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But LIV’s strategy still involves a gamble that the presence of one of the nation’s most polarizing figures will not scare off even more of the sponsorship contracts and television rights that are already proving hard to come by for the operation. And Trump can just as easily alienate prospective fans as he can entice them.Trump himself insists that LIV craves him at its events and that he is not a distraction from the league’s proclaimed goal of growing the sport and giving it doses of needed energy.“They wanted me to be here, and I said sure,” said Trump, who said that LIV’s contracts with his properties did not require his appearances in events like the pro-am.Perhaps all of that is true. But as long as it is, LIV will linger in the political thicket, no matter how well Koepka plays on the game’s biggest stages. More

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      PGA Championship: Who Grew Oak Hill’s Namesake Trees?

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      Rob Galbraith remembers, as a child in the early 1960s, regularly going to the Rochester, N.Y., home of his great-grandfather, John R. Williams, who had been a pioneering physician in the area.Most memorable about those visits was seeing the byproduct of Williams’s amateur avocation: botany. In the backyard, there were several hundred nascent oak, elm and maple seedlings. Inside the house, acorns by the dozens were planted in dirt-filled coffee cans propped on window sills and shelves. Scores of embryonic trees germinated within a nursery on the property.“They were growing everywhere,” Galbraith, now 63, recalled in a recent interview. “All over the place.”Dr. Williams had been nurturing trees in this manner since the 1920s with one singular goal: transforming the grounds of the nearby Oak Hill Country Club from a barren parcel of overworked farmland into a lush golf course landscaped with towering hardwoods, shrubs and other verdant plants.Dr. John R. Williams University of Rochester Medical Center Miner LibraryDr. Williams, with other club members who offered assistance, did not stop the forestation crusade until tens of thousands of trees were planted over four decades. He once quipped that he had stopped counting how many new seedlings he had relocated to the club after the first 40,000.The colossal Oak Hill face-lift worked. By the late 1940s, the club, whose 36 holes were designed by the noted course architect Donald J. Ross, had been acclaimed nationally and hosted its first major golf tournament. As the course’s reputation grew in ensuing decades, three U.S. Opens, the Ryder Cup and multiple other distinguished events came to the flourishing site in western New York. This week, the fourth P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill is underway.Dr. Williams’s abiding devotion to the club’s arboriculture is also a blossoming story line this week because a recent renovation of the grounds removed hundreds of aging trees for agronomic, competitive and aesthetic reasons. It has altered the look of some holes and sparked debate, but Dr. Williams’s influence on a landmark 20th century golf course endures in the thousands of magnificent trees that remain — not just adjacent to fairways but adorning the perimeter and social areas of the 355-acre site.Commonly called the club’s patron saint, Dr. Williams, who frequented the club in work overalls and muddy boots while planting, is the man who put the oak in Oak Hill.The trees along the course played a factor in the first round of the P.G.A. Championship this year, with players like Scottie Scheffler and Keegan Bradley having to hit around trees to keep their spots near the top of the leaderboard.Dr. Williams died in 1965 at the age of 91. Shortly thereafter, during a service at the club in his honor, his granddaughter, Susan R. Williams, listened as a chorus sang a verse of Joyce Kilmer’s renowned poem put to music: “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree …”Susan R. Williams conjured that remembrance for the foreword of a book prepared for the Williams family many years ago and added another fascinating anecdote to her grandfather’s lore. He zealously scoured the world for acorns from renowned oak trees to plant at Oak Hill.“Our family vacations frequently included side trips to specific trees in search of acorns for Grandpa,” she wrote. It included getting acorns from England at Sherwood Forest and the Shakespeare oak at Stratford-on-Avon, and from the oaks planted by George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va. And it was not just family members who were recruited for the international harvest.