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      ‘Different Than What You Expect From a Los Angeles Golf Course’

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      For much of Collin Morikawa’s life, the Los Angeles Country Club was a mystery.The course, designed in 1921 by George C. Thomas Jr. with its North Course restored by the architect Gil Hanse in 2010, was off-limits to most — even Morikawa, a son of Southern California and one of its most promising golfers.But entering this week’s U.S. Open, he is one of a handful of professionals with meaningful experience at the club, which has not hosted a PGA Tour event since 1940 and has never been in the spotlight of a major tournament. Its most recent high-profile competition was the 2017 Walker Cup, an amateur team event played every two years. The United States won that year with a team that included Scottie Scheffler and Morikawa, who first got to play the course when he was a student at the University of California, Berkeley.“It’s demanding — it’s very different than what you expect from a Los Angeles golf course,” Morikawa said in an interview. “The grasses are very different. The West Coast is known for Kikuyu grass and very sticky poa annua greens, bumpy greens in the afternoon. That’s not what Los Angeles Country Club is.”Instead, players will confront a course of Bermuda grass, with bentgrass on greens that Morikawa sees as PGA Tour-like because of their slopes and designs. This year’s Open will include five par-3 holes for the first time since 1947, when Lew Worsham beat Sam Snead in an 18-hole playoff at St. Louis Country Club.Morikawa does not see that as a problem.“Just because there is a heavy focus on par-3s at L.A.C.C. doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a great championship golf course,” he said.No. 6Par 4, 330 yardsThe club’s first five holes pose challenges, but in Morikawa’s mind, it is not until No. 6 that the course offers a fearsome proposition of risk and reward. For the field, it will appear to be an eminently drivable par-4, even with a blind tee shot.But if the greens are as ferocious as the United States Golf Association hopes, good luck. The depth of the green demands perfect distance control, Morikawa said. The ideal landing zone is perhaps five yards in diameter and a bad bounce sends the ball toward the long rough.“Let’s just say it’s 295, 300 yards,” he said. “From that distance, no one is that accurate to hit every drive within a five-yard diameter.” Instead, he said he expects players to layup, often from somewhere between 215 and 240 yards, leaving enough space to the green to test their wedge games. (Morikawa said this week that his caddie had persuaded him to consider going for it instead of laying up.)“When you show up on six, you’re going to be thinking birdie,” he said. “But you’re going to see a lot of bogeys because of how difficult the strategy is going to be.”Nos. 6 and 8 — a par-5 hole measuring 547 yards — at Los Angeles, he said, can be like the second and third holes at Augusta National Golf Club, where players eagerly seek the low scores that are there for the taking.“You want to walk out under par, you have to play smart and you can’t be too aggressive,” he said.No. 9Par 3, 171 yardsFairly few ninth holes are par-3s — the last U.S. Open to have a par-3 on No. 9 was the 2017 edition at Erin Hills in Wisconsin — but the trek back toward the clubhouse includes one Morikawa has judged “deceiving.”A back pin might be merely 200 yards away, but Morikawa warned that the challenge comes from the slope of the green.“With fast greens, if you’re behind the hole, you’re going to be hoping for a two-putt par,” he said. Excessive aggression could very well land a player and his ball in the bunker and poised for a bogey.“For the most part, you’re going to be putting from the middle of the green,” Morikawa said. “You’re going to take four pars and walk out of there very, very happy.”No. 11Par 3, 290 yardsGet over the distraction, on a clear day at least, of the Los Angeles skyline, and face the downhill hole that is the course’s longest par-3. Thanks to its length, Morikawa figures it will be playing somewhere between 200 and 270 yards.“It’s going to be tricky because you have to land it in the right spot,” said Morikawa, who predicted that some in the field would see their tee shots land perhaps 15 yards short of the green and end up dealing with a 30- or 40-yard pitch shot.“If you miss it left, it’s going to run off,” he said of the hole, where the front of the green includes a slope that can fuel headaches if a player is too aggressive toward a back pin. “If you miss it right, it’s going to run off.”Even though the hole is formally a par-3, Morikawa predicted at least some high scores because of its length.No. 13Par 4, 507 yardsWhen Morikawa imagines a quintessential par-4 hole at a U.S. Open, he pictures No. 13: “Long, demanding. You’re going to have a long iron in, the tee box is miles away from the 12th green.”OK, maybe not miles, but it might feel like it after 12 holes of championship golf.And just about everyone — long hitters, short hitters, guys in between — is going to need to keep his tee shot to the left.“Long hitters who hit it right, it’s going to kick down the slope, right into the right rough,” said Morikawa, describing the perils for much of the modern Open field. In Los Angeles, the challenge with the right rough is that it all but forces the player to take a second shot with little visibility.A poor drive, Morikawa said, might require a 5-wood.He is expecting plenty of up-and-downs, and lag putt after lag putt, on a test that has plenty of angles along the way.“It’s a very long hole, but the green in regulation percentage is not going to be there,” he said.No. 14Par 5, 623 yardsThe lone par-5 hole on the back nine, No. 14 first demands that players decide whether they want to try to carry its right bunker. Even with the distances pros are logging off the tee, there will be only a handful who can carry the bunker and will also dare to try it, knowing that they need a drive of 310 yards or so.Edging toward the left, Morikawa said, will leave a player farther from the hole — and “it’s not the easiest layup because the fairways are going to be so narrow.” Being stuck in the rough for a third shot, he said, can be especially troublesome if a right pin is in play for the day because of how the green slopes.“No. 14 is going to require a lot of precision,” Morikawa said. “With 14, if you are a long hitter, you can go for it, push it up there, have a nice little wedge shot and make birdie.”There will be what Morikawa classifies as “stupid bogeys” since the hole is a par-5, ending a four-hole stretch where he senses the Open will not be won, but can be lost.“I think I’ll be pretty happy if I walk out of those holes even par throughout the week,” he said. More

