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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Seek to Drop Litigation Against Each Other

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      Although the tour’s deal with the Saudi wealth fund has not closed, the request to a federal judge was a milestone in golf’s surprise détente.The PGA Tour, LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund asked a federal judge in California on Friday to dismiss the litigation that catapulted golf’s economic and power structure into the American court system.The request to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning that it cannot be refiled, came less than two weeks after the tour and the wealth fund, which bankrolled LIV, announced a tentative agreement to form a partnership. Although the deal may not close for months and faces mounting scrutiny in Washington, Friday’s submission in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., was a milestone in the abrupt détente between the rival circuits.Judge Beth Labson Freeman, who has been overseeing the case, is expected to approve the request, a cornerstone of the tentative agreement between the tour and the wealth fund. By abandoning the litigation, LIV, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund are limiting the potential for damaging revelations and surging legal bills, as well as closing off one avenue for recourse if the new alliance falls apart.Justice Department officials, who were already conducting an antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf, are expected to review the deal closely and could even try to block it or compel changes to it. At least two Senate panels are demanding information about the planned transaction and its consequences, and the deal has not even secured the approval of the PGA Tour’s board.Much about the agreement itself also remains in flux, including the valuations of the assets of the tour, LIV and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, that are to be housed inside the new for-profit venture. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, is expected to serve as the company’s chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, is poised to be its chairman. The PGA Tour expects to hold a majority of the seats on the new company’s board, but the wealth fund will have extensive power over how it is bankrolled, assuring the Saudis of significant influence.Until June 6, when the deal was announced, the PGA Tour had warned against allowing Saudi money and influence to take hold in golf, fueling California litigation that had a costly, complicated life.The acrimonious proceedings began last August, when 11 LIV players, including the major tournament champions Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, brought a lawsuit that accused the tour of violating antitrust laws. LIV itself joined the case later that month.The tour also pursued its own claims against LIV, which it said had improperly interfered with existing contracts with players. The tour later received Judge Freeman’s approval to expand its case to include the wealth fund itself and al-Rumayyan, just one of the rulings that placed pressure on the Saudis and their allies, whose superior financial resources put the tour under immense strain.The tour, the wealth fund and LIV waged a ferocious battle over evidence collection in the case, and many filings in the case were redacted, but a federal magistrate judge concluded this year that the wealth fund was “the moving force behind the founding, funding, oversight and operation of LIV,” undercutting its contention that it was a passive investor in golf.A trial had not been expected until at least next year.Hours before Friday’s filing from the tour and LIV, The New York Times filed a motion that asked the court to unseal records in the case. The Times cited a “substantial and legitimate public interest in these proceedings and their outcome” and suggested that the planned partnership could make concerns of competitive harm moot.“To the extent that competitive harm existed at the time of sealing, those justifications may not apply with the same force today — or upon completion of the parties’ anticipated merger,” The Times’s filing said. “Sealing is a decision that can and should be revisited as facts change and circumstances require.”It was not clear when the judge would rule on either of Friday’s motions. More

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      At the U.S. Open, Wyndham Clark Is Confident, and It Shows