“When people in the armed services left Rochester and went to various parts of the world, they knew to send back acorns to Dr. Williams,” Galbraith said. “Schoolchildren on vacations did the same thing and brought some back home with them.”He added: “The community was a lot smaller then, and while I don’t know how he did it, my great-grandfather was very proficient at getting the word out that he was collecting acorns.”It did not hurt that Dr. Williams was one of Rochester’s most prominent citizens — and with good reason.A tree planted in honor of Dr. John R. Williams at the Rochester Regional Health building near downtown Rochester.Raised in Canada, Dr. Williams’s family arrived in Rochester when he was a teenager. Galbraith, who is the first linear descendant of Dr. Williams to join Oak Hill Country Club, said his great-grandfather became a teacher and later graduated from the University of Michigan’s medical school. As the chief of medicine at a Rochester hospital, Dr. Williams became nationally recognized for his research on blood analysis, and in 1916, he established a laboratory that became a leader in the study of metabolic disorders, chiefly diabetes.Six years later, Dr. Williams was recognized as the first physician in the United States to administer insulin to a diabetic patient. He also surveyed 7,000 Rochester homes to study the safety of the city’s milk supplies and found dangerous, unsatisfactory refrigeration conditions that would lead to illness. He rewrote refrigeration standards, including those that applied to milk delivery trucks. Some of his guidelines were instituted nationwide.Coming to the aid of his community seemed to come naturally to Dr. Williams, who was active in many civic endeavors, especially within the city’s museum community. After Oak Hill moved from its original downtown location to the Rochester suburb of Pittsford in 1926, he began to extensively study the botany of trees in hopes of improving the vast but cheerless property where the golf courses would be situated.Dr. Williams took on the project altruistically, not necessarily for personal benefit.“What’s most interesting about Dr. Williams is that he wasn’t really a golfer,” said Sal Maiorana, a longtime Rochester sportswriter whose 2013 book painstakingly chronicled Oak Hill’s history. “He joined the club specifically as a social thing. But he became fascinated with trees, put in a tremendous amount of time understanding everything about them and consulted arborists around the world. He knew he could help the club, and the Oak Hill board of directors realized that he was the man for the job.”Groundskeepers at Oak Hill preserve Dr. Williams’s tree-planting legacy, sometimes having to shave off a few branches.But 40,000 trees planted? From a practical standpoint, how?“It is a lot of trees, but actually I’d always heard it was 50,000,” Galbraith said with a chuckle. “But he lived to be 91 so he did it consistently over a long period of time. And he had people help plant the trees.”He added: “If you look at everything he accomplished throughout this entire life, he was one of those individuals who would set his mind to things and then just do it.”Dr. Williams’s affinity for trees led to another permanent contribution to the club’s grounds: a living tribute to noteworthy contributors to golf called the Hill of Fame. Beginning in 1956, Dr. Williams began selecting trees on a rise adjacent to the 13th hole on the club’s East Course that would be affixed with bronze plaques commemorating such golfing luminaries as Ben Hogan, Annika Sorenstam, Lee Trevino and Nancy Lopez. The unveiling of each plaque has included a ceremony. To date, 45 people, including amateur golfers and administrators, have been recognized. A tree, Dr. Williams liked to say, was a surviving legacy far superior to a gravestone in a cemetery.In the early 1990s, a northern red oak seedling grown inside Oak Hill’s nursery was transplanted onto manicured grass between the former Genesee Hospital in Rochester (now a medical facility) and an adjacent parking garage. The tree has since sprouted more than 25 feet, giving shade to a walkway used by health workers and visitors.The choice of site for the planting of this particular seedling was not accidental. It was once the property of Dr. Williams, where he lived and operated his medical practice and wandered into his backyard with fledgling trees.Over and over, and over, again.The practice range is kept clear of foliage but the tree line is not far. More

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      Brooks Koepka Wins P.G.A. Championship, Boosting LIV Golf

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      PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Six weeks ago on Sunday, Brooks Koepka did not sleep. He had brooding to do and demons to chase. After everything — the ghastly knee injury, the agony of unfulfilled ambition, the taunts and the splenetic rift in professional golf that he helped personify — he had rallied to a Masters Tournament lead, and then he had fizzled. Collapsed, really.He ultimately vowed, he recalled over the weekend at Oak Hill Country Club, never to “think the way I thought going into the final round.” On Sunday evening, Koepka found his vindication: a two-stroke win at the P.G.A. Championship, earning him his first major tournament trophy since 2019. It was Koepka’s fifth career major victory, tying him with figures like Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson.