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    Tiger Woods at the Genesis Invitational: How to Watch

    Woods, who is expected to play alongside Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas on Thursday and Friday, will be competing in a traditional event for the first time since July.Tiger Woods will return to competition on Thursday for the first time since July in another test for a body that has repeatedly been rebuilt but is, at least in Woods’s judgment, still hard-wired to contend.Woods, 47, will enter the Genesis Invitational, at the Riviera Country Club west of downtown Los Angeles, not having played a traditional golf event since the British Open last summer at St. Andrews in Scotland, where he missed the cut. Earlier in 2022, he withdrew from the P.G.A. Championship after three rounds and finished 47th at the Masters Tournament.But Woods, who is expected to play alongside Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas on Thursday and Friday, insists that he is prepared for the Genesis, which he hosts but has never won, nearly two years after the Los Angeles-area car wreck that nearly cost him a leg. More recently, he has confronted a bout of plantar fasciitis, but he has suggested that the car crash’s consequences still loom far larger.“It’s more my ankle, whether I can recover from day to day,” Woods said on Tuesday. “The leg is better than it was last year, but it’s my ankle.”He would like to win the Genesis, of course, where he made his PGA Tour debut in 1992, when he was a 16-year-old amateur. (It was then known as the Los Angeles Open.) Much of this week’s appearance, though, seems to be about fine-tuning his plan to prepare for the Masters, a major tournament that will begin on April 6 at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.“I’m not going to be playing a full schedule so I’ve got to be able to pick and choose my events and how many events I’m going to play,” Woods said. “I alluded to last year it’s going to be probably the majors and maybe a couple more. Would I like to play more? Yes. Will it allow me to? I don’t know. I have to be realistic about that.”The Genesis field is a sturdy one, in part because it is one of the PGA Tour’s new “designated events,” leaving many of the tour’s top players unable to skip it.Besides McIlroy and Thomas, participants will include Scottie Scheffler, who reclaimed the world No. 1 ranking from McIlroy over the weekend after his victory at the Phoenix Open; and Jon Rahm, a former world No. 1 who has already won two tournaments this year. Max Homa, who won the Genesis in 2021, will be seeking his third victory since September.But last year’s Genesis victor, Joaquin Niemann, will be absent: He has since defected to LIV Golf, the circuit financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.How to Watch the Genesis InvitationalThe first two rounds will be broadcast on Golf Channel on Thursday and Friday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern time. Woods is scheduled to tee off at 3:04 p.m. on Thursday and 10:24 a.m. on Friday.For the final two rounds, on Saturday and Sunday, the Golf Channel will broadcast from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and then CBS will have coverage from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday and then 3 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Sunday.ESPN+ will stream coverage of all four rounds.Woods’s scheduled appearance at the Genesis Invitational seemed to be about fine-tuning his plan to prepare for the Masters Tournament.Cliff Hawkins/Getty ImagesTee times for top groups on ThursdayAll times are Eastern.10:24 a.m. — Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland (No. 10)10:35 a.m. — Tony Finau, Billy Horschel, Adam Scott (No. 10)10:46 a.m. — Max Homa, Tom Kim, Xander Schauffele (No. 10)10:57 a.m. — Will Zalatoris, Cameron Champ, J.B. Holmes (No. 10)3:04 p.m. — Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Tiger Woods (No. 1)3:15 p.m. — Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa (No. 1)3:26 p.m. — Justin Rose, Hideki Matsuyama, Shane Lowry (No. 1)3:37 p.m. — Sam Burns, K.H. Lee, Cameron Young (No. 1)Tee times for top groups on Friday10:24 a.m. — Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Tiger Woods (No. 10)10:35 a.m. — Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa (No. 10)10:46 a.m. — Justin Rose, Hideki Matsuyama, Shane Lowry (No. 10)10:57 a.m. — Sam Burns, K.H. Lee, Cameron Young (No. 10)3:04 p.m. — Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay, Viktor Hovland (No. 1)3:15 p.m. — Tony Finau, Billy Horschel, Adam Scott (No. 1)3:26 p.m. — Max Homa, Tom Kim, Xander Schauffele (No. 1)3:37 p.m. — Will Zalatoris, Cameron Champ, J.B. Holmes (No. 1) More

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    Postcard From Phoenix: A Day Inside Sport’s Party Vortex

    SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — The wind was whipping like a blender working overtime on a margarita Thursday morning, and the more than 17,000 people bellied up to the 16th hole at the Phoenix Open acted as if it were last call.If you want cemetery-like quiet, kneel politely before the golf gods at the Masters’ “Amen Corner.”This is the People’s Open, and the 16th is the loudest hole on the rowdiest stop on the PGA Tour. Jon Rahm, a U.S. Open champion, says the decibels have risen exponentially from year to year.The 16th hole at the Phoenix Open is the loudest hole on the rowdiest stop on the PGA Tour.“Very few sporting events in the world can comfortably happen in the same week as the Super Bowl and still have the impact that they have like this one,” Rahm said. “With that said, I don’t think it’s everybody’s favorite — I think either you love it or hate it. There’s no in between. With my case, I love it.”The tournament is an annual destination for fans who refuse to bow to stuffy golf etiquette and, for that reason, the fairways at the T.P.C. Scottsdale course are lined with younger and rowdier attendees than anywhere else in golf. With the Super Bowl in town, golf’s party capital was not only supercharged, but it also helped the 91-year-old tournament sell out its second- and third-round tickets for the first time.Nate Orr, a lawyer, traveled from Kansas City with his friends Jared Kenealy and Micheal Lawrence. They’re Chiefs season-ticket holders who sprung for Super Bowl seats on Sunday, but found themselves in a box on the edge of the 16th green, where they watched golf balls ricochet off the panels beneath them and trickle into sand traps.Dive Deeper Into Super Bowl LVIIThe God of Sod: George Toma, 94, has been a groundskeeper for all 57 Super Bowls. On Sunday, his perfectionism will be on display for millions of people who will have no idea who he is or how he suffers for his work.Philadelphia Swagger: After surviving a disastrous introductory news conference, an ill-chosen flower analogy and his “Beat Dallas” motivational shirt, Nick Sirianni has transformed the Eagles, and maybe himself.Inside a Kansas City Oasis: Big Charlie’s Saloon is a South Philadelphia bar with a bit of a conundrum: how to celebrate Kansas City’s Super Bowl berth without drawing the ire of locals.Halftime Show: The nearly four-year gap between Rihanna’s live performances will close when she takes the stage at the Super Bowl. During her hiatus, the stakes for her return have only grown.