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      Bold play in honor of his mother, who died nearly 10 years ago, had Clark flirting with the top of the leaderboard for part of his second round on Friday.When Wyndham Clark was a kid, his mother, Lise, would tuck short written notes in his knapsack, little missives meant to lift his spirits or motivate him during the day. Clark tried to hide the notes from classmates because they became a source of teasing, especially when he was younger.During interviews in the 10 years since Lise Clark died of breast cancer at 55, Clark has often said, “I’d give anything to have those notes now.”But Clark, among the leaders after the second round of this week’s U.S. Open, has no trouble recalling the most lasting of his mother’s messages — at least as it relates to his professional golf career.“When my mom was sick,” Clark, 29, said on Friday, “I was in college and she told me: ‘Hey, play big. Play for something bigger than yourself. You have a platform to either witness, or help, or be a role model for so many people.’“And I’ve taken that to heart. When I’m out there playing, I want to do that for her.”Clark conjured the memory in the wake of two consecutive stellar rounds at the national golf championship at Los Angeles Country Club. After shooting a sparkling 64 in Thursday’s first round, Clark followed it up with a three-under-par 67, which had his name atop the U.S. Open leaderboards for several hours before the Friday afternoon wave of golfers teed off.Clark’s distinguished play was not a fluke. He has steadily been climbing the world golf rankings with six top-10 finishes on the PGA Tour during the 2022-23 season. Last month, he earned his first tour victory at the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C., a milestone that Clark, now ranked 32nd in the world, said significantly bolstered his belief in himself.“It was big, to me, it felt like a major championship,” he said on Friday. “I just feel like I can compete with the best players in the world, and I think of myself as one of them.”Several years ago, Clark did not have the same confidence. In the months after the death of his mother, who had introduced him to golf as a toddler, Clark struggled on and off the course.When he competed poorly, Clark would storm off the golf course and, he said, “just drive away as fast as I could, I didn’t even know where I was going.”“The pressure of golf and then not having my mom there and someone to call was really tough,” he said after his Wells Fargo victory last month.He missed cut after cut and withdrew from Oklahoma State University before eventually settling at the University of Oregon. Slowly, he said, he found his equilibrium. He debuted on the PGA Tour in 2017, and while the acclimation to the vicissitudes of a pro golfer’s life took time, by last season his play was consistent enough to earn more than $1.5 million in prize money.“I was building my confidence bit by bit, which is, of course, so vital in this game — or any profession,” Clark said.His self-assurance was on display as he played the L.A. Country Club’s devilish par-5 14th hole on Friday. Clark’s second shot settled in deep, gnarly rough about 30 yards short of the green. His third required a gutsy flop shot from a sketchy lie that had to land with spin and precision on a blazing fast, sloping green.He kept the shot on the green and then drained the 13-foot putt for a spectacular birdie. After his round, Clark, with a wide smile, conceded that his third shot was “very risky.”He estimated that in a normal PGA Tour event, he would successfully execute the shot 70 percent of the time. Friday’s round, though, was conducted under the withering pressure of a U.S. Open, so the chance of averting a bogey, Clark said, “was way less because you have the nerves.”But Clark insisted he never wavered about what shot he had to try.He would play big.“When I’m out there playing, I want to do that for her,” Clark said of his mother. “I want to show everyone the person I am and how much joy I have out there playing.“I was walking the fairway yesterday and just kind of smiling because I was playing well. And I go, ‘Man, I wish you could be here, Mom, because it’s a dream come true to be doing this at the highest level.’”He added: “But I know she’s proud of me. I am who I am today because of her. I mean, I’m getting a little choked up. I miss her, and everything I do out here is a lot for her.” More

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      U.S. Open Shows a Fiercer Side, but Low Scores Abound Anyway