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      At the U.S. Open, the Los Angeles Country Club Has a Rare Collection of Par 3s

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      There will be five of them at Los Angeles Country Club, including one with a stunning view of the city.If there were ever a postcard of the Los Angeles Country Club, it would show the breathtaking view from the tee box on the par-3 11th hole. Downhill and in the distance, the towers of the city skyline frame an elevated, sloping green that’s protected by three bear claw-shaped bunkers.The hole, however, is symbolic for more than its vista. It is one of five par 3s on the North Course, site of the 123rd United States Open that begins on Thursday. Together, these assorted holes are a rare sight, because the typical U.S. Open course features only four par-3 holes.In an era where massive drives are routine, this distinctive feature will test the accuracy of players trying to gauge par-3 flagsticks from as close as about 100 yards or from as far away as nearly 300. The holes form a prized collection of gems as the club hosts its first major tournament.“I think the membership looks at each of them individually because they are so different,” said Richard Shortz, past president of the club and co-chairman of the U.S. Open Committee, of the way club members see the holes. “They’re proud of them all, but they’re not clustered in a way that you can classify all five.”Justin Thomas playing a shot from a bunker on the 15th hole, one of the five par-3 holes at the L.A.C.C.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesOne, though, deserves special classification: the 15th. That’s the hole for aces.Last October, Shortz was playing the course. The 15th hole played at just 78 yards during the 2017 Walker Cup, but on the day that Shortz played, it was playing at 120, because the flag was farther back in the green. Shortz struck a clean hit with his 9-iron and felt like the ball might be close to the hole. But with the pin hidden behind the front bunker, Shortz still took out his putter.When he approached the green, he didn’t see the ball until he peered into the cup, and grinned. It was Shortz’s first hole in one on the 15th.Looking ahead to the Open, he made a bold prediction for a hole that’s listed on the tournament’s scorecard at 124 yards.“I think on 15 we’ll see some holes in one,” said Shortz, who is an older brother of Will, The New York Times crossword creator. “It’s not as though it will be easy. If someone hits the right shot, well, these guys are good.”There have been noteworthy holes in one in the past month: from the Southern California club professional Michael Block at the P.G.A. Championship and from Scottie Scheffler at the Charles Schwab Challenge the following week.Scheffler, ranked No. 1 in the world, may have an advantage because he competed six years ago at the Los Angeles Country Club as an amateur in the Walker Cup, along with Collin Morikawa, who is scheduled to play in the Open.Judging by statistics, the leaders in par 3s on the PGA Tour could also be favorites: The world No. 2 Jon Rahm is ranked first in this category (averaging 2.92 strokes), followed by Max Homa (2.94). Scheffler ranks fifth.In 2013, Homa, then a senior at the University of California at Berkeley, shot a first-round 61 at the Los Angeles Country Club, en route to winning the PAC-12 tournament. Rahm, then a freshman at Arizona State, finished 10th.Still, that limited experience may not guarantee success, said the architect Gil Hanse, who in 2010 restored the George C. Thomas Jr. design from 1928.“The par 3s are not going to favor one particular type of player,” Hanse said. “Here, because you’re talking about accuracy with the wedge versus accuracy with a 3-wood, that’s a big gap to have, to have one player be able to accomplish all of those things.”Jeff Hall, the U.S.G.A.’s championship director who set up the 7,421-yard, par-70 course for the Open, marveled at the “dramatic variety” of these so-called short holes. The two longest par 3s are the 228-yard fourth and the 290-yard 11th.