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      Susie Maxwell Berning, Hall of Fame Golfer, Is Dead at 83

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      She often took time away from the tour for her family. But she tallied 11 championships, including three in the U.S. Women’s Open.Susie Maxwell Berning, a trailblazing three-time champion of the United States Women’s Open golf tournament who was known for her tenacity on the fairway and her grace off it, died on Wednesday at her home in Indio, in Southern California. She was 83.Her daughter Cindy Molchany confirmed the death. She said her mother had had lung cancer for two years.Emerging from Oklahoma City in the 1960s, when women’s professional golf was still a developing sport (she later estimated that there were only about 70 golfers on the tour at the time), she built a glittering career. She shone brightest when the stakes were highest. Four of her 11 wins on the L.P.G.A. tour were in major tournaments, including the Western Open in 1965.The other three were U.S. Open wins in 1968, 1972 and 1973. Berning was one of just six women to win three or more, along with Betsy Rawls, Babe Zaharias, Hollis Stacy, Annika Sorenstam and Mickey Wright — all members of the World Golf Hall of Fame. In 2021, Berning finally joined them in the Hall, which honors both male and female stars of the sport. She was inducted in the same class as Tiger Woods.Berning spoke at her induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. She was inducted in the same class as Tiger Woods.Sam Greenwood/Getty ImagesFull recognition of her accomplishments came slowly in large part because her career was abbreviated, as she consistently prioritized family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Brooklyn Open, All Golfers Are Welcome

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      The sun was just starting to rise over the marinas and box stores of South Brooklyn on Monday as Sam Maurer, a bartender at Lucky Jack’s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, wriggled his foot into a golf shoe.“I’d be going to bed right now on a normal Monday morning,” said Mr. Maurer, 25, who typically works till 4 a.m. He had just arrived at the Marine Park Golf Course, a city-owned facility built in 1963 atop a former landfill, to play in the Brooklyn Open.The tournament, by turns sporting competition and block party, has become a rite of early fall for a wide swath of urban golfers. An unofficial event — it’s not sanctioned by any ruling body of golf — the Brooklyn Open welcomes anyone who pays its $175 entry fee. Players of all ages compete in different divisions depending on their skill level. Befitting a borough of immigrants and dreamers, their backgrounds are as varied as their golf swings.Mr. Maurer, who grew up in Fairfax County, Va., took up the sport as a boy. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., he moved to Brooklyn two years ago to get his start in the hospitality business. Since then, he has played Marine Park about 50 times, although this was his first Open.Among the players were, from left, Luke Watson, a professional caddie; Rich Lee, a just-retired banker; and Vijay Sammy, the owner of an accounting firm.“New York City public golf is some of my favorite golf I’ve ever played, just for the people you meet,” Mr. Maurer said. “In Virginia, even at the public courses, it’s a pretty stuffy game still, and it’s not very inclusive. But in New York that couldn’t be further from the truth.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      BMW PGA Championship Evolved Into a Top International Event

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      The tournament, long a staple for European players, has become an international event for the world’s top golfers.Billy Horschel remembers watching the BMW PGA Championship as a child.Unlike this week’s tournament, the event was played in May, which coincided with the first week of school summer break in Grant, Fla., a fishing town midway down the state’s east coast where Horschel, 37, grew up.Instead of heading to the golf course that week, the 10-year-old Horschel said he asked his mother to let him stay home and watch the televised golf at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, where the idea of the Ryder Cup was born in 1926.And it was good golf to watch. Some of the greats of the European Tour (now the DP World Tour) were winning the event in the 1990s: José María Olazábal and Bernhard Langer, both two-time Masters champions; Ian Woosnam, a Masters champion and force on the European Tour; and Colin Montgomerie, the Ryder Cup great who won the tournament in 1998, 1999 and 2000.“I was a golf fanatic as a kid and I still am,” said Horschel, who now lives up the Florida coast in Ponte Vedra Beach. “I remember saying I want to be part of that tournament one day.”In 2019, when the BMW PGA Championship was moved to the fall, Horschel played in it for the first time because there was no conflict with his PGA Tour schedule.“It was amazing to be able to walk on that course,” he said. “Like any tournament, TV never really does it justice. Right away I fell in love with the golf course. I understood what it required.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      BMW PGA Championship: Tommy Fleetwood Still Seeking American Success

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      Heading into the BMW PGA Championship in his home country, the English golfer talked about the Olympics and playing in the United States.The season might be over on the PGA Tour, but there are still some important events in Europe, beginning with this week’s BMW PGA Championship at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England.Among those participating will be England’s Tommy Fleetwood, 33, who won the silver medal at the Summer Olympics in Paris and finished 20th in the Tour Championship in Atlanta earlier this month. Yet for all his accomplishments, Fleetwood, ranked No. 12 in the world with seven career wins on the DP World Tour, is still searching for his first victory in the United States.Fleetwood, who finished in sixth place last year at Wentworth, spoke recently about the Olympics and his quest to finally break through in the United States.The conversation has been condensed and edited.Were you satisfied with this season on the PGA Tour?I feel good about a lot of things about the year. Whenever you make it to the Tour Championship, it’s always a success. Having said that, I wish I had contended in more tournaments.What do you need to do to go to the next level?Honestly, it’s all been very, very close. It’s easy when you get to this point to think “OK, I’m going to look for a magic answer or rebuild things.” I think I can continue to do the majority of the same things and build on the consistency I’ve had and tweak a couple of small areas.“Having an Olympic medal that you’ll pass down to generations will never not be special,” Fleetwood said.Kevin C. Cox/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Under Wentworth, Remnants of World War II