“Bucket list stuff,” said Lawrence, an executive at a nonprofit.From left: Jared Kenealy, Nate Orr, Stephanie Orr and Micheal Lawrence inside their suite on the 16th green.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe crowd was just as rough on the celebrities who competed in the Pro-Am on Wednesday, including the Olympic great Michael Phelps.Tony Finau, the world No. 13, was greeted like a gladiator at the so-called coliseum hole after knocking his tee-shot 16 inches from the flag. When he sunk the gimme for a birdie, the crowd roared as exuberantly as they had in Arrowhead Stadium last month when Harrison Butker booted the game-winning field goal that landed Kansas City in Sunday’s Super Bowl.Rory McIlroy was booed for merely backing off his ball as the wind gusted.When Jordan Spieth, ranked No. 17, yanked his five-or-so-foot birdie putt, however, the boos reached a crescendo. How to describe the crowd’s ardor? Imagine Eagles fans greeting Chip Kelly’s return. It was that venomous.The Phoenix Open sold out tickets for the tournament’s second and third rounds this year, a first.Autograph-seekers waited on the 16th tee box during the hole-in-one competition on Wednesday.The crowd skews younger than at any other PGA Tour event, in part because of the access to pros.Chants of “Go Chiefs” and “Fly Eagles Fly” were part of the tournament’s already-booming soundtrack as football fans were among those in the long lines of people waiting to secure seats in the Coliseum’s general-admission grandstand.The crowd was just as rough on the celebrities who competed in the Pro-Am on Wednesday. The Olympic great Michael Phelps, the retired Arizona Cardinals receiver Larry Fitzgerald and Carli Lloyd, a former soccer star of the United States Women’s National Team, were announced at the tee box with D.J. music, but they were razzed and roared at as they made their way to the green.The pro golfer’s bags in the “bag room.”Hideki Matsuyama dove to the ground to catch a scorecard that was blown out of his hand on the 12th green.Name another hole where it can rain suds and thunder beer cans as it did last year when Sam Ryder aced the 16th in the third-round to set off a delirious celebration that halted play for 15 minutes so volunteers could pick up the cans.Alas, aluminum cans inside the Coliseum were banned this week and replaced with plastic cups.Where else are gallery members enlisted to remove a boulder as they were in 1999 so Tiger Woods could get a clear shot at the green. It took a dozen of them, and the blessing of a rules official, but after a few heave-hos Woods got his birdie.Enclosed from tee to green by a grandstand that reaches three stories, an army of aggressive and clever beer vendors helped lubricate the crowd on Thursday.“I got a Coors with your name on it — What’s your name?” went one’s singsong mantra.Unlike the golfers they came to watch, patrons of the People’s Open do not even have to make it through all 18 holes. The Birds Nest, a party tent near the course’s entrance, starts throbbing in late afternoon as tournament goers get ready to dance into the night to performances by Machine Gun Kelly and the Chainsmokers.Yes, the Phoenix Open has its charms. Ask McIlroy.“If I wasn’t a player and I wanted to come to one PGA Tour event,” he said after shooting 2-over in his opening round, “this would probably be the one that I’d want to come to.”The 16th green from the top level of the grandstands. More

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    PGA Tour Payouts Soar as Saudi-Backed LIV Golf Rains Down Riches

    A $20 million purse is on the line in Arizona this week — matching, for about a month, a PGA Tour regular-season record.SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — After all these years — and given the ritualized rowdiness, it is impossible to say for certain — the money at the Phoenix Open might be flowing as freely as the drinks and the jeers around the 16th hole.A decade ago, PGA Tour players came to the desert to jockey for a share of $6.2 million in prize money. Last year, they competed for a cut of $8.2 million. This time around? The pool is $20 million.In a decidedly turbulent era of men’s golf, even the tournament that calls itself the People’s Open is a front in the sport’s transcontinental, multibillion-dollar arms race. Classified by the PGA Tour as a “designated event” for this year, the Phoenix Open is one of 10 tournaments on the circuit’s regular-season calendar that have promised purses of at least $15 million; all but one have offered $20 million or more.A central question for the PGA Tour is whether those payouts, and promises of more like them, will help create enough of a counterweight to the riches of LIV Golf, the circuit that has the financial backing of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and, after only a season of play, a track record of eye-popping contracts and guaranteed prize money.Asked in an interview at T.P.C. Scottsdale, the site of this week’s tournament, whether he believed the tour’s increased purses had helped curb an exodus of players to LIV, Commissioner Jay Monahan noted that many tour members were involved in designing the overhaul. Under the revamped system, the tour’s most elite and popular players are usually required to play the biggest events on the regular-season calendar, ensuring sterling fields and, presumably, far stiffer competition than a particular tournament might draw otherwise.