“Just week in and week out on tour there are just not a lot of par-3 holes that play to these kind of numbers,” he said.Each of the par 3s is problematic in its own way, marked by natural hazards and firm, tricky greens.The first par 3 — the 228-yard fourth hole — features a barranca, a dry, sandy ravine typical of Southern California, which slithers like an anaconda through the front nine. At the fourth hole, it lurks in front and then curls back behind the green. There are also two bunkers sloped off the sides of the green.“It’s a smallish target for a long hole with a lot of trouble around it,” Hanse said.In 1927 and 1928, when Thomas worked with Billy Bell to improve the original 1921 design of W. Herbert Fowler, he created some par 3s with flexibility to play as par 4s. The 284-yard seventh hole is one of those. It’s a par 3 for the Open, and it could also play at 264 yards, depending on where the tee is, Hall said.Dustin Johnson, center, lining up a putt on the seventh green at the L.A.C.C. Many have found the green especially hard to read, because of the hole’s topography.Harry How/Getty ImagesThe seventh green, though, will be particularly difficult to read because of the topography. “You feel like the putts aren’t as uphill as they actually are, because your eyes fall to the barranca, thinking it’s more downhill,” Hanse said.Following the par-5 547-yard eighth hole — one of three par 5s on the course, which is also one more than usual for a U.S. Open — players come to the final par 3 on the front nine. The ninth hole measures 171 yards on the scorecard.“It feels like it’s a level hole, but it’s really uphill and deceptive,” Hanse said. “There are four distinct quadrants in the green to move the pin around.”During a tournament, officials change the location of the pin not only to reduce wear on the greens, but also to challenge the players. Hall, who oversees the course setup in his role as the golf association’s championship director, explained that tee boxes at the Los Angeles club also have some room for the tees to move up or back. So, depending on the tee and the pin locations for a certain day, golfers could be dealing with a 30-yard variance on the eighth hole, he said.Doc Redman, Collin Morikawa, and Scottie Scheffler, left to right, played the course during the 2017 Walker Cup. Morikawa and Scheffler are scheduled to return to the course at the Open this week. Harry How/Getty ImagesThe next par 3, the 11th, will test players’ adaptability. From afar, “it’s such an amazing view, sometimes you want to stand there and not hit the tee shot,” said Shortz, the past president of the club.Up close, the 11th offers a history lesson. The green is modeled after Scotland’s 15th hole on the West Links Course at the North Berwick Golf Club. In the 19th century, when a veteran of the Crimean War was playing that famous hole, he noticed that the green protruded in front and then sloped downward right to left; the shape reminded him of a fortress from Sevastopol.The triangle jutting out beside the fortress’s entry point was called a redan. The redan has since become a feature that golf course architects love working into their course designs.For his part, Thomas turned the Los Angeles Country Club’s 11th hole into a reverse redan because the green, 39 yards deep, slopes down left to right. But the downhill carries only halfway through the green because it turns slightly uphill again, Hanse said.“It was actually quite a monumental achievement when you look at how much dirt they moved to create that,” he said. “If you look down the valley, all of a sudden there’s this protrusion of a green that sticks out into it, and that didn’t happen naturally.”The final par 3, the 15th, comes after the course’s longest hole, the par-5 623-yard 14th. Considering the 15th is followed by three stout par 4s, the first two averaging 531 yards and then the 18th at 492 yards, players might be tempted to be too aggressive on the 15th to birdie the hole before facing the rigors of the next three.Beware: Hanse put in a slight hump dividing the front sliver of the green and the main back portion of the 15th.“It’s not OK just to hit the green,” Hanse said. “You have to hit the green within the green in order to not have to worry about three-putting.”Or, like Shortz, you could just bury it in the hole and not worry at all. More

