British Open (Golf)

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      Nick Price and the Thrill of Winning the British Open

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      He won three majors in his career, but it was taking the British Open in 1994 that meant the most.Nick Price, the former No. 1 player in the world, won the P.G.A. Championship in 1992 and 1994, but it was his victory in the ’94 British Open at Turnberry in Scotland that stands out.While playing the 71st hole, a par 5, Price of Zimbabwe felt he needed a birdie to give himself a chance. He did better than that. He got an eagle, knocking in a 50-footer, and went on to win by a stroke over Jesper Parnevik of Sweden.Price, 66, speaking by phone from his home in Florida, reflected recently on his Open triumph and why it was so special. The conversation has been edited and condensed.Where do you place your victory at Turnberry?Having been second twice, in 1982 and in 1988, it was something I really wanted badly. It’s the first major championship I ever watched on TV. It meant the most to me.What are the challenges facing the players at Royal Liverpool?I think your normal links golf. One of the real keys to links golf is to hit the ball straight. Tom Watson, who was always a master of the links courses, that was his philosophy. He said it doesn’t really matter if you miss hit the ball or whatever, but if you hit it straight you can play a links course, and no truer words were spoken.What was the Open you first watched?In 1969, when Tony Jacklin won at Royal Lytham. We didn’t have live TV in those days. The tobacco companies used to have all of these 16-millimeter films that they used to bring to the golf clubs. They would do two showings, one on a Friday night and one on a Saturday night. I can remember sitting on the floor at the golf course in the main lounge in front of the screen watching with two or three buddies. It was such an eye-opening thing. I didn’t know you could make money playing professional golf.What was the key to your win?The putt on 17 was huge, but I birdied the 16th hole, which really put me in a position to win. I played the hole absolutely perfect. I hit a driver down there so I could get my 60-degree sand wedge on it, which I had the most amount of spin with. I used a little bit of a slope behind the pin as a backboard and drew the ball back off the slope to about 15 feet and holed a very difficult left-to-right, downhill putt.What about Bernhard Langer recently setting the record for most wins as a senior?What amazes me about him is the desire. He still has the desire. For many of us who have stepped aside or retired, he’s just an amazing human being.You’re only seven months older. Can you imagine yourself doing what he is doing?No. I had an injury that put me on the downhill toward retirement in 2012. But even so, if I hadn’t that, I probably wouldn’t be playing as much — a few events, but not like he does.You were never fired up about the senior tour anyway, were you?Not really. I went flat out on the regular tour until I was 50, so I was at a little bit of burnout on my first three of four years on the Champions Tour. It didn’t inspire me.What is your biggest regret?I would have liked to have come to America earlier. Over here my progress accelerated a lot more. I should have come at the end of 1980 instead of 1983.When you play with friends these days, what motivates you?The love of the game, that’s what it comes down to. I have to keep moving my goals. It’s not what it was. Yesterday, I shot 71. I broke par. I’m playing from the second set of tees, a course about 6,700 yards. It’s still fun for me and especially with the guys I play with. I try to be selective about the courses I play. I only like to play courses I enjoy playing. That’s one of the things you can be when you get to my age. More

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      There’s a British Open Winner Coaching High School Golf in Ohio