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      Brooks Koepka dreads a “birdiefest” at a major. But Los Angeles Country Club is giving the Open field only so much heartburn.Few golfers relish a U.S. Open quite like Brooks Koepka. One at the Olympic Club was his first major tournament appearance. An iteration at Pinehurst saw his debut top-five finish in a major. He first lifted a major trophy at Erin Hills in 2017, and then he did it again the next year at Shinnecock Hills.But Koepka has this week become a paradoxical, brand-name exhibit in an unexpected debate: Is this U.S. Open, the first at the venerable and cloistered Los Angeles Country Club, too easy? It was only on Tuesday that Koepka had been talking about how the tournament’s historical ferocity was a perverse source of comfort.“I just love when, I guess, maybe somewhere closer to even par wins,” said Koepka, who captured his first Open victory with a score of 16 under at Erin Hills — and his second by shooting one over at a Shinnecock Hills course where the rhetoric about the setup was about as fiery as the greens.“If it’s going to be a birdiefest where 20-, 21-under wins,” Koepka added, “that’s really not the style.”But so far, the par-70 Los Angeles course has offered up an awfully forgiving Open, at least by the standards of a major that takes pleasure in being known as golf’s most treacherous.The first round on Thursday included two players, Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele, racing into the record books with 62s that were the lowest single-round scores in Open history. The field as a whole posted a first-round scoring average of 71.38, the lowest mark in Open history.Friday sometimes seemed to have as many safe harbors as punishments, even as green speeds picked up and the course played a little firmer. Dustin Johnson, who had a quadruple bogey on the second hole on Friday, proceeded to card five birdies and enter the weekend at six under. Harris English began his Friday at three under and wound up at seven under. Wyndham Clark, who has never made a U.S. Open cut, held the lead for a time, having fired a 64 on Thursday and a 67 on Friday.The dynamic has left wait-them-out players like Koepka, who was at even par after the second round, in a peculiar spot: still in the field but not much in the mix (yet), wondering whether a war of attrition will, or can, emerge fast enough on a course where the first tee looks toward the Beverly Hilton and California’s “June Gloom” is often looming.“I won majors on golf courses that I haven’t really liked too much,” Koepka, who tied for second at the Masters in April and won last month’s P.G.A. Championship by two strokes, said on Friday. “But, yeah, this one, I don’t know, it’s just — it’s not my favorite.”The weather forecast for the weekend suggests that the course could become a little more perilous — “Hopefully,” said Cameron Smith, “this place gets really baked out and we can have some fun out there” — and the U.S. Golf Association could impose diabolical pin placements to help achieve what nature cannot. On Friday, the tees were back, and Charley Hoffman, who is playing his ninth Open, cautioned that organizers “haven’t tricked anything up yet” with pin locations.“If you’re in position, you can attack,” said Hoffman, who shot a 67 on Friday to bring his tournament score to two under. “If you’re not, you are sort of trying to make par.”Still, course commentary has often seemed like a study in gentility, just about a month after players raved over the revamped Oak Hill Country Club, which hosted the P.G.A. Championship that concluded with 11 players under par. Around the time Koepka walked off the course on Friday afternoon, with the last tee times still to come for the 156-man field, 35 players were under par for the week, including Rory McIlroy, who picked up three strokes on Friday to stand at eight under heading into the third round.Koepka, left, with a caddie and Rory McIlroy, right, who headed into the weekend at eight under.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesOnly a handful of headliners were in jeopardy of missing the cut as the U.S.G.A., which spent the previous months mulling how to set up one of the widest Open courses in memory, looked toward the weekend.In some ways, the association is learning as it goes, with Los Angeles the third course to make its Open debut in the past decade. The other two offered wildly different winning scores. Erin Hills, a par-72 course, saw Koepka win with a 272. At Chambers Bay, a par-70 setting, Jordan Spieth’s five-under showing was enough.“Obviously now they can see, hey, we can put a little bit more into it, so, yeah, I would be expecting a little tougher over the weekend,” Padraig Harrington, a three-time major winner, said of the tournament organizers. He noted that players see the ideal tournament as playing to 14 under and that the U.S.G.A. could grow flustered at the notion of a winning score belonging to a golfer in double-digits below par on Sunday evening.Harrington, after all, had been quoted in the Irish press this week as signaling a willingness to surrender “body parts” to be at four under after the final round. It was a number, he mused after his Friday round that put him at two over, that was now apparent would not be enough to win this tournament, given the conditions and the scoring.“They’re not giving up body parts for that anymore,” he said.McIlroy, who played in Koepka’s group on Thursday and Friday, confessed that he, too, had not anticipated seeing so many low numbers.“The course has played maybe a little easier than everyone thought it would, but wouldn’t be surprised on Saturday/Sunday to see it bite back,” he said, adding: “It should be tough. It should be just as much of a mental grind out there as a physical one.”Koepka, the sensation of this spring in golf, could not hope for much more. But he was skeptical on Friday that the course could be made sufficiently fearsome in a hurry, perhaps opening the way for him to rise on the leaderboard.In the meantime, he suggested, Los Angeles seemed like a better place for an ordinary round, not one of the ones that really count. More

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      Rickie Fowler Reserves His Flash for the U.S. Open’s First Round

