Golf

DeChambeau aims to conquer genteel Augusta National with brute force. Given his play since bulking up over the past year, lots of golfers — and bettors — think he can. More

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Sei Young Kim shot a sensational seven-under 63 on Sunday to earn her first major title at the Women’s P.G.A. Championship.Kim, a 27-year-old South Korean, finished at 14-under 266 at Aronimink Golf Course. She entered the tournament with 10 L.P.G.A. Tour wins, the most among active players without a major championship.Her 63 was the best round of the tournament. She finished five shots ahead of the runner-up, Inbee Park, who shot 65 on Sunday.“Sei Young was just really untouchable,” Park said.Kim, a 2016 Olympian, was runner-up at the 2015 Women’s P.G.A. Championship and tied for second at the Evian Championship in 2018. She held the 54-hole lead at a major once, at the 2015 ANA Inspiration, where she finished in a tie for fourth.She sealed the championship on Sunday with a round to remember. Her fifth birdie of the day, at the par-3 14th, gave her a four-shot lead over Park and put her at 12 under for the championship.“I’m actually really hiding my tears at the moment,” Kim said, standing next to the trophy after the final round.She earned $645,000 for the victory. Kim has at least one win in every L.P.G.A. Tour season since 2015.“It was just so hard to believe that she never won a major before because it felt like she won a few,” Park said.Nasa Hataoka and Carlota Ciganda tied for third at seven under. Anna Nordqvist (four under) and Brooke Henderson (three under) both played in Kim’s group and finished fifth and sixth.Kim is the latest addition to a growing list of first-time major winners in recent years, a sign of growing parity. Her victory means nine of the last 10 major champions had never won one before. She joins Sophia Popov (Women’s British Open) and Mirim Lee (ANA Inspiration) as this year’s major champions.Kim dazzled at another event without the roar of the galleries — though the Toronto Raptors star Kyle Lowry walked the course — and held off a hard-charging Park. Park had three birdies on the front nine as she tried to match Mickey Wright with a record fourth win at the Women’s P.G.A. Championship.“I thought 65 will definitely do it,” Park said. “I was thinking maybe like five to six under is a good number to kind of post and just see what happens. But obviously Sei Young was just much better than anyone else out there today.”As she approached 18, the trophy sitting out near the hole for her to see, pretty much everyone at Aronimink lined the ropes. She got a big ovation after her tap-in sealed the win.With Paul Fusco on the bag, Kim matched a tournament record with a 29 on the front nine on Friday and shot a 32 for the front nine on Sunday. Fusco kept it loose, even walking over to compliment a reporter for an article (“really cool”) before Kim teed off on No. 8.Kim hit the putt of her life in November at Tiburón Golf Club, a 25-foot birdie on the final hole of the CME Group Tour Championship to win $1.5 million, the richest prize in the history of women’s golf.The money is far less at Aronimink — but the prestige means so much more.“I won’t lie, I did feel the pressure starting last night,” Kim said. “I actually arrived about 30 minutes later than I normally do at the golf course. I really tried to stay composed during the tournament, during the round, and I’m happy that I got it done.”The tournament was delayed three months because of the coronavirus pandemic, landing its final round smack on a packed sports Sunday. The PGA of America had to get creative with the tee times with NBC having other programming commitments on the weekend, and the leaders — including Kim — teed off at 8:49 a.m.Founded in 1896, Aronimink has hosted a number of significant golf events in its storied history, including the 1962 P.G.A. Championship won by Gary Player. Aronimink’s golf course was designed by Donald Ross in 1926 and is off the major schedule until the PGA Championship in 2026. More

Sophia Popov was ranked No. 304 when she won the Women’s British Open in August. Her world has changed mightily as she readies for the P.G.A. Championship. More

The pandemic is forcing players to reduce travel, so this BMW P.G.A. Championship near London has become homegrown. More

Many of the greats have played at the Wentworth Club, which began life as a grand English estate steeped in the past. More

The English golfer is now ranked No. 20 and has set his sights much higher. More

DeChambeau, who bulked up and went all in to prove a power game could flout golf’s norms, shot the only under-par round on Sunday to win the 2020 U.S. Open. More