“I think this one is probably the most meaningful of them all with everything that’s gone on, all the crazy stuff over the last few years,” said Koepka, who said that he had received about 600 text messages by the time he held a news conference. “But it feels good to be back and to get No. 5.”The victory made him the first member of LIV Golf, the year-old breakaway league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to win a major title since joining the circuit. And while Koepka’s triumph at Oak Hill may do little to stanch some of the criticisms of LIV — its ties to a repressive government, its disputed intentions, its gleeful instigation of a financial arms race in an ancient sport — it definitively ended the wrangling over whether men who play a smattering of 54-hole tournaments can prevail on golf’s grandest, 72-hole stages.“I definitely think it helps LIV,” Koepka said, “but I’m more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you.”Fair enough, for he silenced the notion, one that seemed a little more off-the-mark after the Masters, that his contending days were done by carding a three-under-par 67 on Sunday, taking him to nine under for the tournament. But this is a 33-year-old player whose results in 2022’s major season looked like this: missed cut, tie for 55th, solo 55th, missed cut. It had been easy to forget that in 2021, the sequence went like this: missed cut, tie for second, tie for fourth, tie for sixth.Koepka rebounded after shooting a two-over-par 72 during Thursday’s first round.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBy the end of last year, he had a mounting hunch that his recovery was nearly done and that he could, finally, be relevant again. Around January, he has said, he was certain of it.“He is back to being healthy,” said Cameron Smith, who won the British Open last summer and then joined LIV later in the year. “I think that brings a little bit of internal confidence as well being out there and just being able to do your stuff.”It did not look that way as recently as Thursday, when the prospect that Koepka would outlast a swarm of stars seemed closer to impossible than even improbable. He had opened this tournament with a two-over-par 72 and, by his own account, was out of sorts and struggling to strike the ball as he wished. He could not remember, he said, the last time he had hit so poorly.But he was not that far behind because the tournament, the first major played at Oak Hill since a sweeping effort to restore some of the daunting tests that characterize Donald J. Ross-designed courses, emerged as one of the most fearsome P.G.A. Championships in recent decades, often evoking the rigors of the 2008 competition at Oakland Hills in Michigan. Of the 156 players who competed this past week, only 11 finished below par — a departure from 2013, when 21 players finished in the red at the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill.The stinginess came even with the course, with its perilous rough and humbling bunkers, being more accommodating on Sunday than it had been earlier. Smith, Cam Davis, Kurt Kitayama and Sepp Straka all shot 65s on Sunday, running them high up the leaderboard. Patrick Cantlay, who made one of the tournament’s scarce eagles, signed for a 66. Michael Block, whose day job is being the head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club southeast of Los Angeles, had a hole in one at No. 15, the first P.G.A. Championship ace by a club professional since 1996.But much of the focus on Sunday was on Koepka; Viktor Hovland, the budding Norwegian talent; and Scottie Scheffler, the No. 2 player in the Official World Golf Ranking. Koepka, his standing shriveled because of his lucrative ties to LIV, whose tournaments are not accredited in the ranking system, entered Sunday at No. 44. (The P.G.A. of America, which organized this tournament, is distinct from the PGA Tour, LIV’s rival.)Viktor Hovland came close tying to Koepka during the fourth round but ultimately matched Scottie Scheffler, right, for second place.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesDesiree Rios/The New York TimesKoepka stepped into the first tee box with a one-stroke lead and doubled his margin in short order when he made a birdie at the second hole. He had played the hole to par the first three days, always reaching the green in two shots but leaving himself with long putts. On Sunday, with the pin at the front-right of the green, he needed less than 5 feet.His birdie putt at the third hole required even less, after his longest tee shot of the tournament at the hole known as Vista, moving his advantage to three stokes.The sixth hole, a threat to so many players throughout the tournament, loomed. Koepka had survived the hole, a par-4 challenge that the field finished in an average of 4.52 strokes, well enough on Thursday, Friday and Saturday: par in each of the first three rounds. On Sunday, though, his tee shot rocketed rightward into a thick grass in the so-called native area. He took a drop and then, about 191 yards from the hole, struck it onto the green and eventually escaped with a bogey. Although Koepka followed with another bogey, Hovland also stumbled at No. 7.At the turn, Koepka led Hovland by a lone stroke. Scheffler, a steady-voiced sensation since he won last year’s Masters, and Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, were three off the lead.Koepka answered with a tantalizing streak: birdie, bogey, birdie. Hovland had a chance for birdie at the 12th hole, but his tap from nearly 15 feet edged just left of the cup. With six holes to play, Koepka’s advantage was back to two strokes. Two holes later, it was down to one.Koepka received rousing applause as he walked the steep incline to the 18th green, where he finished the tournament with a par.