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      Fowler no longer wears blinding colors and his shaggy hair is long gone. But after years of struggle at major tournaments, the popular golfer quietly made U.S. Open history on Thursday.No golf fans followed Rickie Fowler on Thursday dressed the same as he was. That used to be a thing in 2010 when Fowler, then 22, rode his relaxed dirt-biking roots and a boy band vibe complete with a top-to-toe orange outfit and a flat-brim hat to enormous popularity.Fowler, now 34 and a husband and father, was still dapper in Thursday’s first round of the U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club but hardly flashy in a soft blue-gray pullover with white trim that matched his white cap, pants and shoes.The crowds were somewhat understated, too. Nine holes into his round, which had started on the 10th hole, a packed grandstand politely applauded when Fowler made a birdie putt to tie for the tournament lead at three under par. A fan called out, “Keep it going, Rickie.” But the reaction was hardly the same as the raucous quasi delirium that the longhaired younger Fowler once elicited.Finally, as he marched toward his final nine holes, the volume began to ratchet up. With five birdies and four pars in the closing nine holes, Fowler shot an eight-under 62. It was the lowest round in the history of the U.S. Open. Not long after, Xander Schauffele would match it.That did not alter the quiet smile on Fowler’s face as he hugged a group of friends and colleagues afterward. They had watched his many recent struggles on the golf course — “dark days,” he once called them — and admired how his countenance had never changed.“He’s always been the same guy,” said Justin Rose, who had played with Fowler on Thursday and shot a disappointing 76. “It was fun to watch Rickie today. That was the highlight of my day. Good for him.”Thursday’s result was something of a surprise for Fowler, but not a shock. He has been predicting some kind of revival for months. Once the fourth-ranked golfer in the world, Fowler had plummeted all the way to No. 173 last year. In 2014, he had finished in the top five at each of the four major tournaments. By 2022, he had played in only one, the P.G.A. Championship, and finished tied for 23rd.People wondered if he would defect to the LIV Golf circuit just to get a final big paycheck while his name still meant something. But Fowler stayed with his PGA Tour pals Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, with whom he once took beach vacations, and persevered. He could regularly be seen alone, grinding on the range or practicing putting by himself late in the afternoon or evening during tournaments.Fowler, left, and Jason Day walk from the eighth green on Thursday.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockLast month, after several encouraging results, Fowler vaulted back into the top 50 of the rankings, which qualified him for last month’s P.G.A. Championship. Fowler talked as if he had turned a corner.“Getting back to this stage, I mean, it’s never fun,” he said. “But in many ways, I’ve actually enjoyed it. I learned things about myself. Not that I lost faith, but I came to almost embrace the grind.”To that end, Fowler would have been forgiven if he had sauntered around the L.A. Country Club grounds on Thursday with a giant grin that never left his face. But interestingly, Fowler was mostly stoic, flashing a thin smile occasionally. When he sank a three-foot putt for par on his final hole — the uphill, par-3 ninth hole — he barely raised his right hand to acknowledge the cheers roaring from a nearby grandstand.Interviewed afterward, Fowler maintained his laid-back mien. He insisted he was actually uncomfortable with the L.A. Country Club layout for most of his practice rounds.“Then, yesterday, finally a couple things clicked and that gave me confidence,” he said, admitting that it had not hurt to have birdied three of his first five holes (with one bogey mixed in).Having started his round just after 8 a.m. Pacific time, Fowler reached the halfway point of his round before 10:30 a.m. when a late arriving fandom had yet to fill the grandstands or line the fairways. But as Fowler birdied the first, second and third holes (his 10th, 11th and 12th holes played), larger crowds found Fowler on the golf course. They were treated to a show.At the drivable par-4 sixth hole, he hit a long iron to 51 yards and then spun a wedge shot to within eight feet and sank that putt for birdie. On the par-5 eighth hole, his drive found the devilish barranca right of the fairway, but he rescued himself with a gutsy chip back into the fairway. “I tried not to overthink it and take too long with that recovery,” he said. His pitch to the green left a 13-foot left-to-right birdie putt that Fowler sank with aplomb.A record low U.S. Open score was on the table with a closing-hole par, which Fowler also made look easy, despite having to sink a dicey final putt.“This week is off to a good start,” he said moments later — nonchalantly, as if that were all his performance meant to him.Later, he would reveal otherwise. Asked to characterize his journey from 173rd in the world to a record-setting round in the national championship, Fowler said: “It’s definitely been long and tough. A lot longer being in that situation than you’d ever want to. But it makes it so worth it having gone through that and being back where we are now.” More

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      Max Homa Takes His Star Turn at the U.S. Open