“The players were so engaged and involved in the changes that we were making,” Monahan said. “Their involvement, their belief in this model and this model preparing them to achieve at the highest level, that’s what they’re committed to.”But he also raised his hands and shrugged because at a time when LIV golfers have earned far more at shorter tournaments with no cuts, he can have only so much certainty.Dustin Johnson, who recorded about $75 million in tour earnings over 15 PGA Tour seasons, collected more than $35 million at LIV competitions last year. At one event last year, Charl Schwartzel earned $4.75 million because of his individual and team results. Adjusted for inflation, that lone payday was still a seven-figure advantage over his best tour season.The winner in Arizona on Sunday will earn $3.6 million and tie a tour record that will be eclipsed four weeks later, when the Players Championship’s victor will collect $4.5 million. (As usual, the Tour Championship, which will be held at the end of the season in Atlanta, will award far more, but the money there is considered part of a bonus pool, not a standard tournament purse.)The tour’s pivot toward greater payouts, executives insisted, was in the making long before LIV overtly upended the golf marketplace, with the bigger purses traceable to a new television-rights deal announced in early 2020. They acknowledge, though, that LIV’s emergence prompted them to accelerate and adjust some of their plans, which are being helped along by tour reserves and increased payments from tournament sponsors.The tour, like all professional sports organizations, relies on a gumbo of moneymaking ventures, including television contracts, sponsorship deals and licensing arrangements, which are often becoming much more lucrative. But the tour’s most stalwart supporters, such as Tiger Woods, concede that it will struggle to keep pace with LIV Golf as long as wealth-fund leaders in Riyadh sustain their investment in the new circuit.“We’re running a business here, and the money that our players are playing for are monies that we’re generating,” Monahan said.“You have to operate prudently in the short- and long-term,” he added. “But there are ways to grow within each year, to create more opportunity, and that’s what we’re going to do.”The heightened purses, including one next week at the Genesis Invitational in California, are among the less-disputed strategies the tour has embraced in its quest to preserve its power. Others are entangled in an antitrust lawsuit that will not be tried until at least next year, but LIV has acknowledged that some of the tour’s tactics are having significant effects, even as it has questioned their propriety or legality.In a court filing on Monday, when LIV renewed its objections to the PGA Tour’s indefinite suspensions of players who defected, lawyers for the Saudi-backed league wrote that the tour’s “anticompetitive conduct” had “damaged LIV’s brand, driven up its costs by hundreds of millions of dollars and driven down revenues to virtually zero.”Jon Rahm, who won the PGA Tour’s first designated event last month in Hawaii, during the Phoenix Open Pro-Am on Wednesday.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesTour officials are expected to announce future plans for the high-roller events in the coming weeks, but a principal subject of internal debate has been whether the elevated status should rotate among tournaments. In addition to the tournament in Arizona, where the Thursday morning start was delayed because of frost (yes, really), this year’s designated events include the RBC Heritage at Hilton Head Island, S.C.; the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Conn.; and the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C.Tour officials, though, have made no public commitments that those events will keep their lofty status beyond 2023, and some players have suggested that they want to see an array of tournaments hosting the sport’s headliners.“What I do hope is that some other tournaments that want to put up the resources to become elevated events might get the chance,” Jon Rahm said this week, despite his standing as one of the Phoenix Open’s pre-eminent cheerleaders. “That would be epic. I would love to see this rotating, not always being the same ones every year.”Some players have also worried that tournaments regularly left out of any system, and potentially deprived of many tour stars, will struggle to draw the crowds and sponsorships that make them possible. And there is some anxiety that the PGA Tour is effectively becoming a tale of two circuits — one consistently loaded with A-list players and one routinely populated with everyone else — that periodically overlap.Players said they would approach the elevated tournaments like any other. Rahm, who won the first designated event last month in Hawaii and entered this week’s tournament at No. 3 in the Official World Golf Ranking, suggested “nothing” had changed in his preparations.“I want to perform well in every single tournament I go to,” he said, “no matter what it is.”It is, after all, becoming a much bigger business — especially during Super Bowl week in Arizona, where, as Patrick Cantlay put it, it is “a party for everyone except us.” More

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    On Second Thought, St. Andrews Steps Back From Remodel by Swilcan Bridge

    Want a patio-like surface by a bridge that’s perhaps more than 700 years old? St. Andrews did, but many others most definitely did not.St. Andrews Links — the stately sporting refuge in Scotland that has outlasted major champions, monarchs and well-to-do duffers — caved Monday and abandoned plans for a patio-like surface by the Swilcan Bridge.Few locales in golf invite quite so many pilgrimages as the stone bridge, which crosses a burn on the Old Course’s 18th hole and is the centerpiece of photographs that surface in Scottish pubs, man-caves all over suburban America and Tiger Woods’s office in Florida. So, perhaps it was predictable that even some well-intentioned remodeling of the area around it, worn down by the footwear of many thousands of players and visitors, would lead to fury, confusion and more than a few memes.Golf, you might have heard, is not always keen on change, and the resulting kerfuffle will amount to a brief, if breathtakingly effective, chapter in the very long history — like, maybe more than 700 years — of a 30-foot bridge. The whole spat, of course, could have been avoided had the bridge stuck to its long-ago mission of catering to livestock.But since that did not happen and because many people cannot mimic Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus or Woods on their scorecards, they merely congregate at the bridge, wave like a British Open champion, memorialize the moment for Facebook or Instagram and march on their way, leaving tattered turf behind.The idea that set off the scorn, course officials said over the weekend, was to replicate a past stone pathway and guard against repeated bouts of “disrepair” after a handful of other strategies, including artificial turf, proved insufficient. They added that they could “categorically state that no works have been undertaken to the bridge itself.”As if that would calm down, say, the denizens of Twitter. By Monday night, the Old Course was seeking another solution, new, old or at least not that one.