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesBut at nearly every major, there comes a moment when one man’s victory appears inevitable. It may not be mathematically buttoned-up yet, but almost everyone knows that the tournament is finished before it actually ends.On Sunday, the scene for that moment was the 16th hole. It had not been the most hellish at Oak Hill, not by far. Hovland will remember it, though.His ball in a bunker after his tee shot, he wielded his 9-iron. With less than 175 yards to the hole, he swung and blasted his ball — not onto the green, but into the bunker’s lip. His fourth shot reached the green. A bogey putt missed, leaving him with a double bogey. Koepka, in the twilight of his pursuit for his third P.G.A. Championship victory, made a birdie to lay claim to a four-stroke lead.“It’s not easy going toe-to-toe with a guy like that,” Hovland, who finished in the top seven for his third consecutive major, said of his duel with Koepka. “He is not going to give you anything, and I didn’t really feel like I gave him anything either until 16.”Scheffler made a birdie putt at the 18th green soon after to narrow Koepka’s path. Koepka himself narrowed it further with a bogey at No. 17.He arrived at the 18th hole, which was playing 497 yards on Sunday, with two shots to spare. He tee shot soared and then thumped into the fairway, stopping at 318 yards. The towering grandstands waited in the distance, filled with spectators, as the fairway-lined galleries were, looking to see whether, after everything, Koepka was indeed back.His next swing lifted the ball onto the green. The applause was rising, seemingly with every step in his march up the steep incline, the kind of incline that would have felt Everest-like to Koepka in the recent past. He knelt — there had been times, he said, when he could not so much as bend his knee — and then approached the ball. He steadied himself and tapped the ball forward.It stopped, according to tournament officials, about 3 inches short.He flashed a tight smile, as if to say that, of course, there would be one last hiccup.He tried again. The ball fell into the cup. He pumped his fist and then embraced his caddie for nearly nine seconds.Indeed, after everything, Koepka was back.Desiree Rios/The New York Times More

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      Michael Block Gets a Hole In One At PGA Championship

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      Block, a club pro from Arroyo Trabuco, shot par in each of the first three rounds and on Sunday was paired with Rory McIlroy. He thought it couldn’t get better. Then he got a hole in one.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — On Saturday evening, Michael Block, the 46-year-old Everyman golf pro from a public course in California, learned that he would continue his enchanting run at this year’s P.G.A. Championship by playing the final round with Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion. Block rolled his eyes at the news and spun around.“Are you serious?” he asked.He began to backpedal, as if reeling.Eventually, he walked away, smiling but muttering: “Oh, boy.”Block added: “That should be fun.”And, oh, boy, was it ever.In retrospect, perhaps McIlroy, 34, one of his generation’s greatest golfers, should have been the one grinning and eagerly awaiting the chance to play with Block, who finished the tournament tied for 15th but was treated like a visiting rock star throughout the weekend. And he lived up to the billing.Block proved what’s possible in a game like golf, where the competition is more about the player against the course than it is golfer against golfer.For this one tournament, Block, who had never even made the cut at a major championship, was able to keep up with the best in the game for 72 tense, demanding holes. He proved what’s possible, which may be the central reason people watch sports. And he won $288,333.33.At the end of their pairing Sunday, McIlroy grabbed Block for a long bear hug on the final green. They may be 12 years apart in age and separated by hundreds of millions of dollars in golf earnings, but it was not evident in their heartfelt embrace.In more than four hours of golf on Sunday afternoon, it was just one of the highlights of their pairing — and there were many.It was good golf, and more important, it was good for golf.But no part will likely be more memorable than Block’s shot at the 151-yard, par-3 15th hole on Sunday.First, by way of background, the P.G.A. Championship is the rare major tournament that reserves 20 spots in the field for members of the P.G.A. of America, the organization that conducts the tournament and represents the 28,000 certified club pros in the United States.Block, whose full-time job is to teach golf lessons and serve the recreational players at the Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Mission Viejo, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles, qualified for one of the 20 spots. It was a shock when he was even par through two rounds and in a tie for 10th, which made him only the second club pro to be in the top 10 after two rounds in