British Open (Golf)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Golf

      Cameron Smith Will Try To Defend His British Open Championship

      by

      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

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Golf

      The Genesis Scottish Open Rises in Stature

      by

      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

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Golf

      Phil Mickelson Interviewed in Antitrust Inquiry Into Pro Golf

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Golf

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Golf

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Golf

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Golf

      Cameron Smith, Winner of This Year’s British Open, Joins LIV Golf

      by

      Smith’s defection had been expected, but Rory McIlroy tried to stave it off back in July.Cameron Smith, the world’s second-ranked golfer and a player whose exceptional final-round putting carried him to this year’s British Open title, will join LIV Golf, the breakaway series financed with money from Saudi Arabia.Smith is expected to play in LIV’s next 54-hole, no-cut tournament, which will begin Friday in Bolton, Mass., west of Boston. Five other players — Anirban Lahiri, Marc Leishman, Joaquin Niemann, Cameron Tringale and Harold Varner III — will also join a LIV field for the first time, the series announced on Tuesday.The moves by the players were widely expected but still bruised the PGA Tour, which has spent months trying to devise ways to keep players in its establishment fold. Last week, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, announced changes, including purses averaging $20 million at a dozen events next season, that executives hoped would better position the tour to compete with the allure of LIV, which has enticed players with more relaxed schedules and, in some instances, contracts reportedly worth at least $100 million.Smith, a 29-year-old from Australia who also won this year’s Players Championship, was a leading target for the series, which is underwritten by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The possibility of a Smith defection was such an open secret that a reporter asked Smith about it soon after he won the Open, where he shot an eight-under-par 64 on a Sunday to rally from a four-stroke deficit.“I just won the British Open, and you’re asking about that?” Smith said at a news conference then. “I think that’s pretty not that good.”A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesA new series. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Golf