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      All of the noise is gone now. There is no entourage, no hubbub, no fuss. Instead of yukking it up with David Letterman, as he did 20 years ago this month, Ben Curtis is spending the morning teaching southeast of Cleveland and steeling himself for the roughly 750-mile drive to South Carolina for a family vacation.This kind of understated Friday morning is very much how Curtis likes his life two decades after he made his major tournament debut at the British Open — and won. His victory at Royal St. George’s was an international sensation: He went from being the world’s 396th-ranked player, the one who had spent part of tournament week sightseeing in London with his fiancée, to being the first golfer in 90 years to win a major title on his first try.He never captured another. Sporadic successes followed — ties for second at a P.G.A. Championship and a Players Championship, a spot on a Ryder Cup-winning team, a few other PGA Tour victories — but never the major-winning magic. He last played a tour event in 2017, finishing with career earnings of more than $13.7 million.Today, he coaches his son’s golf team at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Kent, Ohio, and teaches at a golf academy that bears his name. On Thursday, the Open will begin at Royal Liverpool. He could play in it, but he’d rather not.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Curtis celebrating with the claret jug after his victory in the British Open at Royal St. George’s in 2003.Andrew Parsons/PA Wire, via Associated PressLet’s start in 2003. After the first round, you were five shots off the lead. After the second, three. After the third, two. When did you start to think you could win?Saturday, I remember struggling the first nine holes, and then something — I don’t know if I just calmed down, maybe thought it’s over, I don’t know — happened. I shot three under on that back nine, and it just boosted my confidence. When we went to bed that night, I was like, “I’m going to win this thing.” I told Candace that, and she kind of went quiet until the next day.The back nine on Sunday wasn’t as smooth as Saturday’s. Was it the course or the pressure?Probably the pressure more than anything.The first nine continued what I was doing on Saturday. In any tournament, but a major especially, it’s hard to play really consistent for 27 holes without having some kind of hiccup. In the back of my mind, I kept telling myself, “It’s tough for everybody.”Ever watched the round?Twice.Twice in 20 years?We were at a friend’s house, woke up and he had the Golf Channel on since it was Open week. And so we sat there and watched it a little bit, and the kids slowly came down and we watched it. And then that kind of spurred it on to, “Hey, let’s take the time since the kids were older.”When I was playing, I never wanted to watch it because I was stubborn and wanted to concentrate on the future. Now I look at it though, and it’s like, “What were we wearing?”A few days after you won, you told The Times: “It won’t change me. It won’t change who I am.” Did it?I’m sure it did. But personality-wise or things like that, I would hope not.Did it change how you approached golf?I wasn’t used to the limelight, and so it was just difficult to go practice, to go find that quiet place where I could get work done. You try to schedule your day and you tried to have it down to within a few minutes, but if you’re trying to have a two- or three-hour practice session and it ends up being six and you’ve only practiced for two, it wears on you.People are coming up and you’re getting distracted — and not in a mean way, by any stretch — but then you realize you’re putting less and less time into the practice because of that. So that’s what was difficult, or even just going out to eat, and it made me realize I never wanted to be like that — like, I would never want to be in Tiger Woods’s shoes.I’d want to come in under the radar. I wanted to win every week, of course. Everyone does.I’ve heard you felt pressure to prove that the Open hadn’t been a fluke.Definitely. Especially when you’re young and you win early, there’s that pressure of you’ve got to do it again to prove your worth, I guess.Where does that pressure comes from? From within yourself? The media? The galleries?It’s a combination of everything. Luckily, social media wasn’t a huge deal back then. But I did feel it internally. I remember practicing and getting ready at the end of 2005, and my college coach just went: Screw this. Just be you. Don’t try to be somebody that you’re not, because you’re trying to emulate what the top players in the world are doing, and, well, maybe that’s not for you.That was probably the first time I had heard that in years.Curtis talked about his stunning victory in the British Open with David Letterman.Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS, via Getty ImagesJust go back to being Ben Curtis?Just go back to being me. That refocused me a little bit. I think it showed in the play that year, winning twice.You coach high schoolers now. What do you tell them about pressure?They’re worried about breaking 80 or 90, not winning majors. But to them, that’s a big deal. I remember the first time you break 80, the first time you break 70 and how big of an accomplishment that is. So that’s their major.I always tell them you can’t force it. It’s just going to happen. You work hard, and it’s just going to fall in there.You can only control yourself and your emotions and try to treat every shot like it’s the first shot. And 99.9 percent of the rounds do not go the way you want them because usually it’s derailed within the first shot or hole.Brooks Koepka says he thinks he can win 10 majors. Did you ever let a specific number like that enter your head?No, but I always dreamed of winning another one and had a couple of opportunities.Winning a major put you in the history books. Would your career have been easier if you hadn’t won so early?Probably, but it wouldn’t be as cool of a story. Like, if I had won two other events and then won a major and then kind of disappeared?Is there such a thing as winning a major too early?It’s not so much the winning the one too early, but maybe the way Koepka did it and winning a lot within a couple of years. Now, all of a sudden, you think you should win every week.And the hardest thing — and I fell into that trap, too — was trying to gear up your game just for the majors. If you just do that alone, if you’re not playing good going into it, what difference does it make if you don’t have the confidence? Confidence is the biggest thing.Curtis with his wife, Candace, in New York in 2003, shortly before they were married.Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesI was talking to Max Homa recently, and he said he had realized he didn’t prepare for the majors how he prepared for everything else and that maybe he should smile more and laugh more.It’s true. When I won at the Open, we got there early just to get adjusted to the time change. I played on Saturday and Sunday, and then on Monday, Candace and I went into London and were these American tourists.Then I came back and played 18 on Tuesday and nine on Wednesday. But you can overdo it, and I think what Max is saying is if you treat it like any other event, you’ll be fine.It’s so hard to do. But every time I’ve won or came close, it was just, let’s go play golf. You play free.Wyndham Clark is going to Royal Liverpool as a first-time major champion. What’s your advice for him?Enjoy the moment, and don’t be afraid to say no. Try to stick to your routine. And the biggest thing is just expectations: Don’t expect to win. Just go out there and try to enjoy the moment. Just like Max said, laugh, have some fun. If you make the cut and have a chance to win, great. If not, you’re still the U.S. Open champ, and no one is ever going to take that away.You’ve played two Opens at Royal Liverpool. What do you make of it?It’s a really good golf course. I wouldn’t say it was my favorite.Would Royal St. George’s be the favorite?It’s up there, but I love Birkdale, just the look of it, the feel of the place. And obviously St. Andrews is special, but they’re all great. I hated Troon the first time just because I played badly.You can play the Open until you’re 60. Why not play it?One, I don’t want to put the work in. And, two, I’m not going to show up just to shoot a pair of 78s, 79s. It’s not fair to the other guys. You’re basically taking a spot away from a kid at a qualifier or somebody who is trying to play for the first time.I know what it takes to play well. I can go out here and play OK. But when you play 10 times a year, it’s a totally different thing.You last played a tour event in 2017. Was it hard to walk away, or was it liberating?A little bit of both. I think I could have a couple of years earlier and just kept hanging on and playing like crap, to put it frankly. Once I did, it was great.“When I teach, it’s not always about X’s and O’s and hitting it to this spot or in this swing plane or whatever,” Curtis said.Daniel Lozada for The New York TimesWhen did you recognize that you didn’t want that chaotic tour life anymore?When the kids got to school age. When they were young and you could take them with you, it was great. Then they went to school and their schedule is limited, and you’re traveling and playing in these tournaments, and you’re alone.I never played a huge amount, but when you’re used to having them out for about 20, 22 events a year and suddenly it’s only for six or seven, and now you’re out there for 20, 22 events on your own, it becomes tough. It doesn’t matter how nice the resort is. Every hotel room, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Ritz-Carlton or a Courtyard Marriott, it’s a rectangle room with a bathroom in it. And it’s tough on the family at home, too, because they want me home.A lot of retired golfers live in beachfront towns in Florida. You chose Ohio. Why?If you’re in Jupiter, you’re among your peers. Up here, we’re alone. The people are great, down to earth, and we wanted that for our kids. It’s just who we are and where we’re at. This is home.When you left the tour, did you think you wanted to coach high schoolers?No.Think you wanted to run an academy?It took some time. For the rest of 2017, I was thinking about what I wanted to do, and that’s when the academy came about. Ohio has a rich history of golf, and it seems like all of the greats come through here at some point in their careers. You look at Jack Nicklaus, growing up in Ohio, and Arnold Palmer lived in Cleveland for a while.I just started reflecting on how I grew up, and I was thinking, “Who around here is going to help these kids navigate the dreams that I had?” I had to rely on my parents, and then luckily I went to a college where the coach was super involved.When I teach, it’s not always about X’s and O’s and hitting it to this spot or in this swing plane or whatever. I have these good kids, and they want to swing it like Koepka. I’m like, “Listen, swing it like you. What your swing looks like now is not going to be what it looks like when you’re 25.”What persuaded you to coach the high school team?My son was on the team, and the coach decided to retire. I got a call from the athletic director and I was like, “Well, who do you have in mind?” And they were like, “You, and that’s it.”I asked them to take a couple of days and try to find someone. I didn’t want to put that pressure on my son, but he was like, “coach, Dad, coach.”What errors are you seeing that weren’t really a thing when you were learning to play?Kids are more worried about their swing technique and the way it looks than how it performs. As long as you shoot a 72 on the scorecard, it doesn’t matter how you shoot 72. It’s a good score! Just worry about that.Twenty years ago, you said that if you hadn’t been playing the Open, you “probably” would have been watching the tournament on TV. Will you be watching this time?It’s funny: It’s been seven years since I played, but I wake up now and realize it’s almost over. You totally forget. You get up and start doing your stuff, and it’s 2 o’clock and you think you’ll see what the golf is — and then it’s over.The first three years were like that, and I totally missed it. Now, I’ll watch it, and I enjoy it. More