the tournament in the last 40 years.Block had never made the cut at a major before the P.G.A.It turns out Block, who spent his time at this year’s P.G.A. Championship signing virtually every autograph request from fans and entertaining reporters with winsome, self-deprecating answers to countless questions, was just getting started.He shot a third even par 70 on Saturday to stay relatively close to the top of the leaderboard.Just before 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon at Oak Hill Country Club, a Block party erupted alongside the first tee. It was entirely unlike any other celebration at the event since fans began lining the holes of the nearly century-old course for practice rounds early last week.A packed grandstand and a crowd 15 deep that enveloped the arena-like first tee box erupted in rambunctious, clamorous cheering as Block appeared. The greeting for McIlroy was muted by comparison.Chants of “Let’s go, Block,” followed him as he walked up the first fairway, where, apparently free of any jitters, he rifled his opening shot.Block bogeyed the opening hole but he seemed unbothered by it, chatting amiably with McIlroy for two or three minutes as the two sauntered up the fairway. As Block reached the green, a fan shouted: “You’re one of us, Michael; we’re with you!”When he made the second of six steadying pars, Block walked through a narrow corridor of fans. One yelled: “Working man coming through!”Block continued to play with composure, even as some of the crowd’s enthusiasm had begun to wane. But at the 15th hole, Block again showed his sense of drama by knocking his tee shot into the hole on the fly.The ovation for Block’s hole in one could be heard roughly 600 yards away near the clubhouse.By the 18th hole, Block had hooked his second shot well left of the green and nearly 100 feet from the flagstick. His recovery was fitting: a pitch to 7 feet. His par putt slowly crept to the edge of the hole, paused, and then fell out of view.Making par on the closing hole also ensured that Block will be invited to the 2024 P.G.A. Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky.Interviewed minutes later, Block said: “I’m living a dream. It’s not going to get any better than this.”Dedicating his performance to the club pros nationwide, he added, with tears in his eyes: “This is for you.”“I’m living a dream. It’s not going to get any better than this,” Block said after his round. More

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      Golfers Battered By Rain At The PGA Championship

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      Driving rain on Saturday at the P.G.A. Championship forced some golfers to buck the usual country club sartorial norms in order to keep the water out of their eyes.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — For a while during the third round of the P.G.A. Championship on Saturday, Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Scottie Scheffler, Justin Rose, Adam Scott and three or four other golfers were roaming the august grounds of the Oak Hill Country Club with their caps on backward.“It makes me feel cool,” Rose said. “Young. Hip.”The attire at the 105th playing of the P.G.A. Championship on Saturday did not mark a revolution toward relaxed golf mores. Although, it is also true that the back-turned caps — not the norm in professional golf — did not draw penalties, hoots or disqualifications either, so maybe some welcomed informality is brewing in golf after all.The world’s best golfers were experimenting with the best use of their headgear because of a relentless, driving rainstorm that pounded the Oak Hill Country Club throughout the day.Bryson DeChambeau kept a towel to dry his hands hanging from his umbrella.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesSo, Rose, 42, was not trying to remake his image. That was him making a joke. He wore his cap backward because it had become soaked with rain and when he put his head down to hit the golf ball, beads of water drip, drip, dripped past his eyes and onto his ball.“It actually put me off a little bit,” Rose said. “And at the top of my backswing, I had a couple of droplets fall down and it distracted me. I thought, this is annoying me, so let’s flip it.”McIlroy offered the same explanation, although he and Rose both conceded that they had not worn their hat backward at a major golf championship before.It is a known remedy on sloppy, rainy days, one seen regularly during bad weather at municipal golf courses, but the look was a little jarring when exhibited by the world’s best golfers.And in case you were wondering, a spokeswoman for the P.G.A. of America, which conducts the P.G.A. Championship, confirmed that there is a player dress code, but apparently, wearing your cap backward does not violate the code because no golfer was penalized or pulled off the course.Spectators dressed for the elements to take in the rain-soaked third round.