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    At the Masters, Champions Past, Present and Future

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

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      Masters 2024: Five Players to Watch

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

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      Bernhard Langer, a Masters Stalwart for 40 Years, Sits This One Out

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      He first played in the tournament in 1982 and has won it twice, but a pickleball injury, of all things, has him sidelined.Bernhard Langer was set to play in his final Masters Tournament this week. He first played there in 1982, when he was cut, and he has missed only the 2011 Masters, because of a thumb injury, since he won his first in 1985.This year’s event was supposed to be a valedictory for a player, who, at 66, had also won the tournament in 1993 and contended in the final round as recently as 2020, when he finished tied for 29th. That put him a stroke ahead of Bryson DeChambeau, the reigning United States Open champion at the time, who consistently out-drove Langer by about 100 yards all week.Instead, the perennially fit Langer was felled by something that has likely taken down some of his Florida neighbors who aren’t two-time Masters champions: a pickleball injury.It could have been worse, he said in an interview in March. A neighbor who is a foot and ankle surgeon ran over when he saw Langer drop to the ground and sent Langer for an M.R.I. He had torn his Achilles’ tendon, and the doctor got him into a stabilizing boot so he wouldn’t injure his foot further.“I started rehab three days after surgery,” he said.It’s a tough way for a golf great to go down. But the more remarkable feat might be that Langer lasted this long at this level. While aging rockers like the Rolling Stones can just keep replaying their hits, golfers have to continue producing exceptional shots against players a third their age.Langer, right, received a Masters green jacket from Ben Crenshaw after winning the tournament for the first time in 1985.John Iacono/Sports Illustrated, via Getty ImagesLanger won the Masters a second time in 1993.Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Did Jon Rahm Choose for the Masters Dinner Menu?

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      The winner of the most hallowed event in professional golf gets to design the menu (and pay) for the next year’s champions dinner. Jon Rahm, the 2023 winner, supplied a recipe from his grandmother.The winner of the Masters Tournament gets a green jacket, an elegantly engraved trophy and a lifetime invitation to play one of the most revered events in professional golf.He also has the chance to plan a dinner the next spring for other Masters winners (and to pick up the check for one of the most exclusive evenings in sports).“How rare is it to get everybody like that in a room where it’s just us?” Scottie Scheffler said hours before his dinner last year with 32 fellow Masters champions and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, the site of the tournament.“There’s nobody else,” Scheffler continued. “There’s the chairman and then there’s us.”And at a tournament where the concessions are legendary, the pressure is forever on the new champion to pick a menu that befits the moment. Tiger Woods offered up cheeseburgers and milkshakes after his debut Masters victory in 1997, but over the years built menus that included sushi, porterhouse steaks and chocolate truffle cake. Sandy Lyle went with haggis after his 1988 win. Vijay Singh’s selection of Thai food thrilled some players and flabbergasted others.Cheeseburger sliders, made to Scheffler’s specifications, were also on the menu at the dinner in 2023.Scheffler brainstormed his menu with his wife and his agent, starting with a list of the golfer’s favorite foods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jack Burke Jr., Who Won 2 Major Golf Titles in a Season, Dies at 100