“The stonework at the approach and exit of the bridge was identified as one possible long term solution,” the course’s administrators said in a statement that conceded that “while this installation would have provided some protection, in this instance we believe we are unable to create a look which is in keeping with its iconic setting and have taken the decision to remove it.”The statement noted “feedback from many partners and stakeholders as well as the golfing public,” which was a most proper way to characterize social media-fueled disdain and mockery.“What in the world were those idiots thinking building this?” Hank Haney, who once coached Woods, wrote on Twitter on Sunday. Nick Faldo, whose six major tournament titles included the 1990 Open at St. Andrews, was also aghast.“If you’ve travelled halfway around the world for your bucket list round at St Andrews, would you rather leave with a bit of historic dirt on your shoes or a few cement mix scraps?” he asked. Perhaps, he mused, the approach was a “strategically placed sundial (for slow play).”St. Andrews officials said Monday that turf would be restored “in the coming days.” Even though the internet never seems to forget, there is plenty of time for recovery between now and the next Open at St. Andrews. This year’s tournament will be at Royal Liverpool, the 2024 festivities will be at Royal Troon and 2025 will see the competition return to Royal Portrush.The R&A, which organizes the Open, has not announced its plans for other years. More

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    Power to Punish LIV Golfers Faces a Legal Test in Europe

    An arbitration panel will meet next week to weigh whether the European Tour may penalize the men who played on the Saudi-backed circuit.DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Many of the golfers had wandered away one afternoon last week, seeking lunch or refuge from the Emirati sun or something besides the monotony of a driving range.Ian Poulter, though, kept swinging, the consistency nearly enough to disguise that there is almost no professional golfer in greater limbo.Poulter, who has competed on the European Tour for more than two decades, is among the players who defiantly joined LIV Golf, the breakaway circuit bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and faced punishment from the tour. Next week, almost eight months after the first rebel tournament, arbitrators in London will weigh the tour’s choice to discipline defectors.The case is a test for the golf establishment’s response to LIV, which has guaranteed certain players tens of millions of dollars to compete in a league that insists it is looking to revive golf but that skeptics view as a front to rehabilitate Saudi Arabia’s reputation. Executives and legal experts say, though, that the arbitrators’ decision could also ripple more broadly across global sports as athletes increasingly resist longstanding restrictions on where they compete and as wealthy Persian Gulf states look to use the world’s courses, fields and racetracks as avenues for their political and public-relations ambitions.“The impacts of this case are potentially tremendous across all of international sport,” said Jeffrey G. Benz, a sports arbitrator in London who is not involved in the golf case and noted how other leagues and federations have faced opposition to their efforts to stymie potential rivals.Although the issue that next week’s panel will consider is formally a narrow one, dealing only with the European Tour’s conflicting event policy, a ruling in favor of the players could embolden like-minded but wary athletes to plunge into the universe of cash-flush start-ups. A victory for the tour, marketed as the DP World Tour, would reinforce the kind of rules that marquee sports organizers have harnessed for decades to preserve market power. And whichever side prevails will assuredly tout victory as vindication for its approach to professional sports.“There’s the public opinion part, there’s the influence it might have on other athletes, there’s the influence it might have on other rich people who might think, ‘Hey, I’d really love to get into sports. Let’s put a group together and go attack name-the-sport,’” said Jill Pilgrim, a former general counsel for the L.P.G.A. who now teaches sports arbitration at Columbia Law School.“They’re watching all of this,” she added.Poulter has argued that playing with the new circuit was not all that different from the rest of a storied career dotted with appearances across tours.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressThe golf case began last June, when Poulter was among the European Tour players who played in a LIV Golf tournament without the tour’s permission. The tour, wary of undermining the rules that fortify its sponsorship and television-rights deals, responded with short suspensions and fines, modest penalties compared to the indefinite suspensions that the United States-based PGA Tour meted out.The players insist, though, that they are independent contractors and should have greater freedom to pick when, where and for whom they compete. An arbitrator paused the tour’s punishments last summer but did not rule on the substantive arguments that will go before this month’s panel. The arbitrators could announce their decision within weeks of the five-day, closed-door hearing, which will begin Monday.A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 7A new series. More

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    Golf Course or Housing? A Patch of Green Divides Hong Kong