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesIn fact, Rose, Scheffler, McIlroy and Justin Suh, who was another backward hat rebel, were each in the top 10 entering Sunday’s final round, so maybe they knew something that most of the other golfers did not.The soaked hats brigade was the most obvious example of the many adjustments that all the golfers in the field had to make because of Saturday’s rainstorm.The rough weather also highlighted the role of the relationship between players and their caddies. Nothing is more complex than the umbrella handoff between players and caddies that happens thousands of times — almost always in the same sequence — during a rainy round. It is either comical or the epitome of efficient, unspoken coordination.Usually in the fairway, in full view of the gallery of fans, it goes like this:The player holds an umbrella over his head and over his bag while the caddie marches around in the pouring rain trying to figure out the distance of the player’s next shot to the green. When the caddie returns, the player hands the umbrella to him and selects a club from the bag. The caddie dries the club’s grip with a towel hanging from the interior spokes of the umbrella. When the player walks toward his ball in the fairway, the caddie holds the umbrella over the player’s head — but not his own head. This protection of the player is offered until just seconds before he begins his swing at the ball. That’s when the caddie steps to the side. At that moment, the caddie makes sure he’s holding the umbrella over the player’s golf bag, because keeping the bag dry is more important than keeping the caddie dry.Once the ball is struck, the player hands his club to the caddie and the caddie hands over the umbrella. The player heads toward his ball, leaving the caddie to walk in the rain behind him, unprotected.Brooks Koepka, right, and his caddie perform the intricate umbrella exchange. Desiree Rios/The New York TimesOr as Jon Rahm, the world’s top ranked golfer, said on Saturday: “I can just take the umbrella and go. He sacrifices.”But Rahm appreciates his caddie, Adam Hayes, and knows what he endures.“The bottom of the bag today had about two inches of water in it,” he said. “And his clothes were soaked through. He must be carrying about 35 pounds of water on him right now. His job is extra important on a rainy day.”Stephan Jaeger, whose golf bag contained seven towels and other gear to get through a nearly five-hour round in the rain, said he thought his bag weighed 70 pounds on Saturday. The entire experience — the ongoing umbrella exchange, wiping the rain off the bill of his cap, trying to determine how many yards the wet grass would impede a shot — had left Jaeger, who was tied for 10th, exhausted.“It’s a lot of effort,” he said minutes after walking off the golf course. “I think I’m going to feel it once I sit down and calm down. I think the adrenaline will wear off a little bit, and I’m going to be pretty tired. It’s a lot of thinking, a lot to consider.”Jaeger was asked if he ever practiced in the rain between tournaments to get used to the experience.Jaeger answered immediately: “No.” More

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      Brooks Koepka Surges to the Lead at P.G.A. Championship

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      After his second consecutive four-under-par 66, the LIV golfer Koepka will be in the final pairing on Sunday at Oak Hill Country Club.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Four years ago, less than a week before he won his second consecutive P.G.A. Championship, Brooks Koepka allowed the world inside his swaggering mind.“One hundred fifty-six in the field, so you figure at least 80 of them I’m just going to beat,” he said at Bethpage in 2019. “You figure about half of them won’t play well from there, so you’re down to about maybe 35,” he added. “And then from 35, some of them just — pressure is going to get to them. It only leaves you with a few more, and you’ve just got to beat those guys.”Keep in contention long enough, he reasoned, and “good things are going to happen.”He returned to the mix last month at the Masters Tournament, where he surrendered his lead to Jon Rahm during the final round. And now he is in the mix this weekend at the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, where he fired a field-best four-under-par 66 on a rain-soaked Saturday, giving him a one-stroke lead over Corey Conners and Viktor Hovland with a round to play. He had also scored a tournament-leading 66 on Friday, after a 72 on Thursday.All of that is rumbling forth from a man with a wrenching medical history, a man who last year was trying (and failing) to shatter car windows at Augusta National Golf Club after a missed Masters cut, a man who just on Thursday played a round that he said was “the worst I’ve hit it in a really long time.” He finished that day tied for 38th, a day after he declared the try-and-beat-me algorithm he detailed in 2019 still worked just fine.Maybe he was right, though.Sunday, of course, will have pitfalls. With its often firm and narrow fairways and a rough whose verdant hue makes it appear more appealing than it actually is, Oak Hill has been a devilish test since the first tee shot on Thursday. After two rounds, only nine players were below par. After three, that figure had shriveled to seven.Conners held a lead that crawled as high as two strokes for much of Saturday, helped along by a front nine that passed without a bogey and made the possibility of his first major championship victory all the more real. Born in Ontario, not all that