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      Cameron Smith Will Try To Defend His British Open Championship

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      Smith, defending a major tournament title for the first time this week, is happy not to get too worked up about much of anything.It is possible that one of last July’s customers at the Dunvegan Hotel, which fancies itself only a 9-iron away from the Old Course, remembers more of Cameron Smith’s British Open than he does.It would not take much, because Smith recently recalled roughly this about the Sunday that left him a major tournament champion: teeing off, missing a putt on the ninth hole, learning he had seized the lead, then finishing to “the feeling of not really joy, but the feeling of relief.”He considers this, a memory mostly unburdened by brilliance or blunder, a strength.“That’s one of my greatest assets: hitting a golf shot and forgetting about it,” Smith said in an interview. He has friends, as every professional golfer does, who can “remember every single shot from every single tournament they’ve played in.”“But that’s something,” he continued, “I’ve never been able to do.”He is the one who has spent the last year filling the Open winner’s claret jug with beer — Australia’s XXXX Gold, he concluded, tastes best — and passing it around.Now comes his first major title defense, which will begin on Thursday at Royal Liverpool, the English course that is the site of the 151st Open.Assessing Smith’s year so far is an exercise in choose-your-own-adventure analysis. The Masters Tournament, where he had finished in the top 10 for three consecutive years, yielded a letdown in April, when he tied for 34th at the only major tournament where he has never failed to make the weekend.But Smith’s May outing at Oak Hill was his best P.G.A. Championship performance of his career (a tie for ninth), and after missing three U.S. Open cuts in five years, he left Los Angeles with a fourth-place finish. Less than two weeks ago, he won a LIV Golf tournament near London, his second individual victory since he joined the Saudi-backed circuit last summer. The event was, perhaps, exceptional preparation for the taunts and terrors of Royal Liverpool, even for a past Open champion.“And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good,” Smith said.Paul Childs/Reuters“The wind is very different, I feel like, in England and Scotland,” Marc Leishman, one of Smith’s LIV teammates, observed this month. “It’s a lot heavier. Getting used to that is pretty important, taking spin off the ball. Cam is very good at that time, and throw his wedges and putting on top of that, and he’s a pretty formidable opponent.”Smith’s slump — a relative term — at the year’s start probably had its origins in a holiday break that was the longest of the 29-year-old’s career. He had won the Australian P.G.A. Championship, missed the cut at the Australian Open and was desperately in need of a reboot after years of pandemic tumult and a rush into the global spotlight. Even now, he says, he is a professional athlete who would “prefer that people don’t know me.” If he had his way, he’d probably be out fishing.And so though the hiatus was a fine, vital salve for his mind, it was, at least in the interim, a hex on his golf game. Once he returned to competition, the shortcomings of his preparation were clear. He had middling finishes in two of the first three LIV events of the year, and he missed the cut at a tournament in Saudi Arabia.He still preferred to practice putting off a mirror in his Florida office (there, instead of on a green, “because I’m lazy”) but accepted, however begrudgingly, that his driver was in need of greater work. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles for the U.S. Open in June, he was eagerly embracing an old-school approach: Don’t worry too much about distance, try to land the ball in the fairway, have a chance for birdie.He finished 50th in driving distance but had 19 birdies, tied for second in the field and equal to the winner, Wyndham Clark. At Augusta, he had been 31st in driving distance and tied for 37th in birdies, with 13.“I feel like I worked on that quite hard, and the golf has been really good, and then it was just a case of letting go and letting stuff happen,” he said of his resurgence. “And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good.”But Smith’s at-ease sorcery, so plain to anyone who goes online and spends a minute watching him conquer the Road Hole on the Sunday he won the claret jug, flows in large part from his equilibrium. He draws it from his mother, he thinks, perhaps not surprising for a player whose early PGA Tour years were marked by homesickness.The pandemic did not help. When he won the tour’s Players Championship in March 2022, his mother and sister were at T.P.C. Sawgrass, having just reunited with Smith after more than two years of border restrictions. Six months later, he was ranked second in the world and was one of LIV’s most hyped signings.But he has so far managed to avoid being viewed like quite so much of a villain, even before last month’s surprise announcement of a potential détente between the warring circuits. He has spent only so much time airing grievances in public. He has acknowledged shortcomings in LIV’s fields compared to the PGA Tour’s. When his world ranking tumbled, which was inevitable since LIV tournaments have not been accredited, he did not lash out because his shot at reaching No. 1 was fading.“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” he said in an interview in March. Now, with a tentative peace perhaps taking hold in professional golf, he is wondering whether he will have a shot, after all.“Don’t get me wrong: I want to beat everyone else,” he said. “But there’s no reason why you can’t do it with a smile on your face.”He will face 155 other men this week, all of them clamoring to deny him another year with the claret jug. Now ranked seventh in the world, and preparing for a field that includes more than a dozen fellow Open winners, he has a backup plan for his beverages.“The Aussie P.G.A. Trophy is pretty cool,” he said. “You can definitely fit a lot more beer in that one.”Still, he said this week, his eyes welled with tears when he returned the claret jug to the Open’s organizers.“I wasn’t, like, not letting it go,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “But it was just a bit of a moment that I guess you guess you don’t think about, and then all of a sudden it’s there, and, yeah, you want it back.” More