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      The California native had previously played well at Los Angeles Country Club, but first rounds at major tournaments haven’t always gone smoothly. On Thursday, he found his game for a two-under 68.For a decade now, Max Homa has had regrets.A gettable birdie on the Los Angeles Country Club’s sixth hole had eluded him. On No. 8, it took him three putts to find the cup.He finished that round in 2013 with a course-record 61. In his mind, his scorecard could have read — should have read — 59. The U.S. Open, which began Thursday at the course that still haunts one of its one-round masters a little, could allow him to cast just about all of that aside by Sunday night.If Homa can move beyond the past. If he can ratchet down his internal insistence on flawlessness when he plays golf’s most formidable tests. If he can tolerate the pressures and distractions and expectations of being a guy from Los Angeles County who is positioned to star at a U.S. Open just a few traffic nightmares away from the public course he grew up playing in Valencia.“I am good enough to win whatever I want — I’ve decided that,” Homa, who finished Thursday with a two-under-par 68, said in a recent interview. “I need to go out and do that.”Few players have been as good during this PGA Tour season. Homa has won twice, most recently in January at Torrey Pines, and had seven other top-10 finishes, including a runner-up showing at the Genesis Invitational, played at the nearby Riviera Country Club.But the major tournaments have been the scenes of stumbles. He tied for 43rd at the Masters Tournament and fared even worse at last month’s P.G.A. Championship. Last year, the P.G.A. Championship had been the site of his best major tournament outing, a tie for 13th.Homa was in the middle of his group with Scottie Scheffler at three under par and Collin Morikawa finishing at one under par.Harry How/Getty ImagesEntering this week’s Open, though, Homa saw the course as favorable to his game, given his particular skill at high shots and comfort, dating back a decade, with the four- and five-irons that L.A.C.C. can demand.No, he knew, his problem this week would probably not be technical or mechanical. His most pressing dilemma was to settle his mind well enough that he could play a major without punishing himself for this error or that one.“It just feels like at the majors when I’ve done a poor job, I feel like I’ve been trying to be perfect,” he said. “I don’t need to feel and play perfect to contend.”The approach worked well enough on Thursday, the day that has so often frustrated Homa on the biggest stages. His performance tied his best opening round at any major tournament; he first played one in 2013, when he missed the cut at the U.S. Open at Merion.In more familiar environs, Homa notched his first birdie on the third hole. At the sixth hole — a par-4 of 330 yards that can thwart players with a blind tee shot and a green that can feel remarkably tight for a region so familiar with sprawl — Homa made the birdie that did not happen during his fabled Pac-12 Championship round. A bogey at the seventh hole brought him back to one under, before he birdied No. 8, the other source of his could-have-been-better misery. He played the back nine to even par.When he stepped off the course early Thursday afternoon, he was near the top of the leaderboard but trailing Rickie Fowler, who shot a 62, the lowest single-round score in U.S. Open history, by six strokes. (Xander Schauffele soon after turned in the same score: 62, tying Branden Grace’s major tournament record from the 2017 British Open at Royal Birkdale.)Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player and a member of Homa’s group, finished his round at three under par. Collin Morikawa, the two-time major tournament winner and another star from Southern California, was one over.Homa played his shot from the 11th tee during the first round.Harry How/Getty ImagesBryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, who was in another group, finished his day tied with Scheffler, Paul Barjon and Si Woo Kim.“There are going to be times that people hit it in the rough, and I think the person that’s going to win is going to hit the most fairways and going to make the most putts and also hit it on the greens,” said DeChambeau, who won the Open at Winged Foot the same year Homa went eight over par in the first round. “It’s a simple formula, obviously. But again, you have to execute it, right? That’s the whole point of a U.S. Open.”It is, DeChambeau added, supposed to be rigorous.Homa, of course, reveled in his Thursday even as he cautioned that it was much too early to declare anything close to a victory. He had a Thursday morning tee time, when the course was in the realm of soft, to start. By Friday afternoon, he warned, the place could be hellish.The U.S. Golf Association is hardly known for indulging easy Opens.The association’s devilish concoctions will be Friday’s problem, though. Thursday, with greens that were not exacting and a course receptive to strong iron play, was merely a start.“From the first tee to the last putt, I was very accepting and just looked at today as just a round of golf that will set me up toward the rest of the week,” Homa said after he had finished his round. “I think that they have the old cliché that you can’t win it the first day, you could lose it, and I lose a lot of these things on the first day.”Maybe something clicked these last few weeks as he contemplated how to manage the atmospherics that accompany playing a major tournament close to home.“There’s obviously, in ways, more pressure, but that’s coming from outside expectation that because a championship is in my backyard, quote-unquote, that I should now be a favorite to win,” he said in the interview. “On the inside, it’s just cool.”Homa signed autographs for a group of young fans during the practice round on Wednesday.Meg Oliphant for The New York TimesSo he was concentrating on the simple things, like smiling. What would happen, he wondered, if he treated preparations for the Open as if they were as pleasurable as those for an ordinary tour event with lower stakes?He could do nothing, he acknowledged, to combat what everyone else would think, the cheers that would rumble from the galleries, the groans that perhaps lurked, too.Carefree, or at least as carefree as a professional golfer can get at a U.S. Open, was the strategy.After all, he said, “I’m getting to do something I would have lost my mind about as a kid.”On Thursday afternoon, he recalled, that Pac-12 Championship in 2013 had felt like “the biggest thing in the world.”“This,” he added, “is quite a bit bigger.” More

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      What’s a Barranca? U.S. Open Golfers Hope They Don’t Find Out.