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      The U.S. Open Returns to Los Angeles After 75 Years

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      The last time it was there, Ben Hogan set an Open record. This time, players will have to get used to a course few of them have seen.Lights, cameras, championship golf.As the United States Open comes to the Los Angeles Country Club on Thursday, it will be the first time in 75 years that the championship has been played in the shadow of Hollywood.The last time the event came to Los Angeles, in 1948, it was unforgettable. Ben Hogan won at the Riviera Country Club and set a U.S. Open scoring record that stood until 2000 when Tiger Woods broke it.While Los Angeles has not hosted a U.S. Open since 1948, the championship has often been contested in California. Pebble Beach Golf Links in Northern California is now part of the regular U.S. Open rotation — it’s also where Woods broke Hogan’s scoring record in relation to par — and Torrey Pines in San Diego hosted in 2021. The Olympic Club in San Francisco has held five U.S. Opens.But the private and exclusive Los Angeles Country Club, or L.A.C.C. as it’s commonly known, has long been on the United States Golf Association’s short list of venues it wanted to host a U.S. Open. It’s a classic design, by George C. Thomas Jr., who was part of an influential group of early 20th-century architects. It has challenging and uneven terrain. And it sits in Beverly Hills, with views of the Los Angeles skyline.Walter Hagen teeing off during the Los Angeles Open golf tournament at the Los Angeles Country Club in 1935. Historically, the private club has been reticent about hosting a major championship.Associated PressUntil a decade ago, club leadership had demurred about hosting a championship. But in 2017, the club held the Walker Cup, a biannual match pitting the top amateur players in the United States against their counterparts from Great Britain and Ireland, and that experience changed the membership’s view of opening up its private course.John Bodenhamer, the U.S.G.A.’s chief championship officer, said there wouldn’t be this U.S. Open without that successful Walker Cup. In 2010, as the course was being restored by Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner and Geoff Shackelford, Richard Shortz, then the club president, inquired about hosting a Walker Cup, which the association approved. The players at that tournament loved the course, and that led Shortz, who is an older brother of Will, The New York Times crossword creator, to ask about hosting a U.S. Open.The golf association said yes, but then came the hard part: logistics.“It wasn’t easy from the standpoint of, ‘How do we do this in the middle of Los Angeles?’” Bodenhamer said. “Where do we house the players? How do we manage the traffic? How do we build a city within a city?”Yet the great interest in the course pushed the event forward. In many ways, it’s like inviting the public inside one of the Beverly Hills mansions around the club. So many have tried to steal a glimpse from the road, but few have ever been inside.“I played in the Pacific Coast Amateur when it was at L.A.C.C. in the ’80s,” Bodenhamer, the U.S.G.A. championships officer, said. “I remember setting foot through the door and seeing this place in the middle of Beverly Hills and saying, ‘This is crazy.’ All the celebrity houses on holes. But as I played, it was just so different than anything I’d ever seen.”This year, the golfers who will really know the course are those who have played it before: Collin Morikawa and Scottie Scheffler, who played it during the Walker Cup and qualified for the U.S. Open, and Max Homa and Jon Rahm, who played it during the 2013 PAC-12 tournament. Similar tournament knowledge proved valuable last year for Matthew Fitzpatrick, who won the 2022 U.S. Open at the Country Club in Brookline, Mass., after winning the 2013 U.S. Amateur Championship on the same course.Because few professionals have played L.A.C.C. in tournament conditions, Shackelford is both worried and excited to see how it holds up to the best players in the world.In addition to working on the course restoration in 2010, Shackelford wrote the biography “The Captain: George C. Thomas Jr. and His Golf Architecture,” and is also the author of “Golf Architecture for Normal People”; he said he’s concerned about how players would react to what he considered a nuanced, complicated course.“I’m nervous about what they might say,” he said. “I want them to like the course. I want them to enjoy it. This course has elements that will take some time to get to know. Those who do get to know it will have a good week. Those who don’t won’t.”He has been consulting with the golf association on where to put the pins on the greens and the markers on the tees, but he also recognizes that, at the end of the day, it’s a huge stage.JJ Bennett working on the ninth hole at the Los Angeles Country Club. John Bodenhamer described the club as “this marvelous rural oasis in this urban setting.” Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated Press“They haven’t really had a good test run,” he said. “The Walker Cup is a great event, but it’s not the same thing. They’ve just never had anything with the quality of players and the number of them.”Bodenhamer said the golf association was confident in the course’s star turn, despite some challenging weather — like more rain than usual — leading up to the event. “We’ve studied all the wind and weather patterns, but who knows,” he said.There’s also a certain liberation and excitement of going to a course so few people know.“I’m excited about the mystery and the allure of what L.A.C.C. means for caddies, fans, viewers,” he said. “People are going to turn on the TV and say, ‘Wow, that’s a lot different for a U.S. Open.’”“L.A.C.C. is this marvelous rural oasis in this urban setting,” he added. “It’s so natural, it’s gnarly.”One player who knows it well is confident the course will hold up and that the players will do well. Stewart Hagestad, a member of the 2017 Walker Cup team and a longtime club member, downplayed the need for local knowledge.“When I was picked for the Walker Cup team, I wanted to be this big brother player,” he said. “The reality is, these are the best players in the world, and their golf I.Q.s are so high that it doesn’t take a lot of trips around the place to understand it. It just comes down to execution.”Hagestad, who won the United States Mid-Amateur Championship twice and almost qualified for this U.S. Open, made one prediction that runs contrary to the Open’s ethos.“L.A.C.C. will have a score lower to par than a lot of people are expecting,” he said. “What makes major championships is weather. On Saturday at the Country Club” in Massachusetts last year, “it was cool and windy. Right now, in L.A., the low temp goes between 56 and 59 degrees and the high is from 68 to 73. The wind is going to blow six [miles per hour] and gust to eight.”Beautiful conditions, but Hagestad did have a warning: If the greens start to glow pink or purple, that’s not Hollywood makeup— its bent grass surface has been sped up beyond what players can imagine. More

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      For Corey Pavin, the Right Club for a U.S. Open Win