far from Oak Hill, he has been a favorite of the galleries, energized by an April victory at the Texas Open and confident in his putting, a welcome status for a player with a reputation for expert ball striking. But a double-bogey on the 16th hole sent him tumbling out of the top spot.And Hovland again lurked at and around the top of the leaderboard throughout Saturday. He has been there before: Since the start of last year’s British Open, he has been in the top-10 at the end of every major tournament round. His afternoon darkened quickly, with bogeys on two of his first five holes, before a spree of three birdies left him poised to take the lead on the 14th hole. A sand wedge from about 75 yards brought him just inside the green’s edge, but he missed a birdie putt, settling for par. He missed another birdie try at No. 16.Viktor Hovland on the 18th green waiting to putt. He lurked at and around the top of the leaderboard throughout Saturday.Six pairings ahead, Hovland’s playing partner in last year’s final round at St. Andrews, Rory McIlroy, rediscovered some of the form that eluded him at the Masters and beyond. (Neither Hovland nor McIlroy won that Open, which Cameron Smith left with the claret jug.) McIlroy, often drenched, shot a 69 for the second consecutive day, taking him to one under and putting his ambition to win his first major since 2014 not fully out of reach.“I probably hit it a little better off the tee today than I did the first couple of days, but I think this tournament and especially in these conditions and on this golf course, the nonphysical parts of the game, I think, are way more important this week than the physical parts of the game,” McIlroy said Saturday. “And I think I’ve done those well, and that’s the reason that I’m in a decent position.”Koepka has not gone as long as McIlroy without a major victory, though he has been more battered with injuries these last few years. He began to gain ground early on Saturday, with birdies on the fourth and fifth holes. At No. 5, christened Little Poison, his 179-yard tee shot landed neatly on the green, setting up a putt for birdie. Unlike plenty of other past major champions, including McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, on Saturday, he avoided a bogey at No. 6, a havoc-inducing par-4 that has been playing closer to a 5.A second shot at No. 13 landed in the rough, leaving Koepka 96 yards from the hole. His next stroke put him on the green, setting up a birdie putt from roughly 18 and a half feet. That putt, though, seemed puny at the 17th hole, when Koepka rolled one in from about 47 feet.One of the central questions entering the tournament at Oak Hill was whether Koepka would much resemble the player who punished almost the entire field at Augusta. Playing in the LIV Golf league afterward, he had assembled a middling performance in Australia, a third-place finish in Singapore and a sixth-place outing last weekend in Oklahoma.Before that tournament near Tulsa, he had mused over how he enjoyed the rigors of the majors: “the discipline, the mental grind that comes with it all, the focus.” In the hours after his letdown at Augusta, he said this past week, he did not sleep, that swaggering mind suddenly left looking for answers. The answers took shape within days.He said on Saturday that he had learned that he should “never think the way I thought going into the final round.”Koepka on the fourth fairway. A victory on Sunday would give him his fifth major tournament championship.“I won’t do it again the rest of my career,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that you can’t go play bad — you can play good, you’ll play bad, but I’ll never have that mind-set or that won’t ever be the reason.”A victory on Sunday would give him his fifth major tournament championship, and his first since that heady week at Bethpage in 2019.Others are not so well positioned. Rahm, the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, shot two over on Saturday to bring his tournament score to six over. Justin Thomas, the winner of last year’s P.G.A. Championship, and Phil Mickelson, who has won the event twice, were five over on Saturday, moving their scores to 10 over.“This golf course, with how difficult it is, it all starts by putting the ball in the fairway,” Rahm said. “It’s not an easy task. It’s very, very difficult. If you can do that, then you can maybe give yourself some chances and it all starts with that. A little bit of it is trying to keep the club head dry and manage it but again, there’s an element — there’s only so much you can control — so a bit of an element of luck.”With the wet conditions forecast to clear, players expected the tees to be moved back for Sunday’s final round. The P.G.A. of America, the three-time major winner Padraig Harrington noted, is deeply skilled at setups.“If they want us to go out there and shoot a good score, being 68, they’ll set it up that way,” he said. “They could if they want set it up for a low one for sure, but that wouldn’t suit the leader. The leaders always want a tough challenge on Sunday so they can play safe and the chasers get caught out.”But the universe of chasers is a small one. Again, its members are pursuing Koepka.The field will chase Koepka in the final round on Sunday. More