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    The Masters: Bernhard Langer Returns to Say Goodbye

    A pickleball injury sidelined him last year, but he is returning to a course he loves.Bernhard Langer, barring a miracle, won’t win the Masters Tournament this year, which gets underway on Thursday.Langer, 67, who was born in Germany and now lives in the United States, hasn’t made the cut at Augusta National Golf Club since 2020.But he’ll receive his share of attention as he plays for the last time on the course that has meant so much to him. Langer, who made his first appearance in 1982, won the tournament in 1985 and 1993. He planned to say farewell last year but couldn’t participate after tearing his Achilles’ tendon playing pickleball.Langer, who has won a record 47 tournaments on PGA Tour Champions, spoke recently about his affection for the Masters. The following conversation has been edited and condensed.Are you playing any pickleball these days?No. I haven’t played since my injury, and I was told not to but maybe when I’m retired I’ll try it again. I don’t know yet. I’ll see how my leg feels.What would be a successful week for your last time at Augusta?From a professional standpoint, if I could make the cut, that would be unbelievable, but it’s very unlikely. I’ve gotten shorter [with his drives off the tee], and the injury didn’t help. This golf course, it’s meant to be hit with short to medium irons into the greens, and I’m coming in with 3-irons and 3-woods [clubs that hit the ball much farther]. It’s extremely difficult to hit these small targets, and I can’t do that with long clubs.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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    The Masters Helped Turn Ely Callaway Into a Golf Club Maker

    He invented the Big Bertha driver, which changed the game of golf. Bobby Jones, a creator of the tournament, was a Callaway cousin.Ely Callaway, founder of the namesake golf club company, did something few golf enthusiasts could imagine doing. He declined an invitation from Bobby Jones to join the Augusta National Golf Club in 1957.Jones, a revered amateur golfer who won the Grand Slam in 1930 and was a co-founder of Augusta National with Clifford Roberts, was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero. Over the family’s mantel, long before the Masters achieved the major status it has today, hung a lithograph of Jones winning the Amateur Championship, also known as the British Amateur, and completing the Grand Slam. Across it was a personal handwritten inscription from Jones to Callaway and his first wife, Jeanne.Bobby Jones teeing off at St. Andrews in Scotland in 1928. Jones was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero.Getty ImagesNicholas Callaway said his father had practical reasons to turn down Jones.“Ely’s rationale later in life when he became the Callaway of Callaway Golf was that since Augusta was only open for a portion of the year, most of the year he would spend fielding calls from friends angling to get an invitation to play,” he said. His father’s posthumous memoir, “The Unconquerable Game: My Life in Golf & Business,” is being released this month.It worked out fine for him. “In the 1990s, he attended the Masters for many years and would get invited to play often in the days following the tournament,” his son said.The decision had to have been difficult. Something that comes across in Callaway’s memoir was the impact Jones had on him.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 Masters, Champions Past, Present and Future