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      The Genesis Scottish Open Rises in Stature

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      The course is considered a solid testing ground for the British Open, a major played just down the road a few days later.The Renaissance Club, the site of the Genesis Scottish Open that begins on Thursday, looks like it’s been there for hundreds of years, like so many other great links courses in Britain.Like all true links courses, it winds along the coast with few trees; wind, rain, heat and cold become issues for players. It has firm fairways that can kick a well-hit drive forward an extra 50 yards or punish an equally well-struck shot with an unlucky bounce.The course has high golden fescue grass that waves in the wind. Brown-tinged greens undulate subtly in the center and strikingly on the edges. And of course, deep bunkers swallow balls careening toward their targets.It’s in the best neighborhood in town for golf. Muirfield, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and regular host of the British Open, abuts the course. And down the road is North Berwick Golf Club, where the sport has been played since 1832.But the Renaissance Club, now in its fifth year of hosting the Scottish Open, opened in 2007 after two American brothers developed the club. The tournament course is the product of an extensive renovation in 2014, which opened up some of the holes with views of the water.Yet its architect, Tom Doak, is not known for building courses that host professional golf championships. This was his first.So how did the Renaissance Club come to host a tournament that has been growing in importance? (It offers entry into the British Open for players who place in the top five spots, and it is sanctioned by the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, meaning more money and ranking points.)The change began in 2011 with a broader strategy to play on conditions that would approximate the British Open often held a few days later. The Scottish Open had been around, off and on and under various sponsors, for about 50 years at that point.The organizers partnered with Visit Scotland, the country’s tourist board, to find venues that would also capture a tourist’s imagination. While Scotland has a variety of topography for its golf courses, Scottish golf conjures up images of wind-ripped, bouncy courses.“We kicked off a links strategy in 2011 and decided to move from Loch Lomond to Castle Stuart,” said Rory Colville, the Genesis Scottish Open championship director. “We decided that it was in the players’ best interest to play links golf the week before the Open Championship. The economic benefit of the first Scottish Open at Castle Stuart was said to be in excess of 5 million pounds [about $6.3 million]. That’s a really positive thing.”Loch Lomond, which had hosted the tournament for more than a decade, was a parkland course on an estate with streams and trees that dated back centuries. It’s ranked as one of the best courses in the world. But its trees and streams don’t conjure up the same images of Scottish golf.Castle Stuart, like the Renaissance Club, is a modern course built to look like it has been on the land forever. The difference was in the design team.Opened in 2009, it was designed by Gil Hanse, an American architect who restored courses for the United States Open and the P.G.A. Championship, including Los Angeles Country Club and Southern Hills in Oklahoma. On Castle Stuart, Hanse worked with Mark Parsinen, who found the land, to build a course in the Highlands with wide vistas, firm fairways and deep bunkers.“Although at the time Castle Stuart was a relatively young golf course, it highlighted all you would want from a new links course as a venue,” Colville said. “It was a fair test of golf, but it was also the right type of test in the warm-up to the Open,” in that it was not set up to be overly penalizing.“Players don’t want to get beaten up going into a major championship,” he said. “Castle Stuart was the right type of golf course. Also, it had this fantastic scenic setting to showcase golf to the world. It was a really rewarding experience to take the Scottish Open up to the Highlands.” And it produced solid champions: Luke Donald, Phil Mickelson and Alex Noren.The strategy in those years was to use a rota, or schedule, of courses akin to what the British Open does in moving the championship to a set number of venues. For the Scottish Open, these included Royal Aberdeen, Gullane and Dundonald.“We had an exceptional experience at Royal Aberdeen,” Colville said about the tournament in 2014. “Justin Rose won there in great style. Rory McIlroy played there and went on to win the Open the week after that.”Gullane had the advantage of being close to the capital, Edinburgh, which increased the number of spectators.But top players balked at a rota before the official Open Championship rota. It meant they would potentially have to learn a new course each year. There were also economic reasons to host an event at the same stop with the same infrastructure planned out.The Renaissance Club is a true links course that winds along the coast with few trees to protect players from the elements. The course was extensively renovated in 2014, which opened up some of the holes with views of the water.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images“At Loch Lomond, we built an event year after year,” Colville said. “We needed to find a home to make it the scale it needs to be. That’s tricky when you’re looking at a member club, with a larger number of members who don’t want the annual interference of golf course closure and interruption of their day to day golfing.”The Renaissance Club had been founded by the brothers Jerry and Paul Sarvadi. Paul is the chief executive of Insperity, a human resources company, and Jerry spent his career in aviation fuel.On the club’s 10th anniversary in 2018, Paul Sarvadi talked about his commitment to continuing to host the Scottish Open. “While proud of our first 10 years, we are even more excited about our next 10 years,” he said.Colville said the brothers had a passion to create a home for the Open.“They’ve built a long-term TV compound and parking facilities,” he said. “They’ve built the infrastructure that makes it feasible to hold the event year after year. They’ve made it a viable event.”They’ve also allowed tinkering to the course. “Our agronomy team has worked very closely with the club to improve the conditions and refine the golf course.”Doak, who declined to comment, is better known for designing destination venues on remarkable plots of land, like Barnbougle in Tasmania, Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand and Pacific Dunes in Oregon. He has largely eschewed commissions or restorations of courses that will host tournaments.“I never really thought I’d do tournament golf courses,” he told the Golf Channel in 2019. When asked what he did to create a course tough enough for the professionals, he added, “It’s a little bit getting inside their heads. You want to do things that make them think and make them play a little safe.”Since the Renaissance Club course was renovated in 2014, Doak has been less involved in year-to-year changes. The ownership group brought in Padraig Harrington, a three-time major champion and past Ryder Cup captain, to consult on the course from a tournament player’s perspective.“You get the perspective of someone with his links credentials to help refine the golf course and improve it,” Colville said. “He’s added some subtle design features to make the rough more penal and changed a lot of the fairway cut lines.”In the five years since the course began hosting the event, the Scottish Open has achieved elevated status with its sanctioning by the PGA and DP World tours. It has secured Genesis, the luxury-car company, as a title sponsor.And the field has grown stronger. Last year’s champion, Xander Schauffele, was the fifth-ranked player in the world after his victory.“We expect to be the best attended Scottish Open this year, with more than 70,000 spectators,” Colville said.“This year we have eight of the top 10 players in the world. That’s a vote of confidence that they like the golf course and like the facilities.” More