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      He took the 1995 U.S. Open when he picked a 4-wood on the final hole and hit a shot that is still remembered.The United States Open, which begins Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club, has featured plenty of memorable shots over the years. One was the 4-wood struck by Corey Pavin on the final hole of the 1995 Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southhampton, N.Y.Pavin, clinging to a one-stroke lead, knocked his approach from about 2225 yards away to within five feet of the pin. He missed the birdie putt but prevailed by two.“The shot of his life,” Johnny Miller of NBC called it at the time.Pavin, 63, who played on the golf team at U.C.L.A., recently reflected on what happened in 1995 and on the course that players will encounter this week.The conversation has been edited and condensed.Where’s the 4-wood these days?The 4-wood is in a nice case in storage at the moment. I had it in a house on display. When we moved, we didn’t have enough room for it.Did you use it after the Open?I used it for a couple more years and then switched to a different club.What options did you consider for the shot?I was carrying a 2-iron in my bag, as well. I said, [to his caddie] “Do you think I can get a 2-iron there?” He said, “No, I don’t. I think it’s a 4-wood.” I said, “I agree.” That was our conversation. It was very short, to the point, with no doubt on what club I should hit.Did you know right away that you were on target?When I made contact with the ball, I knew it was really good. I hit it just the way I wanted to. I had the exact same shot on Friday and hit a 4-wood onto the green, as well. So I had a good picture in my head because I did it on Friday.Did the shot receive so much attention because it was hit with a 4-wood?A fairway wood is somewhat unique to hit a second shot on a par-4 on the 72nd hole. I was 35, had won 12 tournaments at that time and hadn’t won a major, that was a factor as well.“If I had gone my whole career and hadn’t won a major, I would have been bothered by it,” Pavin said.Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWas it eating away at you that you hadn’t won a major?It was one of my goals, certainly, at that point in my career. I don’t know if eating away is the right way to say it, but I wanted to win a major very badly. If I had gone my whole career and hadn’t won a major, I would have been bothered by it.How do you assess your career?When I started on tour, if somebody had told me, “You’re going to win 15 tournaments with one of them being a major,” I would have told them they were probably crazy. I never had a long-term goal like that. My goal every year was to win at least one tournament, play consistent golf at the highest level I could.Did you play the Los Angeles Country Club when you were in college?We played just a couple of times. It’s a beautiful golf course. I think it’s going to hold its own pretty well.Is there a unique challenge for the guys or is it a typical Open layout?One challenge is that nobody has ever really seen it in tournament conditions. I’m not sure how it’s going to be set up. Chipping out of [the Bermuda rough] is very difficult. And hitting full shots out of it is very hard.Why did the Ryder Cup bring out the best in you?I love the Ryder Cup. The pressure there is 100 times stronger than anything I’ve ever felt. When I feel that pressure it makes me concentrate and focus even better. You don’t get a chance to represent your country very often.Any regrets about your time as captain in 2010?It was a fantastic experience. Of course, I wish we would have won, but I have no regrets on how I went about it. I was as thorough as I could be, gathered as much information as I could and made decisions based on that information. More

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      PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan Steps Back after ‘Medical Situation”

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      The tour did not elaborate on Jay Monahan’s condition but said two other executives would oversee operations during his absence.The PGA Tour said Tuesday night that Jay Monahan, its commissioner, was “recuperating from a medical situation” and that two of its other executives would oversee the tour’s day-to-day operations for the time being.The tour’s four-sentence statement came one week after Monahan, 53, announced that the tour had reached a partnership deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which bankrolled the LIV Golf league that has clashed with Monahan’s circuit for more than a year.Monahan, the tour’s commissioner since 2017, was one of the lead negotiators during the secret talks, which led to a deal that has stirred a furor among players, outrage on Capitol Hill and the prospect that the Justice Department will seek to block the arrangement. He has spent recent days crafting a response to a crush of opposition to the deal, including a session with players he called “heated,” a contentious news conference, a town-hall meeting with tour employees in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and a pointed letter to lawmakers in Washington.The tour did not elaborate on Monahan’s condition but said that its board “fully supports Jay and appreciates everyone respecting his privacy.”The tour did not give a timeline for Monahan’s return and said that Ron Price, the circuit’s chief operating officer, and Tyler Dennis, the president of the PGA Tour, would take charge in the interim.Monahan has worked for the tour since 2008, with stints as its chief operating officer, its chief marketing officer and as executive director of the Players Championship. Under the deal that Monahan helped broker this spring after he spent months condemning the rush of Saudi cash into men’s professional golf, the moneymaking components of the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour are to be housed in a new company.Monahan is expected to be its chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund, is in line for its chairmanship. Monahan and his lieutenants have insisted that the company’s structure, which allows for extensive Saudi investment, will give the PGA Tour ultimate authority over the most elite tiers of professional golf. But al-Rumayyan’s role and the potential for significant infusions of Saudi cash have helped stir doubts about the extent of Monahan’s authority.It is not clear when the deal will close, but the agreement has been the subject of intense discussion and skepticism among players at the U.S. Open, where competition is scheduled to begin Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club. More

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      Tiger Woods, Forced to Miss the U.S. Open, Is Everywhere