    Seventy-five years ago this past week, Sam Snead won the Masters Tournament and became the first champion to receive one of Augusta National Golf Club’s green jackets.Until he died in 2002, the jacket was his to wear every time he returned to Augusta. These days, it is a sartorial symbol of how, beyond a freighted history and marvelous azaleas and golf’s geopolitical machinations and gallery roars that ripple from Amen Corner to the clubhouse, Augusta National is more enchanted by champions than most places.Since the start of the month, Lottie Woad has captured the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Eight children were named champions of a junior golf competition after playing at Augusta. More than 30 past Masters winners gathered for dinner to honor Jon Rahm, last year’s champion, and Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson hit tee shots to start this year’s tournament. Many of their brethren played afterward, because they are allowed to for life. On Sunday, someone — perhaps someone new, perhaps someone already admitted to the locker room reserved for past champions — will win the 88th Masters.There may be no place in men’s golf where hope, dazzle and ambition are as abundant as Augusta.But this past week, all of the possibilities seemed to be on greater display than usual. There was the solar eclipse on Monday, when fans peered skyward, just as Ben Crenshaw and Nick Faldo did here, too. Later on, Tiger Woods, 48 years old and two years removed from the last time he finished a major tournament, made his record 24th consecutive Masters cut. But he faded on Saturday. Higher up the leaderboard during the third round, players like Ludvig Aberg, Nicolai Hojgaard, Max Homa and Xander Schauffele hunted for their debut major title, while Bryson DeChambeau, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Smith looked to build on the magic that had made them champions elsewhere not all that long ago. Scottie Scheffler occasionally stumbled but was still at once contending for another Masters victory and wondering if he could lock it down before the birth of his first child.Golf enthusiasts often regard a trip to the Masters as the stuff of dreams. It certainly is for players. The Masters represents a shot at becoming one of those champions written into history, with the green jackets and the possibility of forever enchanting Augusta.Spectators cast their eyes skyward to witness Monday’s solar eclipse.Winners of the Chip and Putt competition.Honorary starter names are placed at the first tee.Scottie Scheffler, left, hits out of the bunker as Stewart Hagestad, right, hits out off the bunker on the 12th hole during a practice round.Tiger Woods looks at his tee shot on the third hole.Bryson DeChambeau, center, carries a Masters sign along the 13th fairway.Luke List watches his shot on the seventh hole.Danny Willett reacts after making a birdie.Collin Morikawa stretches as he walks along the 15th fairway. More

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    The Masters: How to Get an Invitation

    There’s a long list of possible ways, like being a past winner, but the creation of LIV Golf has complicated the process.Despite a missed putt on the 18th hole at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, Stephan Jaeger still punched his ticket to Augusta National Golf Club, where he will be playing in his first Masters Tournament this week.There are many ways to get an invitation to the Masters, and Jaeger, 34, found one of them.But first, he missed a putt that would have clinched a victory over the former Masters champion Scottie Scheffler. Then Scheffler missed a shorter putt that would have forced a playoff with Jaeger.In the end what mattered was that Jaeger won the tournament, not how he did it, and in doing so he earned an invitation to the Masters.“I couldn’t have thought, dreamed up a better week to do it,” he said after his victory.The Masters, the season’s first major for men, is an invitational, which means it is up to the members of Augusta National to send invitations and create the field of men who will compete for the coveted green jacket. This is unique among the major championships.This year extra attention has been paid to how players secure their invitation largely because of the rise of LIV Golf, the league that has poached a dozen top players. (More on that later.) But how players earn their Augusta invitations has been part of a bigger story around getting into the PGA Tour’s top tournaments, which have the strongest fields and high prize money.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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    Masters 2024: Five Players to Watch

    Among them are golfers who have won the event before and have a good chance to do it again.No golfer has repeated as the champion of the Masters Tournament, which begins on Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club, since Tiger Woods successfully defended his crown in 2002.Such is the challenge facing Spain’s Jon Rahm, who closed with a 69 last year to secure his second major title. He also won the 2021 United States Open.Rahm, who signed with LIV Golf in late 2023, will be one of the favorites.Here are five other players to watch:Scottie SchefflerThe strong favorite will be Scheffler, who is so precise from tee to green. When he is making putts, as he’s been doing lately, he seems unbeatable.Ranked No. 1 in the world, Scheffler turned in a six-under 66 in the final round to capture the Arnold Palmer Invitational last month. One week later, he shot an eight-under 64 to rally to win his second consecutive Players Championship, which no player had done since the tournament — considered the unofficial fifth major — began in 1974.The true test of his greatness, however, will depend on how he fares in the official majors. Scheffler, 27, who tied for second in March at the Texas Children’s Houston Open, has one major title, the Masters in 2022.Jon Ferrey/Liv Golf/LIVGO, via Associated PressBrooks KoepkaKoepka, 33, made a run at the green jacket last year before faltering with a final-round 75 to tie for second, four strokes behind Rahm.The next month, he took the P.G.A. Championship, his fifth major. One more and he’ll match the total of Phil Mickelson, Lee Trevino and Nick Faldo.Koepka said his inability to close the deal at Augusta National last year helped pave the way for his win at the P.G.A.“I think failure is how you learn,” he told reporters at the P.G.A. “You get better from it. You realize what mistakes you’ve made.”Doug Defelice/LIVGO, via Associated PressPhil MickelsonWe 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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    What Did Jon Rahm Choose for the Masters Dinner Menu?