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      Phil Mickelson Interviewed in Antitrust Inquiry Into Pro Golf

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      The Justice Department met with PGA Tour lawyers this week, but a timeline for the completion of its review is unclear.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — The Justice Department’s antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf has included interviews with players, including the major tournament winners Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Sergio García, as the authorities examine whether the PGA Tour sought to manipulate the sport’s labor market.The department, which has been conducting its investigation since at least last summer, has also explored the specter of collusion in the Official World Golf Ranking and the tight-knit relationships between the leaders of the PGA Tour and the distinct organizations that stage the Masters, the P.G.A. Championship and the U.S. Open.Although lawyers for the PGA Tour met with Justice Department officials in Washington this week, a timeline for the review’s completion — much less whether the government will try to force any changes in golf — is not clear. But the inquiry’s scope and persistence has deepened the turbulence in the sport, which has been grappling with the recent rise of LIV Golf, a league that used money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to lure top players away from the PGA Tour.Eight people with knowledge of the Justice Department’s inquiry described its breadth on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was pending. The department declined to comment.Unlike Major League Baseball, no golf organization has a blanket exemption from federal antitrust laws. A handful of organizations that have close ties to one another have run golf’s top echelon for generations but have withstood some scrutiny in the past.The PGA Tour, the dominant professional circuit in the United States and LIV’s opponent in a pending antitrust lawsuit that the rebel league brought last year, stages tournaments that have often made up the majority of golfers’ competition schedules. But the tour does not run the four so-called major tournaments, which are the sport’s most cherished events and important ways for players to earn prize money and sponsorship-sparking clout.This week’s P.G.A. Championship, for instance, is being overseen by the P.G.A. of America at Oak Hill Country Club, just outside Rochester, N.Y. The U.S. Open is organized by the United States Golf Association, and Augusta National Golf Club administers the Masters Tournament. (The R&A, which organizes the British Open, is based in Britain.)The groups have not moved in lock step since LIV debuted last year — the circuit’s players, for example, have not faced bans from the majors — but professional golf’s establishment has remained a focus of antitrust investigators. Lawyers for LIV have cheered the government’s scrutiny and have regularly communicated with Justice Department officials, who have taken no stance on the league’s lawsuit against the PGA Tour and have not intervened in the case.“If the system is rigged, then consumers are not getting the best product, and if that is the result of an agreement between two or more parties, then that becomes a violation,” said Stephen F. Ross, who teaches sports law at Penn State University and previously worked for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.The PGA Tour, which declined to comment on Wednesday but has aggressively denied wrongdoing and predicted that the department’s inquiry would fizzle, adopted a hard line last year when LIV emerged. It threatened, and then imposed, suspensions to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league, which has offered guaranteed contracts sometimes worth $100 million or more and provided some of the richest prizes in golf history.Tour executives have insisted that their strategy was rooted in membership rules designed to protect the collective market power of elite players in matters like television-rights negotiations and tournament sponsorships, and that golfers who breach rules they agreed to can be disciplined. But investigators have shown interest in the possibility that the tour’s punitive approach threatened the integrity of golf’s labor market, which now includes a LIV faction that vocally argues that players are independent contractors who should be free to compete on tours as they choose.The department’s inquiry swiftly moved beyond a superficial glance at LIV’s public complaints and came to include interviews with some of golf’s most recognizable figures.Mickelson, who has won six majors, including the 2021 P.G.A. Championship that at 50 made him the oldest major tournament winner in history, has been a fearsome public critic of the PGA Tour. He accepted a reported $200 million in guaranteed money to join LIV last year, provoked a firestorm when he played down Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses and, last month, all but silenced people who doubted his remaining playing potential when he tied for second at the Masters.DeChambeau was a sensation when he captured the 2020 U.S. Open title, and García, a Masters winner, first starred at a major in the 1990s and has been among the most distinguished European golfers of his generation.LIV golfer Bryson DeChambeau signed autographs for spectators on Wednesday during a practice round ahead of the P.G.A. Championship.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesRepresentatives for Mickelson and DeChambeau declined to comment. A representative for Garcia did not respond to messages requesting comment.LIV declined to comment. But the league’s commissioner, Greg Norman, publicly hinted in March at the circuit’s cooperation with the Justice Department investigation.“The D.O.J. came, trying to understand the antitrust side of things,” Norman said during an appearance in Miami Beach. “So the PGA Tour created this other legal front that they have to fight.”The review of the tour’s labor practices could prove the most consequential element of the investigation, antitrust experts said, if the Justice Department finds fault with the circuit’s approach.“That one goes more to the sort of core of what the PGA is,” said Paul Denis, a retired Justice Department official who later worked on antitrust matters in private practice. “If that’s where they’re headed, that’s much more significant because that really does affect their business model in terms of their relationship with the players.”But American regulators have also become increasingly mindful of the close ties among golf’s most powerful organizations and their executives and administrators.That prong of the investigation is not unique to the golf inquiry. During the Biden administration, the Justice Department’s antitrust division has shown particular concern about people serving in multiple top roles for potential competitors, and its misgivings have sometimes led directors of public companies to surrender board seats.In October, Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, said that the prohibition on overlapping service was “an important, but under-enforced, part” of federal law.Whether the Justice Department seeks to compel changes in executive or board leadership in golf may hinge on whether Kanter and his lieutenants believe they can prove that the PGA Tour is a competitor to a major tournament organizer, a notion that tour executives have privately scoffed at and used to cast doubt on the strength of the department’s potential case. The tour and the major tournaments jockey for television-rights fees and sponsorships, but they are far from head-to-head rivals in many senses.They do, however, cooperate.The tour has a stake in the world ranking system, which major tournaments use, in part, to determine their fields. Along with the tour, Augusta National, the P.G.A. of America and the U.S.G.A. also have seats on the ranking system’s governing board, and all of them supply personnel for its technical committee.Player rankings are based on a complex formula that considers performances in accredited tournaments, from PGA Tour events to competitions on circuits that draw little notice. Since administrators have not yet acted on LIV’s application to participate in the system — LIV executives have acknowledged that the league would require special dispensations to be accepted immediately — its golfers have slid downward in the ranking, threatening their future participation in the majors. (Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, has recused himself from deliberations about LIV’s bid to join the system.)Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressThe Justice Department’s inquiry is of substantial importance to LIV Golf, which has faced setbacks in its lawsuit against the PGA Tour. But the league has spent months stoking chatter about the federal investigation, its potential implications for the PGA Tour — and the potential benefits for LIV.The tour has countered that effort by citing its record: an F.T.C. inquiry that lasted years and ended in 1995 without any action against the tour.Shortly beforehand, Norman’s first quest to start a global circuit to rival the PGA Tour collapsed.David McCabe More

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      Forged After a Tumultuous Era, World Golf Championships Fade in Another