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      Who can forget Woods’s U.S. Open win by 15 strokes at Pebble Beach in 2000, or his 19-hole playoff in 2008 at Torrey Pines? “It does feel wrong that he’s not here,” his fellow Californian Max Homa says.The U.S. Open will be played in Los Angeles this week for the first time in 75 years, and there is a predominant California theme to the event. Many of the top contenders at the tournament grew up nearby. More than a dozen in the field were raised in California or call it home.All of which makes it seem almost wrong, or cruel, that the best California golfer in history will not be competing. Tiger Woods, who grew up in Cypress, Calif., about 30 miles from the site of this year’s national golf championship, is unable to play at the Los Angeles Country Club after ankle surgery in April. It will be the ninth major championship Woods has had to skip, or leave prematurely, since the harrowing 2021 car crash that nearly led to a leg amputation and has significantly inhibited Woods’s ability to play, and walk, a golf course since.Not surprisingly, even in absentia, Woods’s presence is felt. Especially here. Especially at the U.S. Open, which Woods has won three times — usually in dramatic, unforgettable fashion.Although, as Max Homa, a California native and the world’s seventh-ranked golfer, said as he practiced his chipping on Tuesday morning: “Tiger is so transcendent that you could argue that he’s especially missed at any event anywhere. But yeah, it does feel wrong that he’s not here. That’s fair to say if you look at the history of the game.”Fans in Tiger Woods branded gear around the course at the U.S. Open.Meg Oliphant for The New York TimesCollin Morikawa, who was born in Los Angeles two months before Woods won his first major championship in 1997 and who has since won the P.G.A. Championship and British Open, said Woods’s influence on golf was so great that he wondered how many of today’s best players would even be playing the game this week if not for him.“He’s maybe not the sole reason why we got involved in the game,” Morikawa said of Woods, and then added, “But for me growing up, he’s all I cared about.”With a smile, Morikawa went on to describe how he had enjoyed getting to know major champions like Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas in recent years.“But I didn’t care about them when I was growing up — I really didn’t,” Morikawa said. “People ask me about the history of Rory winning this or certain guys winning that. I didn’t really care. I only cared about Tiger.“So, yeah, I think he’s always missed. But he’s always going to impact this game in ways that we can’t even describe, in ways that we don’t even know.”Woods, whose total of 15 major championship victories is second only to Jack Nicklaus’s 18 titles, has also seemed to save some of his most memorable performances for when the U.S. Open arrived in his home state.In 2000, at Pebble Beach Golf Links, he won by an astounding 15 strokes, which set the event record for largest margin of victory. Eight years later at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego, Woods, who had not played for two months because of two stress fractures and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left leg, managed to tie for the tournament lead with Rocco Mediate after four grueling rounds.Woods on his way to winning the 100th U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in 2000.Elise Amendola/Associated PressA playoff the next day put Woods through 19 more taxing holes before he claimed the championship.Those were Woods’s U.S. Open highlights, but he has also had six other top 10 finishes. The last decade, however, has largely reflected the decline in Woods’s physical well-being. Now 47, he last played the U.S. Open in 2020, when he missed the cut. In the previous nine U.S. Opens, he was in the field only five times. He missed the cut twice, and his best result was a tie for 21st.Since his inspirational victory at the 2019 Masters, Woods has only completed four rounds at a major championship four times. Which brings to mind Woods’s plaintive comment on the eve of this year’s Masters: “I don’t know how many of these I have left.”In that way, his absence at this week’s U.S. Open is another reminder that Woods is being forced to cede the spotlight he has commanded for more than 25 years.But those following in his considerable wake are not allowing him to be forgotten.“His presence in the game of golf is always known because he’s impacted this game in ways that some of us could only dream of,” Morikawa said. “For him, it’s just about getting healthy at this point. Who knows when we’re going to see him or not? I don’t think any of us take that for granted anymore.”Late Tuesday morning, practicing with the Los Angeles skyline in the background, Homa was asked if California golfers had a sense of pride that Woods was one of them.“Maybe it goes deeper,” Homa answered. “I find a sense of pride in the fact that the best golfer of all time grew up playing on a very average municipal golf course. So did I.“I don’t know if it’s a California thing — but I do think that’s just cool.” More

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      At The U.S. Open, Golfers Are Focused On LIV’s Merger With PGA Tour