    The winner of the most hallowed event in professional golf gets to design the menu (and pay) for the next year’s champions dinner. Jon Rahm, the 2023 winner, supplied a recipe from his grandmother.The winner of the Masters Tournament gets a green jacket, an elegantly engraved trophy and a lifetime invitation to play one of the most revered events in professional golf.He also has the chance to plan a dinner the next spring for other Masters winners (and to pick up the check for one of the most exclusive evenings in sports).“How rare is it to get everybody like that in a room where it’s just us?” Scottie Scheffler said hours before his dinner last year with 32 fellow Masters champions and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, the site of the tournament.“There’s nobody else,” Scheffler continued. “There’s the chairman and then there’s us.”And at a tournament where the concessions are legendary, the pressure is forever on the new champion to pick a menu that befits the moment. Tiger Woods offered up cheeseburgers and milkshakes after his debut Masters victory in 1997, but over the years built menus that included sushi, porterhouse steaks and chocolate truffle cake. Sandy Lyle went with haggis after his 1988 win. Vijay Singh’s selection of Thai food thrilled some players and flabbergasted others.Cheeseburger sliders, made to Scheffler’s specifications, were also on the menu at the dinner in 2023.Scheffler brainstormed his menu with his wife and his agent, starting with a list of the golfer’s favorite foods.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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    The Joys of Links Golf Never Get Old