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      The Los Angeles Country Club’s barranca, a narrow gully, winds through the course, providing drainage during rainy season and a challenge to the players.Not many major golf championships have also served as an opportunity for fans to broaden their vocabulary, but this year’s U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club may do just that. Across the four days of the tournament, beginning Thursday, expect broadcasters — and perhaps the golfers — to routinely use a word that may be unfamiliar to many in the international viewing audience.The word is barranca — pronounced “burr-ahng-kuh” — and it describes a narrow, winding, steep-walled gully or river gorge typically found in Southern California landscapes.The barranca on the L.A. Country Club’s North Course comes into play repeatedly during the 18 holes, especially as protection in and around the greens. Errant golf balls that land inside the barranca may be unplayable and result in a one-stroke penalty. In other instances, expect to see competitors descending into the barranca with hopes of rescuing their golf balls. It may be a successful recovery ploy, or it might just provide a good photo op — a golfer submerged several feet below the fairway thrashing away to try to make par.The L.A. Country Club barranca, however, is far from a random curio of the course layout. It serves an important, effective drainage role during rainy seasons and adds a natural, craggy aesthetic to the course design, which originated in the 1920s. By the 2010s, however, the barranca, which meanders throughout the property with tributaries extending in multiple directions, had largely been grassed over. A renovation of the grounds, completed in 2017, by the golf architect Gil Hanse, with his design partner, Jim Wagner, and a design consultant, Geoff Shackelford, restored the barranca to its original appearance — and tactical purpose.Meg Oliphant for The New York TimesMeg Oliphant for The New York TimesIt first comes into play on the second hole, a 497-yard par 4 where players will face a long approach shot over the barranca. The golfers will encounter the barranca five other times on the front nine.At the 520-yard, par-4 17th, Hanse removed several trees so the serpentine barranca would be visible from the tee, reminding players of the danger that lurked. It could test the nerves of the tournament leaders entering the championship’s penultimate hole in Sunday’s final round.“The barranca just flows throughout,” John Bodenhamer, the chief championships officer of the United States Golf Association, which conducts the U.S. Open, said on Wednesday. “There’s a brilliance to how it is used.”Bodenhamer added that the barranca had three feet of water running through it when he visited the site in March. The water was still as high as two feet last month. But with a limited amount of rainfall in June, Shackelford said on Wednesday, the barranca was now mostly sandy or dry, a condition that was expected and desired.“You’ll see players playing out of them — that’s how they were intended,” Bodenhamer said. “You’ll see a lot of heroic shots, a lot of excitement. The barranca is just magnificent.”And maybe educational, especially to those hoping to add to their vocabulary.The barranca snakes through the course, including near the fourth green.Meg Oliphant for The New York Times More

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      Our Golf Reporter Didn’t See the PGA Tour-LIV Golf Deal Coming, Either