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      Golfers competing in Los Angeles this week were caught off guard by the news that the PGA Tour and LIV had planned to join forces. Now they have to try to win a major.Jon Rahm was at home last Tuesday, preparing coffee with his children underfoot, when the news arrived in a flood of text messages. Collin Morikawa glanced at Twitter and saw the word there. During breakfast at Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Brooks Koepka peered at a television and glimpsed a headline.What was clear Tuesday — one week after the PGA Tour said it intended to join forces with the Saudi wealth fund whose LIV Golf league had fractured the sport — was that the deal Rahm, Morikawa and Koepka heard about in real time had been golf’s version of a flash grenade: stunning, staggering, disorienting.And now, the effects lingering, they need to play the U.S. Open, a major tournament, which will begin Thursday at Los Angeles Country Club. Some escape, huh?“I think there’s more guys that are puzzled about what the future holds,” Jason Day, who had a stint as the world’s top-ranked player soon after he won the 2015 P.G.A. Championship, said in an interview by a practice putting green.“Some guys are emotional, I think, on both sides, which is very much understandable,” added Day, a PGA Tour fixture who turned professional in 2006. “I think we’ve just kind of got to let things settle and see where things are spread out on the table once we kind of know where things are progressing.”It is hardly an optimal outlook just before the third men’s major championship of the year. But it is a pervasive one, and it will assuredly aid the United States Golf Association’s preference for Opens that compel players to use their minds as much as their clubs.No Open in recent memory may demand more compartmentalization from the field.“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Jon Rahm said.Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s a lot of not-answered questions,” Rahm, who opened the 2023 majors cycle with a victory at the Masters Tournament in April, said on Tuesday. “It’s tough when it’s the week before a major. Trying not to think about it as much as possible.”For many of the elite players who could contend for the trophy this weekend in Los Angeles, turbulence in their professional lives, aside from driving, chipping and putting, has been historically scarce.The PGA Tour was unchallenged as the world’s premier circuit for most of a period that began during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and the players who kept their tour cards were rewarded handsomely for performing well in events from Torrey Pines in San Diego to Sea Pines in Hilton Head Island, S.C.LIV’s thunderous emergence last year proved a most severe test of the tour’s supremacy and cast a haze over professional golf. For the first time in generations, the PGA Tour was not the unrivaled signature show in American men’s golf.Now, with the PGA Tour and LIV poised to amass their moneymaking ventures inside one new company led by the tour commissioner and chaired by the Saudi wealth fund’s governor, the dimensions of professional golf are hazier, even for the sport’s biggest names.Will LIV exist in a year’s time? How might players who defected from the tour to LIV be allowed to return? Should golfers who remained devoted to the tour be compensated for their loyalty? And what about all of that money, said to be $100 million or more in some instances, that the wealth fund promised LIV golfers?The deal emerged from seven weeks of secret talks that began with a WhatsApp message on April 18, continued in London, Venice and San Francisco, and culminated in an announcement in New York last Tuesday. Much about the framework agreement, though, is unclear, with bankers and lawyers still rushing to fill in blanks on matters as weighty as asset valuation. Golf executives have suggested that months could pass before the deal closes, and some are privately acknowledging that the shoals before and beyond a closing may not be easy. (“I don’t have enough information about the deal yet to have an unfavorable or favorable view about it,” Patrick Cantlay, a player who is on the PGA Tour’s board, said on Tuesday.)In the meantime, some players suggested that they would simply settle for an answer, or answers, to their most essential questions.“We all want to know the why,” Morikawa said. “We’re so interested in the why. For us, for me right now, it’s just like what’s going to happen? I don’t know. But we always want to know that why answer — like, what’s the purpose behind it? But I think there’s so many different parties involved that there’s too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella.”Substantive answers are unlikely to emerge between now and Thursday’s first tee shots, leaving players to wonder and worry ahead of a tournament that can earn any one of them a spot in history.For Collin Morikawa, the question in the air on the merger seemed to be “Why?”Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Rahm said. “You’re going to need to access every single aspect of your game to win a championship like this. I think it becomes more of a mental factor, not overdoing it at home. You can never really replicate U.S. Open conditions.”Koepka, among the finest major tournament golfers ever, signaled that he had tried to excise any talk of the deal during his preparations for a course he played years ago, and primarily remembered for the Playboy Mansion’s presence on the back nine.“There’s four weeks a year I really care about and this is one of them and I want to play well, so I wasn’t going to waste any time on news that happened last week,” said Koepka, the LIV star who tied for second at the Masters in April and then won the P.G.A. Championship in May near Rochester, N.Y.Last Tuesday, he recalled, he saw the news and then went out to practice.The sport itself, after all, is to come center stage on Thursday, and the questions are not fading — or being answered — this week or next or the next.“There is potential of it being a really, really good thing for golf,” Day said. “But I feel like it’s too early to kind of even say anything like that because you just don’t know where things are going to fall.”For now, he said, “I’m trying to win a tournament.”On that much, PGA Tour and LIV golfers agree — once they stop thinking about last week. More

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      The Titanic PGA and LIV Golf Deal Stokes Anger on Capitol Hill