    No matter which seaside, windswept course hosts the British Open, the final major tournament of the year puts a golfer’s imagination to work, and captures ours.Tired of the whole golf-gone-wild thing? The one that has turned the men’s professional game into a new toy for Saudi investors? The one that has U.S. senators dragging golf (minus the bag) to work? The one that has left the PGA Tour star Rory McIlroy saying he feels like a sacrificial lamb in the proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership?Rest easy. This week, links golf, the windswept and unadorned form of the game, takes its annual turn on golf’s main stage. It’s a chance for golf to tell its origin story all over again. The British Open, the fourth and last of the annual Grand Slam events, is upon us.The host course, this time around, is Royal Liverpool, also known as Hoylake to those who know the course and its bumpy fairways, which are rendered a pale khaki green by the summer sun and the brackish air.British Opens are always played, to borrow a phrase from the BBC commentator Peter Alliss, who died in 2020, “in sight and sound of the sea.” They are contested on links courses that are a century old — or much older. Royal Liverpool held its first Open in 1897 and is on Liverpool Bay, though you might think of it as the Irish Sea. The course is a mile from the train station in Hoylake — many fans will get there via Merseyrail — and about 15 miles from Penny Lane in Liverpool.The lifelong Texan Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2017 British Open, prepared for Royal Liverpool by entering last week’s Scottish Open, played on the links course at the Renaissance Club. One afternoon, Spieth slipped away and played North Berwick, an old and beloved links. Its 13th green is guarded by a stone wall because — well, why not? The wall was there first, and the course goes back to 1832.Jordan Spieth during the final round of his win at the British Open in 2017.Richard Heathcote/R&A, via Getty Images“In the British Isles,” the American golf course architect Rees Jones said recently, “they like quirky.”Promoting a course by way of its architect, a powerful marketing tool in American golf, is not much of a thing in Britain. Years ago, Jones was making a first visit to Western Gailes, a rugged course on Scotland’s rugged west coast. The club’s starchy club secretary — that is, the gatekeeper — told Jones he could play the course if he could name its architect.Jones offered a series of names.Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.“Who designed it then?” Jones asked.“God!” the secretary bellowed.Spieth’s plan was to play only a few holes at North Berwick, but he found he couldn’t quit. He played the entire course. While on it, he talked about the joys of links golf.“There’s nothing like links golf,” he said. “The turf plays totally different. The shots go shorter or farther than shots go anywhere else, depending on wind. It’s exciting. It’s fun. You use your imagination. There’s never a driving-range shot when you’re playing links golf.”In the background, somebody in Spieth’s group offered, “Good shot,” to another player. But you have to be careful with that phrase, when playing on links land.Nobody could know that better than Tom Watson, the winner of five British Opens in the 1970s and ’80s.“In 1975, I went to Carnoustie to play in my first Open,” Watson said in a recent phone interview. Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, is famously difficult, bleak and tricky. Watson arrived at the course on the Sunday before the start of the tournament, but the overlords turned him away. He was too early. Good thing there are 240 traditional links courses across Britain.“So Hubert Green and John Mahaffey and I went down the road to Monifieth,” Watson said. “I hit my first shot right down the middle. Everybody says, ‘Good shot.’ We walk down the fairway. Can’t find my ball. It’s gone. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know about this links golf.’”Watson won that 1975 British Open at Carnoustie. And he might have won in 2009 at Turnberry, but his second shot, with an 8-iron, on the 72nd hole, landed short of the green, took a wicked bounce and finished in fluffy grass. He need one simple closing par to win. Instead, his bogey meant a playoff, and Watson, 59 and spent, was doomed. Stewart Cink won.Watson came into the press tent and said, “This ain’t no funeral.” A links golfer, over time, learns to accept the good bounces and bad ones in any golfing life.Phil Mickelson with his caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay after making his birdie putt on No. 18 to win in 2013.Toby Melville/ReutersAfter Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982 with the dream of becoming a golf course architect, he became a summer caddie at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Doak, now a prominent architect (and the designer of the Renaissance course), has been making a study of links golf ever since. In a recent interview, he noted that older golfers often do well in the British Open. Greg Norman was 53 when he finished in a tie for third in 2008. Darren Clarke was 42 when he won in 2011, and Phil Mickelson was 43 when he won in 2013.Links golf, Doak said, is not about smashing the driver with youthful abandon. When Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, he hit driver only once over four days. Greens on British Open courses are typically flat and slow, notably so, compared with, say, the greens at Augusta National. There’s less stress over putting and the game within the game that favors young eyes and young nerves. What links golf rewards most is the ability to read the wind, the bounce and how to flight your ball with an iron.“In links golf, you have to curve the ball both ways, depending on what the wind is doing and where the pin is,” Doak said. “You have to figure out what the ball is going to do after it lands.”That takes guile and skill and earned golfing wisdom — all helpful whether you’re playing in a British Open or a casual match with a friend in the long dusk light of the British summer. Open fans will sometimes finish their golf day with a suppertime nine (or more) on a nearby seaside links. Greater Liverpool has a bunch of them. Every British Open venue does.Playing night golf on those courses, you might also see golf officials, equipment reps, sportswriters and caddies, Jim Mackay among them. Mackay, who is known as Bones and who caddies for Justin Thomas, was Mickelson’s caddie when Mickelson won at Muirfield a decade ago.Mackay, like millions of other golf nuts around the world, can’t get enough of the game. That is, the actual game, not its politics, not its business opportunities. Mackay knows, as a golfer and caddie, that success in links golf requires a certain kind of golfing magic, the ability to make the golf ball do as you wish.Playing links golf, he said recently, “is like standing 50 yards in front of a hotel and having to decide which window on which floor you want your ball to go through.”The caddie as poet. A golfer with options.Links golf, John Updike once wrote, represents “freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” On some level, the winner at Royal Liverpool will understand that. The winners of all those suppertime matches will, too. Yes, the Open champion will get $3 million this year. But he will also get one-year custody of the winner’s trophy, the claret jug, his name etched on it forever.Tiger Woods with his caddie Steve Williams after his win at Royal Liverpool in 2006.Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesDo you know how much Woods earned for winning at Hoylake in the summer of 2006? Not likely.But many of us remember Woods sobbing in his caddie’s arms. We remember Woods cradling the jug in victory. We remember the clouds of brown dirt that announced his shots, his ball soaring, his club head twirling.“Hit it, wind,” Woods would say, now and again, to his airborne ball, as if the wind could hear him, and maybe it could. More

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    Stanford Golf Star Rose Zhang Is Ready for Her Professional Debut

    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