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      The announced deal to drastically change golf took nearly everyone by surprise.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Alan Blinder’s plans blew up around 10 a.m. last Tuesday.Mr. Blinder, who covers golf for The New York Times, had just settled in at his home office when he received a heads-up from a source with some gobsmacking news: The PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the insurgent league bankrolled by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, had agreed to a partnership, suspending a bitter and costly struggle for supremacy of men’s professional golf.“I shouted down the hall to my wife that LIV and the PGA Tour were joining forces, and that I probably wouldn’t be around for dinner,” Mr. Blinder said in an interview. “And then I got to work.” He barely left his desk for the next 13 hours.Below, Mr. Blinder shares how he pivoted from shock to covering the news, the implications of the deal beyond sports and the questions he still has heading in to the U.S. Open, which begins today at the Los Angeles Country Club. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How surprised were you?It was one of those things that people thought was a distinct possibility at some point in the future, but all the reporting we had done, all the signals were that the tour and LIV were preparing to fight each other in court for the foreseeable future. There was a monstrous case in a federal court in California involving contract interference and antitrust law. And suddenly that was all set to vanish.Who was the first person you called?My editors, to tell them that their day was about to get blown up, too. We published an article reporting the news less than 10 minutes after I told my editors, and that soon grew into live coverage. Once the news was published, I tried to figure out, in detail, what on earth had happened and what it meant. Because the announcement was steeped in legalese and jargon, I spent the rest of the day on the phone with sources and experts both inside and outside of golf just trying to understand what this framework agreement meant.Why is this happening now?The most significant factor is that the PGA Tour was under increasing financial strain. I’m not saying the tour was going to go broke tomorrow, but I think the tour realized it was in an exceptionally expensive fight that was not going to get any easier. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has gobs of money, but it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing from its perspective, either. LIV had faced some pretty significant setbacks in court.Who stands to benefit the most from the deal?It depends on your perspective. The PGA Tour is arguing that it’s going to have a majority of the board seats and its commissioner, Jay Monahan, as the new company’s C.E.O. Its supporters are insistent that they still control the game of golf, that they are the majority stakeholder in this endeavor. But the Saudis have significant influence. The governor of Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is going to be this new entity’s chairman, and the Saudis have extensive rights to invest in this partnership. How this actually looks going forward remains to be seen.Will we see a loosening of PGA Tour standards to align more with the LIV Golf version of the game, which includes music at events, looser dress codes and no cuts of golfers?The PGA Tour is saying that it still has control over all the competition and play. We’re not expecting the overarching rules of golf to change, in part because the tour doesn’t control them. Could you see some elements of LIV borrowed and integrated into the PGA Tour? Perhaps. The PGA Tour is trying to appeal to a younger audience and broaden the appeal of the game.There have been vows from Washington to slow or stop the deal — or, at least, make it very uncomfortable for golf executives. What are the odds that lawmakers will succeed in blocking the deal?A lot of experts expect the Justice Department to go to court to try to either block the deal or insist upon changes. This is also somewhat unusual because it’s not like this deal was announced last week and suddenly the Justice Department was intrigued by pro golf. Their antitrust folks had already spent months and months and months looking at professional golf. So they have a bit of a head start if they really want to scrutinize this deal.Why should people who don’t follow golf care?This is a golf story, but it’s a story that could play out in other sports going forward. Is it possible that we will see Saudi Arabia or other wealthy states try to make their mark on other sports?This is not just a story of sports, or business, or geopolitics. It’s a story that includes all of those different threads and more. We had a big article in Monday’s paper that had four bylines on it, and only two of them were the bylines of sportswriters.What are the biggest questions you have going forward?Beyond tour memberships and where you play, how does golf kind of take a breath after all this tumult? The golf industry is a pretty small world. A lot of people know one another well and have known one another for a long time, so they’ve really been shaken up over the last year. So one of the big questions is, when do all these wounds get patched up? More

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      U.S.G.A. Steadfast in Plan to Curb Pro Golfers’ Driving Distances