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      A match play event in Texas may be the last W.G.C. event, ending an international competition that preceded golf’s high-rolling present.AUSTIN, Texas — It was not all that long ago — Tom Kim, after all, is only 20 years old — but before Kim emerged as one of the PGA Tour’s wunderkinds-in-progress, he would watch the World Golf Championships.“For sure, 100 percent,” Kim cheerfully reminisced as he clacked along this week at Austin Country Club, the site of the championships’ match play event. “There was W.G.C. in China. There was Firestone before. You had Doral. You had this.”Had, because once one man wins on Sunday, the championships appear poised to fade away. An elite competition forged, in part, because of another era’s tumult has become a casualty of this one’s.“Everything runs its course and has its time,” said Adam Scott, who has twice won W.G.C. events. Barring a resuscitation, which seems improbable given the PGA Tour’s business strategy these days, the W.G.C.’s time was 24 years.The W.G.C. circuit was decaying before LIV Golf, the Greg Norman-fronted league that is cumulatively showering players with hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, cleaved men’s professional golf last year. Two W.G.C. events vanished after their 2021 iterations, and a third, always staged in China, has not been contested since 2019 because of the coronavirus pandemic.And as the PGA Tour has redesigned its model to diminish LIV’s appeal, even the Texas capital’s beloved match play competition has become vulnerable to contractual bickering and shifting priorities.“We’ve had great events and great champions, but the business evolves and it adapts,” Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said this month, when the tour reinforced its decision to wager its future on “designated events” that should command elite fields and, in some cases beginning next year, be no-cut tournaments capped at 80 players or less. (LIV, whose tournaments always have 48-man fields and no cuts, responded with a wry tweet: “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Congratulations PGA Tour. Welcome to the future.”)With a $20 million purse, doubled in size from five years ago, the match play competition that began on Wednesday is a designated event under the 2023 model. Next year, though, it will not be on the calendar at all, winnowing the W.G.C. to one competition. And Monahan has said it would be “difficult to foresee” when his circuit’s schedule might again include the HSBC Champions, the W.G.C. event in China that will be the last remaining event formally existing in the series.The Chinese tournament’s website has had few updates in recent years, and an inquiry with the event’s organizers went unanswered. HSBC, the British banking powerhouse that is the tournament’s title sponsor, declined to comment.But the PGA Tour’s freshly calibrated distance from the Shanghai competition is fueling what looks to be an unceremonious end for the W.G.C., which were announced to immense fanfare in 1997, when the tour and its allies were smarting over Norman’s failed quest to start a global circuit for the sport’s finest players. The events, which debuted in 1999 with a match play event that sent some of the game’s best home after the first day, were intended to entice and reward the elite without challenging the prestige of the four major tournaments, as well as to give men’s professional golf a greater global footprint.It worked for a spell, and five continents hosted W.G.C. events, many of which Tiger Woods dominated. With the exception of the Chinese tournament, though, the circuit had lately been played in North America.“The ‘world’ part of the World Golf Championships wasn’t really in there,” Rory McIlroy, the four-time major tournament winner whose W.G.C. résumé includes a victory in the 2015 match play event, mused in an interview by the practice putting green.McIlroy, among the architects of the tour’s reimagining as Norman’s unfinished ambitions proved more fruitful this time around, said he had also worried that the W.G.C. events had come to lack “any real meaning,” even as they had been “lovely to be a part of, nice to play in and nice to win.” The tour’s emphasis on select tournaments, many executives and top players like McIlroy believe, will lend more consequence to its season and make it a more appealing, decipherable and concentrated product that can fend off the assault by a LIV circuit bent on simplifying — its critics say diluting — professional golf.“Your casual golf fan knows the majors, the Ryder Cup and maybe the events that are close to their hometown,” said McIlroy, who is among the players devising a new weeknight golf competition that is expected to start next year. “I get it: Professional golf is a very saturated market with a ton of stuff going on, and people have limited time to watch what they want to watch.”The Austin tournament’s end will, at least for now, reduce match play opportunities on the circuits that have been aligned with the W.G.C. Though the Austin event — which has three days of group-stage play, followed by single-elimination rounds — has a field of only 64 players, less than half of the size of last year’s British Open, it has been larger and more accessible than other signature match play tournaments.Rickie Fowler hits from the rough during the first round of W.G.C. match play.Eric Gay/Associated PressBut given the format’s popularity, it will linger, if a little less, on the international golf scene. The Presidents Cup, Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup will remain fixtures — the Solheim will be contested in Spain in September, with the Ryder decided soon after in Italy — and more modest events, such as the International Crown women’s tournament that will be played in May, still dot the calendar.Some players this week appeared more mournful than others about the erosion of the W.G.C. and the decline of match play. Scott said he hoped the tour’s new system would be able to accommodate the next generation of ready-for-stardom players from around the world, as the W.G.C. did, even as he said he was not insistent that match play be a staple.“We don’t play much match play, so the kind of logic in me questions its place in pro golf, but also we’ve got to entertain as well, and if people like to see it and sponsors want to see it, yep, I’m up for it,” Scott said.He grinned.“Maybe we should have some more, get a bit more head-to-head and see if guys like each other so much after,” he offered mischievously. “The year of match play!”The PGA Tour has not ruled out a return to the format, though it would assuredly be limited. LIV could also eventually try to tap into interest. At an event in Arizona last week, Phil Mickelson, a LIV team captain, said that match play was “certainly something that we are discussing as a possibility for the season-ending event.”But the W.G.C. appear effectively finished. Kim, the youngest player this week, was delighted that he had arrived just in time.“I played once before it all goes away,” said Kim, who has six top-10 finishes in his early tour career and expressed confidence in the circuit’s direction. “I played once in my life.”He wandered off to practice. A round against Scottie Scheffler, the reigning match play champion and the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, loomed soon enough. More

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      Tiger Woods Is Back. He’s Still a Work in Progress.