For almost 100 years, the hallmark of the United States Open has been the qualifying procedure. It’s integral to the very nature of the Open, as the tournament is open to all comers — provided they have an official handicap index of 1.4 or better.Usually the Open field is composed of 156 players, with half of them qualifying via prior performance and the other half through a series of grueling qualifying rounds. The Open is played on some of the finest courses in the land, under the most rigorous conditions imaginable, but the need to first qualify through superlative play is paramount.It is this requirement of having to earn one’s way into the championship that clearly sets the Open apart as the most democratic of all of golf’s tournaments.Typically, there are 9,000 to 10,000 applicants for local qualifying at about 115 sites across the country, with successful qualifiers moving on to 10 regional qualifying sites in the United States. There are also additional international qualifying rounds, with regionals in Canada, England and Japan. Most years, about 78 players are fully exempt into the championship and qualify through a variety of categories — winners of the major tournaments over the past several years, winners of other U.S.G.A. events in the past year, high finishers on various money lists and the like.Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S.G.A. canceled all qualifying and replaced it by deliberately selecting players picked from several golf performance lists for approximately half the field with the other half coming from the fully exempt categories as usual. Because of the change of dates for the tournament — to mid-September from mid-June — the field was reduced to 144 players, a result of the fewer hours of available sunlight in the fall than in the summer that is critical to completing the first two rounds with a much larger field.The goal was to mirror — as closely as possible — the average composition of the various player categories over the past few years and fit play into the available light. John Bodenhamer, the U.S.G.A.’s senior managing director, in charge of the Open, acknowledged that the goal was to mirror the average composition of the past few years. “This has been a very challenging year, and to go without qualifying is deeply disappointing to us,” he said.However, the U.S.G.A.’s category selections were somewhat arbitrary — for example, this year’s inclusion of players off the Official World Golf Ranking list was increased to 70 from 60; 13 amateurs, always a fixture in the Open, were included, down from the 18 who played their way into the 2018 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y.Without the qualifying rounds, there won’t be any wonderful, compelling stories about the young assistant pro at a small club who overcomes all odds to qualify or the heartwarming tale of the senior amateur who first played in the Open 25 years before and finally made it back. The U.S.G.A. takes great joy in publicizing those individuals.Also missing will be the ultimate Cinderella stories — the players who had to go through the qualifying rounds and went on to win the U.S. Open — Ken Venturi in 1964, Orville Moody in 1969, Steve Jones in 1996, Michael Campbell in 2005 and Lucas Glover in 2009.Because of the elimination of local and sectional qualifying, this year’s Open is tantamount to an invitational tournament. But the winner’s name will appear on the U.S. Open trophy right there with the greats of the game. His scores will go in the official U.S.G.A. record book and he’ll also receive the same gold medal as those legendary players.As a counterpoint, consider the case of the 1942 Open. It was called the Hale America Open, but it came to be known as the Wartime U.S. Open. It was conducted by the U.S.G.A., with an assist from the Chicago District Golf Association and the PGA of America, and was played at Ridgemoor Country Club in Chicago on the traditional mid-June dates for the U.S. Open.Most significantly, it featured local and sectional qualifying conducted by the U.S.G.A.Virtually all of the top players were there; players who had already won a major or would go on to win one. Bobby Jones even came out of retirement to play.Without a doubt, it had all of the trappings of the U.S. Open.Ben Hogan won by three strokes over Mike Turnesa and Jimmy Demaret, and by four over Byron Nelson, shooting 17-under-par 271 for the tournament. Hogan’s Open appeared for many years in the official record book. And the gold medal that Hogan was presented with by the president of the U.S.G.A., George Blossom, was visually identical to the other four he would go on to win. There was one very slight exception — the background of a small field of stars on the face of the medal, about half the size of a pinkie fingernail, is not painted blue as it is normally in the ones that winners get for winning the Open.The threshold question then is, if this year’s U.S. Open, without local and sectional qualifying — the bedrock principle underpinning the U.S. Open — is considered official, shouldn’t Hogan’s name be added to the iconic trophy and his records put back in the official record book as well?Hogan always believed he won five U.S. Opens, though U.S.G.A. removed the 1942 victory from their record book and did not engrave his name on the trophy. Restoring his fifth title would also change another bit of Open history: Hogan’s 62 in the second round would also count as the lowest score in the tournament’s history. More