    The dispute over one of the city’s golf clubs exposes rare political friction for the elite in the new Hong Kong, where the establishment is torn between defending wealth and following Beijing’s wishes.On an autumn afternoon at the Hong Kong Golf Club, hundreds of dogs — pugs, Pomeranians, Shiba Inus — strolled the verdant grounds with their owners in tow, enjoying rare access to the range that charges new members a $2 million entry fee.But these impeccable greens, in the northern reaches of Hong Kong, have become an unlikely battleground.The Hong Kong Golf Club has been fighting a government proposal to carve out less than one-fifth of its 172 acres of land and redevelop it for public housing. The open day for dogs was an effort by the club to rally public support to the club members’ cause in a city known for its soaring inequality and acute shortage of affordable homes.Hong Kong’s government has come under pressure from Beijing to reduce the wealth gap in line with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s promises of “common prosperity.” But the land dispute puts on picturesque display the tensions between Hong Kong’s attempts to redistribute wealth and the interests of the elite who the government has long relied upon for support. The city’s business leaders may be aligned with China’s Communist Party rulers, but many are also stubbornly protective of Hong Kong’s capitalist wealth.The club has mobilized members to speak out about the public housing plan. Prominent figures in the city’s pro-Beijing political establishment have also criticized the proposal.“I hope nobody calls the golf club rich and powerful or pins that label on it. Because it is a sport facility after all,” said Regina Ip, a senior adviser to the Hong Kong government and a golf club member herself.A golfer at the course in 2018.Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York TimesBy contrast, Hong Kong newspapers closely aligned with Beijing — eager to push the territory even closer ideologically to China’s Communist Party — have criticized the club, accusing it of ignoring the needs of working people.“If the golf course development plan is thwarted, the public impression of ‘business colluding with government officials’ will only get worse,” one of the newspapers, Ta Kung Pao, said in an editorial after an environmental review in August effectively delayed the housing plan.It’s not just avid golfers who are stirring opposition to the land swap. Some members of Hong Kong’s business elite see the city government’s plans to claim 32 acres of club land as dangerous government meddling in the economy.More on ChinaCrackdown on Protesters: The protests against China’s restrictive “zero Covid” policy were a rare rebuke of Xi Jinping’s rule. Now, Beijing seems intent on deterring those who might have been emboldened by them.A Harsh Winter: For many people across China, a shortage of natural gas and alarmingly cold temperatures are making a difficult season unbearable.Real Estate: With China’s real estate boom coming to a sudden halt, many Chinese homebuyers have been left with dashed dreams, empty bank accounts and unfinished homes.Solomon Islands: For years, Beijing has thrown its wealth and weight across the globe. But its mixed results in this South Pacific nation calls into question its approach to expanding its power.“A feature of capitalism is a gap between rich and poor,” said Shih Wing Ching, the owner of Centaline property, the biggest property agency in Hong Kong, who has taken up the golf club’s cause, though he does not play himself. “If you try to erase the feature, say by taking away golf, then it’s not capitalism, it’s socialism.”As a youth, Mr. Shih, 73, was a zealous leftist student who took part in the 1967 labor protests that turned into anti-government riots and were inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which sought to trample traditional privilege. The chaos and trauma of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China eventually turned Mr. Shih against communism, and he later found success selling real estate.“Deng Xiaoping once said that the horses would keep on racing and the dancers would keep on dancing,” Mr. Shih said, citing a comment the Chinese leader made ahead of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 to suggest Hong Kong would not lose its capitalist verve. “If the horses still race and dancers still dance, then I’d add that the golfers should keep on swinging.”Both sides in the fight recognize that the small section of the golf club that might be claimed by the government would make barely a dent Hong Kong’s housing crisis.For more than 10 years, Hong Kong has been recognized by some yardsticks as having the world’s most unaffordable housing market, particularly when comparing median household income to median housing costs.Even Mr. Xi, China’s leader, has weighed in on Hong Kong’s housing woes.“Currently, the biggest aspiration of Hong Kong people is to lead a better life, in which they will have more decent housing,” Mr. Xi said on the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China in July. He urged the government to carry out reforms and “break the barriers of vested interests.”China’s leader, Xi Jinping, giving a speech in Hong Kong in 2022 to inaugurate the city’s new leader, John Lee. Mr. Xi has focused attention on the city’s housing shortage.Pool photo by Selim ChtaytiSome pro-establishment politicians have argued that by targeting the golf club, the government is sowing greater hostility between rich and the poor.Lau Chi-pang, a legislator on the influential elections committee, was criticized by Chinese state media for appearing in the golf club’s YouTube video stream praising the club. Mr. Lau, a history professor who was commissioned by the club to write a book about it, said it had “rich cultural value.”“If public housing is built on the golf course, it will become a political monument,” he said, adding that if housing advocates win the battle they will “then aim at other private clubs.”The dispute over the course began in 2018, when Hong Kong’s government solicited public input on where to acquire land for public housing, and a few pro-democracy legislators raised the idea of taking back land from the golf club. The land is owned by the government, which has leased it to the club since 1911.Polls showed that 60 percent of the public supported the plan. But with the business sector strongly opposing the proposal, the government decided to develop only 32 out of the club’s 172 acres.Golf carts at the Hong Kong Golf Club. The club’s members have rallied against the city’s plans to use part of the course’s property for new housing.Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York TimesMr. Lau argued that there is other land available for development, especially along the northern area bordering Shenzhen in mainland China, which is more important to Beijing than a few buildings on a golf course.Late last year, the city received over 6,000 letters from golf club members and others opposing the plan. Their arguments ranged from one-sentence declarations — “I want to play golf!” — to a 500-page long petition listing the golf course’s historic value and the significance of the Hong Kong Open, a prominent international tournament long held at the club.The dispute has become tied up with the combustible mix of Hong Kong’s crackdown, as opponents of the land swap — even those aligned with Beijing — test the limits of free expression. Some pro-Beijing district councilors have objected to the housing plan, warning of traffic jams and a lack of infrastructure to support the influx of new residents. One councilor even openly declared in a meeting that opponents of the plan would “rise and attack” should it go forward, a bold statement in Hong Kong with a national security law curtailing political dissent.Further complicating matters is that several former legislators who proposed using the golf course land for housing have either been arrested on national security charges or gone into self-imposed exile. Grassroots organizations pushing for more public housing have voiced increasing frustration over the delays.“If the government walks back from the decision, there will be little authority in the future,” said Man Yu-ming, the chairman of the pro-establishment Federation of Public Housing Estates. “We’re not giving up any land we deserve!”John Lee, the city’s top leader, who was appointed in July, recently said he respected the housing plan, which was conceived of during his predecessor’s administration.The delays are a sharp contrast to how Hong Kong’s neighbor across the border in mainland China, Shenzhen, has handled its land shortage. That city, an economic hub of more than 17 million people, tapped several golf courses for urban development in recent years. Some deem the Shenzhen government decisive and resolute. Others don’t.“A debate about this reflects the healthy society of Hong Kong,” said Ronny Tong, an adviser to the government. “Ultimately, it’s an issue of two competing values.”Mr. Tong, a golf club member, has argued that golf courses attract professionals and investors to Hong Kong.“I play golf all the time,” Mr. Tong said. “It’s not a sin.” More

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    Trump Courses Will Host LIV Golf Tournaments in 2023

    As the league announced more details of a 14-stop second season, former President Donald J. Trump’s courses remained central to the schedule, deepening his ties to Riyadh.Former President Donald J. Trump’s golf courses will host three tournaments this year for the breakaway league that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is underwriting, deepening the financial ties between a candidate for the White House and top officials in Riyadh.LIV Golf, which in the past year has cast men’s professional golf into turmoil as it lured players away from the PGA Tour, said on Monday that it would travel to Trump courses in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia during this year’s 14-stop season. Neither the league nor the Trump Organization announced the terms of their arrangement, but the schedule shows the Saudi-backed start-up will remain allied with, and beneficial to, one of its foremost defenders and political patrons as he seeks a return to power.Part of LIV’s scheduling approach, executives say, hinges on the relative scarcity of elite courses that can challenge players such as Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith — and the abundance of them in a Trump portfolio that is more accessible than many others to the new circuit. In a court filing last week, LIV Golf complained anew that the PGA Tour had warned “golfers, other tours, vendors, broadcasters, sponsors and virtually any other third parties” against doing business with the rebel league.But Trump, whose courses hosted two LIV Golf events in 2022, has expressed no public misgivings about his company’s ties to the league, which has drawn attention to Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses and prompted accusations that the country was turning to sports to repair its reputation. A confidential McKinsey & Company analysis presented to Saudi officials in 2021 suggested there were significant obstacles to success and underscored the limited financial potential for one of the world’s largest wealth funds.Long before Monday’s announcement, the Trump family was closely entangled with the wealth fund, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman oversees and the PGA Tour is now trying to draw directly into its legal fight against LIV.A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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    Anthony Kim Was Compared to Tiger Woods. So Why Did He Walk Away From Golf?

    A young man is walking briskly across a stretch of mowed grass, on his way to someplace entirely new. Hundreds of people are clapping as he passes. They are hollering his name. The young man lowers his head, tugs off his white cap and holds it in the air. A smile flickers across his face, then disappears.This is Anthony Kim. It is 2008, and he is 22 years old and one shot away from earning his first win in a first professional golf tournament. When he reaches the 18th green, he pauses, not only to line up his final putt, but also, he later reveals, to let a simple fact swirl into his consciousness: My life is about to change. Kim taps the ball, and it clunks into the cup. He punches the air twice, screams “Yes!” twice. He takes a bow.He is $1.2 million richer.“That walk up 18 was the best feeling in my entire life,” he says later that day.“I want to recreate that as many times as possible now.”The feeling would prove fleeting. Four years after that first win, after more rousing victories that established him as one of golf’s biggest stars, Kim took a sudden leave from the game. Injuries were hampering his play, and he needed time to heal. But beyond his physical troubles, some invisible, unknowable forces must have been churning inside him.Because he never came back.‘Golf’s Yeti’A full decade after Kim stopped playing professional golf, people are still fascinated by him, still asking where he is, still curious if he might ever return.They wonder, in part, because of his talent. His power, his touch, his moxie — they were a recipe for sustained greatness. More than that, though, they wonder because he never bothered to explain himself. In a world of interminable retirement tours and heart-tugging valedictory speeches, Kim walked away in 2012 without saying goodbye and has made almost no public appearances or utterances since.Kim was supposed to be the next Tiger Woods. Instead he became the sports world’s J.D. Salinger. Sports Illustrated called him “golf’s yeti.” Pictures and stories hinting at his whereabouts regularly go viral on social media. Last summer, when the new LIV Golf circuit began recruiting players with huge, guaranteed sums of money, many people’s minds went to the same place: Could Kim, still just 37, be coaxed back to the game?Anthony Kim celebrated his victory at the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte, N.C., in 2008. It was his first professional win.Chuck Burton/Associated PressSports careers are rare and valuable. They are hard won, involving years of tedious and often lonely practice. And they are fragile, susceptible to the ravages of age and injury. Most athletes, for these reasons, tend to treasure them.Kim’s total retreat, then, stirs all kinds of questions about sports and celebrity: What duty does a person have to his God-given talent? What does that person owe to his fans? And in the age of TMZ and T.M.I., what does it mean, really, to disappear?