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      American lawmakers and officials are studying the pact between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.One of golf’s greatest tests will unfold starting on Thursday, when the U.S. Open begins at the Los Angeles Country Club. It might be an easier lift — it will assuredly be a shorter one — than the test that is emerging in Washington.The abrupt announcement last week that the PGA Tour will tie itself to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and its LIV Golf league is provoking American officials in ways as predictable as they might be persistent in the months ahead.Antitrust experts are insisting that the Justice Department should consider suing to stop the agreement, which calls for the business operations of LIV and the PGA Tour to be brought into one new company, if the deal closes in the coming months. Lawmakers are complaining that the Florida-based PGA Tour is lurching into business with an arm of the Saudi state that it roundly condemned until last week. Political strategists are scrambling to shape perceptions of an agreement that was forged in secret and, upon its release, promptly criticized as a well-heeled exercise in hypocrisy and whitewashing.Whether the commotion will amount to anything beyond a few news cycles of fussing — a successful assault on the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status comes to mind — may not be clear for months. But a week into golf’s latest maelstrom, a deal that could eventually prove lucrative for players and executives is already promising a booming era for lawyers, lobbyists and political sound bites, too.Although golf had been under pressure inside the Justice Department, where antitrust regulators were looking at the PGA Tour, the announcement last week brought the tumult to Capitol Hill.In the House, Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, swiftly introduced a bill to revoke the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status. And in the Senate, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, announced on Monday that a subcommittee he chairs would conduct an inquiry into a deal that he said “raises concerns about the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.”At the U.S. Open in Los Angeles this week, PGA Tour golfers like Jon Rahm will be playing with men like Sergio Garcia, who defected to LIV last year.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesThat there would be a battle was never much in question. The principal short-term matter to resolve was who, exactly, would be picking which fights.The golf side of the battle features two forces with formidable records across decades in Washington. Even though Saudi Arabia has had plenty of bipartisan tangles, the kingdom’s officials and allies have often enjoyed an uncommon rapport with their American counterparts, as was on display during a visit from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week. And the PGA Tour has usually found the capital to be a wellspring of courtesy, especially when its supporters helped short-circuit a Federal Trade Commission inquiry in the 1990s.The trouble for the wealth fund and the tour is that Washington also has a bipartisan affection for lawmakers imitating sports executives, and browbeating actual ones, in public and in private. It can be good politics to glower at the commissioners who draw more jeers than many elected officials, and headline-making hostility from Congress could complicate the golf industry’s quest to sell the deal to the public — and then move past it.The tour and the wealth fund can take some comfort in history, which suggests a successful congressional effort to thwart the deal directly is unlikely. The Hill, though, could still seek to make the transaction painful beyond a feisty public hearing or two. A change to the tour’s tax status, like the one envisioned in the bill introduced in the House, could cost it millions of dollars a year because it has been structured as a “business league” that is exempt from taxes under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.Groups like the PGA Tour have combated legislative headaches surrounding their tax-exempt status in the past, with one effort to end the practice for sports leagues vanishing from a 2017 tax bill at the last moment. In the past 18 months, years after the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball surrendered their exempt statuses, public records show that the tour has spent at least $640,000 on lobbying, with much of that work tied to “tax legislation affecting exempt organizations.”As a part of his inquiry, Blumenthal on Monday demanded documents related to the tour’s tax-exempt status and, in his letter to the tour, wondered whether the deal would allow a foreign government to “indirectly benefit from provisions in U.S. tax laws meant to promote not-for-profit business associations.”Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, similarly seethed that the tour had “moved itself right to the top of the leaderboard in terms of most questionable tax exemptions in professional sports.”But Wyden has also suggested that the deal should run into resistance before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a Treasury Department-led committee that examines national security implications of foreign investments in real estate and American companies.Whether there are serious national security concerns about a deal involving golf tours, or whether the committee will even review the agreement at all, is unclear. Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, said last week that it was “not immediately obvious” to her that the agreement related to national security. But Wyden, who is planning a congressional investigation of his own, has signaled his interest in the department’s exploring whether the deal could give “the Saudi regime inappropriate control or access to U.S. real estate,” most likely through the tour’s Tournament Players Club collection of golf courses.And those are just the spats that have erupted since last Tuesday.The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, left, and Jimmy Dunne, a board member, were closely involved in the merger negotiations.Getty ImagesUrged on by LIV’s lawyers, Justice Department regulators have spent months examining whether the PGA Tour’s tactics to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league were illegal, and whether the tour’s coziness with other leading golf organizations — like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament — violated federal law. Instead of quieting misgivings about golf, the deal has only intensified them and might have even armed the department with a new lever: suing to stop the pact, which the tour and wealth fund deny amounts to a merger.“Generally, we want to encourage parties to settle their disputes outside of the judicial process, but it doesn’t mean that settlements are immune from antitrust,” said Henry J. Hauser, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who now practices at Perkins Coie, one of the capital’s best-connected firms. “If companies try to resolve a legitimate dispute by agreeing to common conditions that stifle competition, that could be a problem.”The Justice Department has declined to comment.The tour is moving aggressively to curb Washington’s irritation, going as far to suggest that Congress and other parts of the federal government could have done more to help it rebuff a Saudi challenge.“While we are grateful for the written declarations of support we received from certain members, we were largely left on our own to fend off the attacks, ostensibly due to the United States’ complex geopolitical alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, wrote in a letter to lawmakers last week. “This left the very real prospect of another decade of expensive and distracting litigation and the PGA Tour’s long-term existence under threat.”In the penultimate sentence of his letter, Monahan described the tour as “an American institution,” just as Blumenthal would on Monday. But like many executives before him, Monahan is finding that Washington is forever eager to scrutinize American institutions, especially when sports are involved.He may ultimately find that the shouting has only just begun.Lauren Hirsch More