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      The BMW PGA Championship will be played at the club, where a bunker was built by the British military to be a site more secure from bombing than central London.When golf pros and fans pull up to England’s Wentworth Club for the BMW PGA Championship, they’ll be driving in over a little-known slice of World War II history.About 30 feet under the club’s parking lot is a sprawling bunker that was constructed by the British military and used after the war’s outbreak in 1939.The ultraexclusive golf club, where the tournament will be played from Thursday through Sunday, sits on the Wentworth Estate in the village of Virginia Water, in Surrey, about an hour southwest of London. Now home to some of the most expensive property in the country, Wentworth was once one of many country estates requisitioned by the British military during the war.The site was intended to be a more secure alternative to central London, especially if German bombing eventually forced evacuations from the city.“In the war planning in the late 1930s, it was identified as a possible future seat of government,” said Alex Windscheffel, a senior lecturer in modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Surrey. “You have to remember, in the late 1930s, there’s a lot of fear about the bombers” and what they could do to cities.But the government stayed in London after all, so Windscheffel said, Wentworth “still gets used, but I don’t think it’s ever used quite in the way that was imagined.” The Wentworth Club declined to comment for this article.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      PGA Tour Meets With Saudi Fund in New York to Discuss LIV Golf Deal

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      More than a year has passed since the tour agreed to a deal with LIV Golf, but there is some hope an in-person gathering in New York could create momentum.More than a year after the PGA Tour announced plans to combine forces with the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund’s upstart LIV Golf league, the two sides met in Manhattan on Tuesday in hopes of — finally — making headway on getting to a deal.Given a series of starts and stops in talks aimed at a proposed deal, an accord remains far from certain. But executives from the tour and the Saudi wealth fund, which backs LIV Golf, alongside their advisers, were focused on hammering out details of an agreement, three people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.Also involved in the talks is at least one executive from the consortium of U.S. investors that has already committed to investing in the tour, the people said. The meeting is expected to continue on Wednesday, and could also spill into additional days, they said.The flurry of activity demonstrated an eagerness by both sides to get a deal done. The standoff between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed rival has divided the sport, frustrating fans and players alike.No players attended the meeting, the people said, though several have been in other meetings about the deal. A report that Tiger Woods was New York spurred speculation about his presence, but one of the people said Woods was in town for a golf event supporting his foundation.Plans for the meeting came together within the past week, with the hope that an in-person gathering would generate some momentum, the people said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supporting the Next Wave of Female Golfers

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      Playing the sport is expensive, but several organizations are reaching out to help smooth the way in golf — and life.Alexis Lamadrid, a 17-year-old golfer from Phoenix, birdied the last five holes at Old Barnwell in Aiken, S.C., to win Underrated Golf’s event in June at one of the best new golf courses in the country.“I didn’t really think about it,” Lamadrid said in an interview.What she was thinking about was how the tour has helped her gain greater knowledge about the world. It was founded in 2019 by Stephen Curry — who led the U.S. basketball team to a gold medal in the Paris Olympics and is a star for the Golden State Warriors — with a mission to give opportunities to underrepresented young golfers.“Golf can take me so many places,” Lamadrid said. “Golf has helped me open my eyes to things that are related to golf. If I don’t go professional — everyone has that dream — golf has so many opportunities.”Another young female golfer, Salma Ibrahim, 18, who grew up in Los Angeles to parents who immigrated from Somalia, hit her first golf shots after her father, a distance runner, watched Tiger Woods on television.“He hated distance running — he wanted to teach me golf,” she said. Her six siblings also learned the game.In addition to competing around the country, she’s found other things in the sport to transport her beyond the tee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chi Chi Rodriguez, the Golf World’s Swashbuckling Champion, Dies at 88

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      He won eight PGA Tour tournaments and two senior majors — but it was his flair on the greens that made him one of the sport’s most popular players.Chi Chi Rodriguez, whose flamboyance on the course and passion for the game of golf transformed him into one of its most popular players through his more than three decades on the pro tours, died on Thursday. He was 88.His death was announced by the PGA Tour. The announcement did not cite a cause or say where he died.In a sport played out at lush country clubs where respectful crowds idolize often bland players with comfortable roots, Rodriguez broke the mold.Growing up in a poor family in Puerto Rico, he almost died at age 4 from vitamin deficiencies. At 7, he helped out in the sugar cane fields where his father, Juan Rodriguez Sr., whacked away with a machete for a few dollars a day.The boy who would be known as Chi Chi also began caddying at a course that drew affluent tourists. He taught himself to play using limbs from guava trees to propel crushed tin cans into holes he had dug on baseball fields, and when he was 12 he shot a 67 in a real game of golf. After playing in Puerto Rican tournaments, he joined the PGA Tour in 1960.Rodriguez was 5-foot-7 and about 120 pounds. But he used his strong hands and wrists to get off long low drives, and he was an outstanding wedge player, offsetting his sometimes balky putting game. “For a little man, he sure can hit it,” Jack Nicklaus told Sports Illustrated in 1964, relating how Rodriguez often outdistanced him off the tee on flat, into-the-wind fairways.Rodriguez won eight tournaments on the PGA Tour, then became one of the top players on the Senior (now Champions) Tour, capturing 22 events, including two majors: the 1986 Senior Players Championship and the 1987 Senior PGA Championship. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1992.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More