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      Players are objecting to a proposed change from golf’s rulemakers to use new balls, but the U.S. Golf Association said Wednesday it would not abandon the plan.The United States Golf Association acknowledged Wednesday that it had heard ferocious opposition to its proposal for professional players to use balls that travel shorter distances — but it also signaled no interest in abandoning its ambitions to rein in equipment in the next several years.The association and the R&A, a governing body based in Britain, had in March proposed a rule that they estimated could trim top golfers’ tee shots by an average of about 15 yards. Framed as an effort to preserve the sport and the relevance of many of its finest courses, the proposal provoked a backlash among hard-driving professionals, who are routinely hitting tee shots at distances that were all but unimaginable only a few decades ago, and equipment manufacturers, who relish selling weekend duffers the same balls the stars strike at events like this week’s U.S. Open.“Our intent is pure; it’s not malicious,” Fred Perpall, the U.S.G.A.’s president, said at a news conference at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the Open will begin on Thursday. “We’re not trying to do something to damage anyone. We’re thinking about all the good that this good game has given us, and we’re thinking about what is our responsibility to make sure that this game is still strong and healthy 50 years from now for our children’s children.”The debate about distance in golf has played out for years, with executives increasingly irritated with stopgap fixes, like redesigning holes to accommodate the game’s most potent hitters. Some of the sport’s retired greats, including Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, have pressed golf’s rule book writers to take blunt and urgent action.“Not everybody’s got the ability to go buy the golf course next door, like you do at Augusta,” Nicklaus said in an interview with The New York Times at the Masters Tournament in April. “You can’t just keep buying land and adding. We used to have in this country probably a couple of thousand golf courses that could be tournament golf courses. Today, we maybe have 100.”In the 2003 season, PGA Tour players recorded an average driving distance of about 286 yards, with nine golfers, including Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and John Daly, typically hitting at least 300 yards off the tee. So far this season, the tour’s average driving distance stands at nearly 298 yards. Some 91 players — up nearly 10 percent since the U.S.G.A. and the R&A released their proposal — exceed 300 yards on average.Under the plan, balls that travel more than 317 yards when struck at 127 miles per hour would generally be banned.The U.S.G.A. and the R&A are gathering feedback about their proposal, which would not take effect until at least 2026 and would be classified as a model local rule, empowering individual tours and events to adopt it. The U.S.G.A. and the R&A would almost certainly impose the rule at the events they control, including the U.S. Open and the British Open, two of the four men’s major championships.But other golf power brokers, including the PGA Tour, have not embraced the plan, and many of the game’s biggest stars have openly resisted the thought of deliberately curbing distance.Even those who have been receptive to the prospect of making balls seem a little less like long-distance missiles have urged golf’s leaders to have a consistent standard throughout the game, without differences for top-tier professionals.Under the plan, balls that travel more than 317 yards when struck at 127 miles per hour would generally be banned.Desiree Rios/The New York Times“I just don’t think you should have a ball for the pros that might be used some tournaments, might not be used some tournaments, then amateurs can buy different golf balls,” said Matt Fitzpatrick, who won last year’s U.S. Open. “I don’t think that would work.”Tour players recently met privately in Ohio with U.S.G.A. officials and manufacturers to discuss the proposal, and Patrick Cantlay, who is No. 4 in the Official World Golf Ranking, said this week that “tensions were high” in those sessions.“Seems like golf is in a good spot, and doing anything that could potentially harm that would be foolish,” Cantlay said.Mike Whan, the U.S.G.A.’s chief executive, said Wednesday that he was sensitive to the concerns bubbling up from players and suggested that the governing bodies could tweak their proposals in the months ahead. But he emphasized that the U.S.G.A. is also concerned about the millions of golfers who are not professionals and neither he nor Perpall indicated plans for a wholesale surrender.“If you’re going to take on significant governance decisions that you think are going to help the game be stronger in 20 and 40 years, you can’t expect everybody to like those decisions, and that’s part of governance,” Whan said. “You have to decide whether or not you can stand up for what you think is the game long-term, knowing that maybe 20 percent or 30 percent or 50 percent like it and the others don’t. But I think the feedback process is important and it makes us better. Even when we don’t like the feedback we get, it makes us better.”Whan and Perpall’s impassioned defense unfolded as one of golf’s most influential figures, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, was absent from the U.S. Open course. The tour disclosed late Tuesday that he was “recuperating from a medical situation” and that two other executives, Ron Price and Tyler Dennis, had indefinitely assumed day-to-day oversight of the circuit’s operations.The announcement that Monahan had stepped back followed seven days of turmoil in professional golf. Last Tuesday, the tour announced that it planned to partner with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the force behind the LIV Golf league that upended the sport, after months of depicting Saudi money as tainted. Monahan, who helped to negotiate the deal, was criticized as a cash-hungry hypocrite, but he has retained at least some crucial allies inside the tour.“Jay is a human being,” Webb Simpson, the 2012 U.S. Open winner and a member of the tour’s board, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Golf is a game, and oftentimes, we make golf into something so much bigger than it is and we dehumanize people.” Perhaps, he said, Tuesday’s announcement would give “people a little perspective.”But Simpson said he knew nothing about Monahan’s status beyond the tour’s initial statement. The tour has declined to elaborate on it or to give a projected timeline for Monahan’s return.Price and Dennis said in a statement that their priority was “to support our players and continue the work underway to further lead the PGA Tour and golf’s future.”In its own statement on Wednesday, the wealth fund “committed to working closely with the PGA leadership and board to advance our previously announced transaction to invest significantly in the growth of golf for the benefit of players, fans and the expansion of the game around the world.” More