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      Woods shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday at the Genesis Invitational in Southern California. Every stroke amounted to research for the bigger ambitions that still linger.The world’s 1,294th-ranked golfer arrived at the tee box on Thursday afternoon. The No. 2 player, Rory McIlroy, was there, too. So was Justin Thomas, ranked seventh.But the 47-year-old man wedged between William Nygard and Marcos Montenegro in the Official World Golf Ranking still believed, however fantastically, that he could win the Genesis Invitational, a tournament he had never conquered.For all of his scars, that man, Tiger Woods, has barely changed his approach to the mental battleground that so often separates the sports elite from the rest. His birthday in December did not openly blunt the competitiveness that raged so hard for so long that it helped define an entire professional sport; his disappearing acts from golf did not extinguish his hopes of upending his rivals’ ambitions.What Woods cannot mask — indeed, what he does not even try much to mask — is that every competitive round is effectively 18 holes of rehabilitation research and development. There are days when the experimentation works better than others. He shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday, ahead of a second round on Friday morning, with each stroke and step at Riviera Country Club a data point in his team’s quest to make a rebuilt body hum to a higher-than-normal standard.“The communication between myself, my staff, my training team, it’s an ebb and flow daily trying to figure out the right tape job, the right angles, the padding that we need. That all changes from day to day,” Woods said after his round. “Look at where we were last year. It has completely changed, and it will continue to change.”The toll has been immense because professional golf does not ordinarily pair well with a quick recovery from a car wreck that nearly cost one of the sport’s finest players a leg.At Augusta National Golf Club last April, when Woods played the Masters Tournament to make his post-wreck return, he said he would face “lots of treatments, lots of ice, lots of ice baths, just basically freezing myself to death” before the next day’s round. After he withdrew from the year’s next major tournament, the P.G.A. Championship, where he was 12 over par after three rounds, he abandoned his plan to play the U.S. Open because, as he put it later, there was “no way physically I could have done that.” At the British Open in July, after he missed the cut, he said it was “hard just to walk and play 18 holes.”“People have no idea what I have to go through and the hours of the work on the body, pre and post, each and every single day to do what I just did,” he said then. About four months later, after he concluded that he could not play a low-key event in the Bahamas because of plantar fasciitis, he acknowledged without elaboration that his year had included undergoing “a few more procedures because of playing.”Beyond the surgeries, his 2022 results were at once brilliantly defiant — he did, after all, play nine rounds at major tournaments than two years after he sustained open fractures of the tibia and fibula of his right leg — and newly humbling. His best finish was 47th at the Masters, his worst outing at Augusta National since 1996. (He bounced back from trouble particularly well in those days: He won his first green jacket the next year.)This year threatens, but does not necessarily promise, more of the same. These days, Woods said this week, an ankle is his greatest menace.“Being able to have it recover from day to day and meanwhile still stress it but have the recovery and also have the strength development at the same time, it’s been an intricate little balance that we’ve had to dance,” said Woods, who nevertheless declared that he is still very much a shotmaker when his endurance matches his ambition. “But it’s gotten so much better the last couple months.”Riviera, the course west of downtown Los Angeles where Woods played his first PGA Tour event in 1992, when he was a 16-year-old amateur, is but another laboratory, an in-the-spotlight version of the practice complex in his backyard or Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. Just about every day, he says, he is striking balls, and he is doing plenty of chipping and putting. When he grows weary, he mounts a cart — something he cannot do on the PGA Tour — but has seen his outings go from a few holes to 18.“It’s just a buildup, and it’s built up fantastic to get to this point,” he said. “Then, after this event, we’ll analyze it and see what we need to do to get ready for Augusta.”Woods stopped to adjust his shoe on the 12th hole. He said that of all the injuries he sustained in his 2021 car wreck, his right ankle has given him the most trouble.Ronald Martinez/Getty ImagesThere will be much to do since, so far this year, he has not walked 72 holes across four consecutive days, and Augusta is among the most topographically rigorous destinations in golf. But Woods, who intends to maintain a dramatically curtailed playing schedule in the future and is not expected to compete before the Masters in April, believes that his own record means he should not be counted out, not yet.“There was a touch and go whether I would be back after my back fusion,” he said, referring to the complex operation he had in 2017 after failed back surgeries and a need for opioids. “I didn’t know if I was going to walk again after that and I came back and had a nice little run. Same thing with this leg: I didn’t know if I was able to play again and I played three majors last year. Yes, when you get a little bit older and you get a little more banged up you’re not as invincible as you once were.”But the nature of golf, he insisted, makes it possible to ignore ordinary retirement timelines for athletes.“There’s no contact, I don’t have 300-pound guys falling on top of me,” said Woods, who is still dealing with the plantar fasciitis that sidelined him in the autumn. “It’s just a matter of shooting the lowest score. We have the ability to pick and choose and play a little bit longer.”That is true. Arnold Palmer played his 50th and final Masters in 2004, when he was 74. Gary Player appeared in 52, his last when he was 73.This week in California, moments after Woods made clear he would not be looking to match Player or Palmer at Augusta, a reporter asked Woods to peer into the future. “If you’re 60 and you don’t wake up with the irrational belief ‘I could win this tournament,’” the question went, “could you still enjoy any of it?”Maybe — maybe — someday, the response effectively went.“If I’m playing in the event I’m going to try and beat you. I’m there to get a W, OK?” he said. “So I don’t understand that making the cut’s a great thing. If I entered the event, it’s always to get a W.”Reality looms, though, and his next sentences showed it.“There will come a point in time when my body will not allow me to do that anymore, and it’s probably sooner rather than later,” he said. “But wrapping my head around that transition and being the ambassador role and just trying to be out here with the guys, no, that’s not in my DNA.”Until then, his research and development will continue. He started Thursday’s round with a 4-foot putt for a birdie. Three bogeys surfaced as the afternoon progressed — and so did three consecutive birdies to end the afternoon.“As soon as I get back to the hotel, it’s just icing and treatment and icing and treatment, just hit repeat throughout the whole night,” Woods said. More

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

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      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