      Cameron Smith Overtakes Rory McIlroy to Win the 150th British Open

      by

      The Australian turned in a brilliant final round on the Old Course at St. Andrews to finish at 20 under par and capture his first major championship.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The wind, what little there was of it, finally seemed to be blowing Rory McIlroy’s way again at a major championship.He had a share of a four-shot lead with one round to go, and though he was not quite playing at home in the home of golf, McIlroy, a Northern Irishman, certainly must have felt as if he was playing on his terms and on his turf as he basked in the roars of the record crowd and walked his jaunty walk over the undulating fairways and double greens of the Old Course.McIlroy, at 33, has both charisma and game, with an elastic swing that provides him the sort of power usually associated with more muscular men and allows him to pound drives to faraway places.But the 150th British Open would come down to deft touch, not overwhelming force, and though McIlroy certainly did not choke away his chance to make history, he hardly seized the big moment by the lapels and shook it for all it was worth.That was left to Cameron Smith and his putter.Smith, an Australian with a wispy mustache and mullet, has a retro air, and though blazers and ties are the rule at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, Smith still fit right in at the Old Course, holing birdie after birdie after birdie after birdie after birdie (yes, five in a row) on the back nine despite the pressure that goes with trying to win one’s first major.Smith, a 28-year-old from Brisbane in steamy Queensland, would make eight birdies in all on Sunday, shooting a brilliant, bogey-free closing round of 64 that put him at 20 under par and gave him a one-stroke victory over the American Cameron Young. McIlroy finished in third place, one more stroke behind, after shooting 70 on Sunday and producing par after par but no fireworks on the back nine.“The putter just went a little cold today compared to the last three days,” McIlroy said.Smith had no such difficulties, and he is the first Australian to win the British Open since Greg Norman in 1993 and the first Australian man to win any major since Jason Day won the P.G.A. Championship in 2015.Smith also maintained his nation’s tradition of winning special anniversary editions of the Open Championship at St. Andrews. The Australian Kel Nagle won here in 1960 on the 100th anniversary of the tournament.“That’s pretty cool; I didn’t know that,” Smith said. “I think to win an Open Championship in itself is probably going to be a golfer’s highlight in their career. To do it around St. Andrews, I think, is just unbelievable. This place is so cool. I love the golf course. I love the town. Hopefully we can keep that trend going with the every 50 years. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”The victory was also, at first glance, a reaffirming moment for the traditional tours in their increasingly contentious rivalry with the breakaway, Saudi-backed LIV Golf series, which has used big checks and lighter workloads to lure major stars like Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson, all of whom have since been barred from competing on the PGA Tour but, for now, are still able to play the majors.The closest a defector came to victory at the Old Course was Johnson, who finished in a tie for sixth at 13 under. But Smith was hardly reassuring when asked about rumors that he was considering a jump to LIV. “I just won the British Open, and you’re asking about that?” he said, visibly uncomfortable, saying the line of inquiry was “not that good.”The reporter persisted, and Smith neither confirmed nor denied his interest in the new tour, which is headed by Norman, a fellow Australian. “I don’t know, mate,” Smith said. “My team around me worries about all that stuff. I’m here to win golf tournaments.”Peter Morrison/Associated PressSmith, if he does jump, is certainly in a stronger bargaining position after his week at St. Andrews, and he showed much more precision than emotion during his final-round surge that began on No. 10 when he made the first of his five consecutive birdies and began to reel in McIlroy and Viktor Hovland, who were the co-leaders after the third round.But Smith has learned some hard lessons at the majors with four top-five finishes, including a tie for third at the 2022 Masters and a tie for second there in 2020. “I’ve definitely kicked myself a couple of times over the last few years,” he said.He won the Players Championship in March, his second PGA Tour victory this season, also making a string of final-round birdies on the back nine. The Players, with its elite field and rich purse, has often been labeled the next best thing to a major, but the Open Championship is the real deal, and though the Old Course is far from the most difficult test on the rotation, it retains its power to inspire.Smith’s 20-under-par total score of 268 set a record for a British Open at St. Andrews, surpassing Tiger Woods’s score of 19 under when he won the Open here in 2000.Woods, then in his prime, won by eight strokes, turning the final round into a processional. But Smith’s victory went to the wire. He led the tournament after two rounds, but then fell four shots off the lead with a one-over 73 on Saturday, a round that included a double bogey on the par-4 13th when he went for an ill-advised second shot from the edge of a bunker.By Saturday night, McIlroy had the momentum, sharing the lead with Hovland, a former collegiate star at Oklahoma State who taught himself the rudiments of the game by watching YouTube videos and was trying to become the first Norwegian to win a major.Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland after putting on the 13th green. He let his lead slip away.Warren Little/Getty Images“You were born for this Rory! Come on!” shouted one Scottish fan as McIlroy headed for the 10th tee on Sunday.McIlroy won the 2014 British Open at Royal Liverpool and added a fourth major at the P.G.A. Championship later that season. He seemed set for a long run of dominance, but missed the British Open the next year, the most recent one to be contested at St. Andrews, because of an injury, and has faced years of final-round disappointments.Eight years later, the chase for the next major continues even though he finished in the top 10 in all four majors this season.“I’ll rue a few missed sort of putts that slid by, but it’s been a good week overall,” he said. “I can’t be too despondent because of how this year’s went and this year’s going. I’m playing some of the best golf I’ve played in a long time. So it’s just a matter of keep knocking on the door and eventually one will open.”This one opened for Smith instead. “Look, I got beaten by a better player this week,” McIlroy said. “Twenty under par for four rounds of golf around here is really, really impressive playing, especially to go out and shoot 64 today to get it done.”To get it done, Smith had to recover from a shaky second shot at the infamous Road Hole, the par-4 17th that played tougher than any hole on the course this year. But Smith produced a beautifully weighted putt uphill from off the green that left him with a 10-foot putt to save par. He made it and headed to the 18th hole, where Young, his playing partner, finished with an eagle that put him very briefly in a tie for the lead with Smith, at 19 under.Smith teeing off on the sixth hole on Sunday. He drew a crowd as he climbed the leaderboard.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesBut Smith had already put his second shot on the par-4 18th just two feet from the hole.“Cameron was not going to miss that,” said Young, who had watched Smith drain so many pressure putts throughout the overcast afternoon.Young knew his man. Smith calmly positioned himself and stroked the ball into the cup to retake the lead at 20 under.The last chance for McIlroy to force a playoff was to make an eagle on 18, which Young had just proven was drivable. But McIlroy’s tee shot, like his round, came up short, and when he failed to hole his second shot, Smith was the British Open champion with his name engraved — in a hurry — on the claret jug.“All the hard work we’ve done the last couple years is really starting to pay off,” Smith said to his team, with the trophy in his grip and the tears starting to come. “And this one definitely makes it worth it.”But Smith, after composing himself, made it clear that he intended to put the claret jug to good use, although not at the moment for claret.“I’m definitely going to find out how many beers fit in this thing, that’s for sure,” he said. More