‘He Was Transcendent’Kim was born and raised in Los Angeles, the only son of South Korean immigrants. Though his golf swing would come to appear effortless, his skills were intensely honed during his childhood years by his father, Paul, and a string of coaches. By the time Kim reached college, he could make a golf ball do whatever he wanted.“His talent was beyond anything I had ever seen before,” said Rocky Hambric, an agent who signed Kim after his three years at the University of Oklahoma. “And I know it’s sacrilege, but that includes Tiger Woods.”Two months after that first PGA Tour win came a second. It was only his second year on the tour, but he was operating with the prowess of a veteran. He finished the 2008 season with eight top-10 finishes, $4.7 million in winnings and a tornado of hype.That Kim emerged just as Woods was navigating the first real turbulence of his career — in the form of injuries and marital turmoil — heightened speculation about whether he could be the game’s next superstar.And the highlights, for a little while, kept coming. On the second day of the 2009 Masters Tournament, in a stirring display of his daredevil approach to the game, Kim fired off 11 birdies, setting a tournament record that still stands.In a traditionally staid sport, Kim often felt like a gate-crasher, providing surprising bursts of flair and color.He demolished two-dimensional stereotypes about both golfers and Asian Americans. He wore garish belt buckles bearing his initials. He talked trash — and backed it up. He had an admitted love of partying. He was gregarious with fans and generous with his time and money. He signed a multimillion dollar endorsement deal with Nike. He spoke often about wanting his own reality show.“He was transcendent and attracted interest from all segments of sport, music and entertainment, which was especially rare for golf at the time,” Chris Armstrong, another former agent, said in a text message.Kim was known on tour for flashy clothing and a love of nightlife.Streeter Lecka/Getty ImagesHe appeared with the actress Jessica Alba on “The Jay Leno Show” in 2010.Justin Lubin/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesIn a span of a few weeks in 2010, he appeared on “The Jay Leno Show,” where he gave the actress Jessica Alba a putting lesson, and played in the celebrity game at the N.B.A.’s All-Star weekend, where he was matched up against the comedian Chris Tucker.“I’d rather have 50 people love me and 50 people hate me,” Kim said in an interview with ESPN in his rookie season, “than have 100 people who don’t even know who I am.”At some point during this ascent, Kim took out an insurance policy on his body. When injuries forced him to step away from the game, he began receiving monthly checks that reportedly would cease if he returned to competition. The payout, according to a Sports Illustrated article from 2014 that cited anonymous sources close to Kim, landed somewhere between $10 million and $20 million and was the primary reason, they said, for his prolonged absence.Yet there has remained something unsatisfying about that line of reasoning. Few other golfers relished the simple act of competing as much as he so plainly did.Near the end of the 2008 season, in a performance that cemented his status as golf’s most exciting young player, Kim trounced Sergio Garcia, the Spanish star, in the opening singles match of the Ryder Cup, a prestigious team competition. Kim swaggered around the course all day, feeding off the energy of the clamorous crowd.“I wouldn’t trade this for $10 million,” Kim said that day.At the Range With Tommy ChongKim last spoke publicly about his golf career in 2015, three years after he left the game.In an interview with an Associated Press reporter, he confirmed that he was receiving insurance payments, but he denied that the money was the reason he was not returning to competition. He also shot down more fanciful rumors, including one that he was homeless.He said he needed time to rehabilitate an assortment of injuries, including to his ankle and back. He was hiring a new trainer. In all, he sounded optimistic, saying he was happy with his progress. “My goal right now for the next year is to get healthy,” he said.Communicating through friends, Kim declined to be interviewed for this article.Those who know him say he splits time between Texas, California and Oklahoma. He became a father in 2021 and got married last summer. He has broad investments, including in real estate. He and his wife own The Collective, a popular food hall in Oklahoma City.To answer a question on everyone’s mind: Kim plays golf, but only sporadically. Adam Schriber, who has been Kim’s swing coach since he was a teenager, said in an interview that he played twice with Kim in the past two years.“It’s the same swing you remember,” Schriber said.Kim during the second round of the 2010 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga.Harry How/Getty ImagesEric Larson, Kim’s caddie from 2008 to 2009, fondly recalls splitting a couple buckets of balls some years ago at a public driving range in Los Angeles with Kim and Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, whom Larson befriended during their overlapping stints in federal prison.In an interview, Larson said that he had asked Kim on the phone recently about whether he would participate in the LIV Golf tour. Kim demurred.“He goes, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ ” Larson said. “I said, ‘Come on, man, get the old clubs out. Go out there and have some fun.’ And he starts laughing at me. He goes, ‘That’s what everybody wants me to do!’”Anthony Kim SightingsThere is a point where talent, at its most rarefied levels, starts to feel collectively owned. The dynamic is pronounced in the sports world, where people use the first-person plural form to refer to their favorite teams, where athletes return the favor by winning championships for the city and dedicating awards to the fans.This can explain why, for sports fans, there is something so disconcerting about watching a star player walk away at a young age. When talent feels like a winning lottery ticket, squandering it can be processed almost as a betrayal.Consider Bjorn Borg, who was one of the top tennis players in the world in 1983 when he retired, seemingly out of the blue, at 26. The decision bewildered his fans, but Borg’s justifications hinted at an often unseen tension: that success in sports can close as many doors as it opens.“Basically, over the years, I was practicing, playing my matches, eating and sleeping,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “But there’s other things besides those four things.”Borg explained his decision. What Kim has done — to walk away and become entirely inaccessible to an adoring public — feels different and extraordinary, particularly at a time when name recognition has never held more value.He is hardly in hiding — today it seems a person can be deemed a recluse or misanthrope for merely declining to maintain a social media account — but still, any evidence of him engaging with society in even the most banal way tends to inspire wonderment.In 2019, Ben Bujnowski, 48, a technology sales consultant from Great Falls, Va., was on vacation with his family when he spotted Kim outside a Los Angeles restaurant. A longtime golf fan, Bujnowski could not resist circling back to say hello, and Kim gladly obliged his request for a picture.Bujnowski posted the photo to Instagram — “AK sighting in the wild,” he wrote — where it was soon picked up and circulated by the golf news media. The comments section of the original post became a message board of sorts for strangers to post their own sightings of Kim.In this way, each public photograph of Kim inspires its own little news cycle: Kim crouched in a group photo in somebody’s backyard; an inadvertent shot of the back of his head at a bar; an unintentionally cryptic Instagram post from Schriber. In 2018, No Laying Up, a golf media company, posted a brief video of Kim, surrounded by at least six dogs, expressing support for Phil Mickelson before his exhibition match against Woods (“Need to see him holding today’s paper,” somebody tweeted in reply).“It almost feels like his life story in golf hasn’t been completed yet,” said Bujnowski, who sometimes gets recognized on the street by golf fans. “People want to know what happened.”A Carefree SummerThe sports world craves neatly legible narratives. But Kim’s path offers a reminder of how frequently the industry’s most common tropes — the underdog stories and redemption arcs, the last shots and legacies and love of the game — fall short of capturing the complexities of the people who inhabit it.Fans may want their heroes to stay in their assigned roles, but there are gifted people everywhere turned off by the relentless pursuit of external validation. And failure, in the eyes of others, may represent freedom for the individual.Kim hinted at a possible worldview in a 2009 interview with Golf Digest, when he responded to question about his apparent fearlessness on the course by deflating its very premise.“It’s just golf,” he said.Photo illustration by Mike McQuade; photograph by Hunter Martin/Getty ImagesSome close to Kim can recall moments that seemed to foretell his eventual ambivalence toward his golf career.Larson, Kim’s former caddie, thinks back to the week after the 2008 Ryder Cup. Kim led the field by two strokes after two rounds at the Tour Championship. But that Saturday, in the third round, his momentum spiraled. He hit only four fairways. One of his tee shots struck a fan, sending him to the hospital with a head wound. Kim slumped to a tie for third place.Larson was sure that Kim imploded because he had, somewhat inexplicably, gone out late that Friday night.“I don’t know what he thought, but you don’t just go out and party all night Friday night when you’re leading the Tour Championship.” Larson said. “That would have been his third win that year, but we ended up losing that tournament by a shot, and he was out Friday night, late, and I’m just like, ‘What are we doing?’”Schriber, the swing coach, recounted another moment that, in retrospect, felt loaded with meaning. It was 2010, the night after what turned out to be Kim’s final PGA Tour win, at the Houston Open. Schriber and the rest of Kim’s team were on a private jet to Georgia happily passing around a bottle of tequila, but Kim seemed withdrawn.“We were just getting pummeled celebrating — because winning’s hard — but he didn’t even drink after the win,” Schriber said. “He said, ‘Schribes, I don’t feel anything, I don’t feel the joy.’”A week later, Kim finished third at the Masters.Schriber is reluctant to speculate too much on his friend’s mind-set, but, in his view, Kim’s childhood and the continually rocky relationship he had with his father had a deeper and more lasting effect on Kim than most realized.The story of how Paul Kim tossed one of his son’s second-place trophies in the trash is part of Anthony’s lore. Later, when Kim was in college, he and his father had a fight that resulted in a two-year stretch of silence between them. After Kim turned professional, his father publicly acknowledged that he was too hard on his son, that he was too cold, that when other parents asked him how to mold their children into top athletes, he advised them against it.Schriber doubted that golf, even during Kim’s loftiest moments, was the respite the young man needed it to be.“I think it was the feeling of, ‘It’s not taking the pain away like I hoped it would,’” Schriber said.Schriber was also there when, in his eyes, Kim got an early glimpse of an alternate path.It was 2006, the summer after Kim left college. He was staying at Schriber’s house in Traverse City, Mich., laying the foundation of a golf career, practicing every morning and sleeping on a couch in the living room at night. In the afternoons, stuck in a sleepy town with few other options, he hung out with Schriber’s children, kayaking, fishing, hiking and doing all manner of other activities that he, as a child golf prodigy, had rarely had time to enjoy.That September, Kim played in the Valero Texas Open, his first PGA Tour event. He tied for second, won nearly $300,000 and soon after moved into an upmarket condo in Dallas. But he never forgot those lazy days in Michigan, when nobody knew who he was and life felt pleasantly small.“Best summer of my life,” Kim said often, according to Schriber.Susan C. Beachy More