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      A top professional in the postwar years, he won the Masters and the P.G.A. championships in 1956. At his death he was the oldest living champion of both.Jack Burke Jr., a top player on the P.G.A. tour in the postwar years who won two major golf championships in one season, then became a sought-after instructor to some of the game’s greatest stars, died on Friday in Houston. He was 100 and the oldest living winner of the Masters and P.G.A. championships.A representative of the Texas Sports Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 1978, confirmed the death.Burke’s banner year was 1956, when he won both the Masters and P.G.A. titles and was named the P.G.A.’s golfer of the year.His Masters victory surprised almost everyone.Only weeks earlier, having gone winless since the Inverness open in Ohio in 1953, Burke, who was 33, had announced that he was considering retiring. And going into the final round at Augusta National Golf Club, he was eight strokes behind the Masters leader, Ken Venturi, and had not drawn much attention.All eyes had been on Venturi, who at 24 was vying to become the first amateur to win the Masters. But as Venturi faltered, Burke crept up the leaderboard, passing eight players, and won by a stroke.He had received some meteorological help.“I had a downhill putt on the 17th hole that was lightning quick, and it was made even faster because the 40-mile-per-hour wind had blown sand out onto the green,” Burke told Golf Digest in 2004. “I just touched that putt, and I immediately thought, ‘Oh, no, I didn’t get it halfway there.’ Then the wind grabbed that thing and kept blowing it down the hill, until it plunked dead in the middle of the hole. It was a miracle — the best break of my career.”The golfer, and previous Masters winner, Carey Middlecoff helped Burke slip on the traditional green jacket after Burke’s 1956 victory. At right was Bobby Jones, the founder of the Masters.Associated PressThat June, Burke won the P.G.A. championship, defeating Ted Kroll, at the Blue Hill Country Club in Canton, Mass., in match-play format, which is based on holes won in a head-to-head contest and not the number of strokes on a scorecard.All told, Burke won 16 tournaments on the Professional Golfers’ Association of America tour, including four in four weeks in 1952.The son of a Houston golf club pro, Burke turned professional at 17 and joined the tour at 23, hailed as one of the most promising golfers of his generation.In 1949, Burke, by then living in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y., in Sullivan County, recorded his first professional win, in the Metropolitan Open, on his home course, the Metropolis Country Club, in White Plains, defeating the veteran Gene Sarazen. The victory came 24 years to the day after Burke’s father defeated Sarazen in a tournament, as Sarazen ruefully but good-naturedly pointed out to Jack Jr.In 1952, after his four straight tour victories and a second-place finish at the Masters, behind Sam Snead, Burke was profiled by Collier’s magazine as “Golf’s New Hot-Shot.” At 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds, he could hit 265 yards off the tee and was an excellent putter. His boyish good looks only added to his appeal.“His curly faintly auburn hair, blue eyes and occasional shy smile have made him the darling of the feminine links addicts,” the magazine wrote, identifying Burke as “one of golf’s most eligible bachelors.”In 1957 Burke joined his mentor, Jimmy Demaret, the first three-time Masters champion, in founding the Champions Golf Club in Houston. Demaret had been an assistant pro under Burke’s father since Jack Jr. was 10.Burke and Demaret instituted a membership policy — still in force — under which only golfers with a handicap of 14 or lower are admitted. “I liken us to Stanford University, or Yale or Harvard,” Burke told Golf Digest. “They don’t accept D students academically, and we don’t accept people with a D average in golf.”The club hosted the 1969 United States Open and the 2020 U.S. Women’s Open Championship, among other tournaments.Burke in 2004 at the Champions Golf Club in Houston. He founded the club in 1957 with his mentor Jimmy Demaret, a former golf champion.Darren Carroll/Getty ImagesBurke went on to earn distinction as a longtime instructor of Phil Mickelson, Hal Sutton, Steve Elkington and other professionals. In his 70s, Arnold Palmer dropped by for a lesson.Jack Nicklaus once said of Burke, “I can’t tell you how many times we were playing golf and he’d say, ‘Jack, how are you going to play from that position?’”John Joseph Burke Jr. was born on Jan. 29, 1923, in Fort Worth, the eldest of eight siblings, one of whom died young. He grew up in Houston, where his father, who had tied for second in the 1920 U.S. Open, was the pro at the River Oaks Country Club.Jack Jr. first played golf at age 6. At 12, he shot a 69 on a tough par-71 course. At 16, he qualified for the U.S. Open. But at 17, at the insistence of his mother, he entered Rice Institute (now Rice University) in Houston. He left before he completed his freshman year, however, and became the head pro at the Galveston Country Club.When World War II broke out, Burke joined the Marine Corps and taught combat conditioning, including judo. He joined the P.G.A. tour after the war (it officially became the PGA Tour in 1968), moved to New York State and also taught golf at clubs in New Jersey and New York City.He first gained wide attention in 1951, when he recorded two commanding victories in that year’s Ryder Cup competition. That led to his selection to four more Ryder Cup events in the 1950s, in which he compiled a 7-1 match record against his European competition. He was twice Ryder Cup captain, losing in 1957 and winning in 1973.In 1952, he won the Vardon Trophy, given to the tour leader in scoring average. (His was 70.54.) When Burke was 81, Hall Sutton, the 2004 United States Ryder Cup captain, named him an assistant captain.Burke was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2003, he was voted the recipient of the PGA Tour’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the United States Golf Association’s Bob Jones Award. In 2007, he received the P.G.A. Distinguished Service Award.Burke married Ielene Lang in 1952. She died in the mid-1980s. He had turned 60 when he met Robin Moran, a freshman golfer at the University of Texas, in 1984 on the putting green at the Champions Golf Club, where her father had sent her for a golf lesson, according to the P.G.A. historian Bob Denney. The couple married in 1987. She was a finalist in the 1997 United States women’s amateur championship and was also inducted into the Texas Golf Hall of Fame. She survives him.Burke had a daughter with his second wife and five children with his first, including a son, John J. Burke III, who died in 2017. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.Burke joined elite company by winning two majors in a single season, but by his own choice he would never have a shot at a grand slam, as it is understood today, by winning all four, either in a single season or in a career. He missed the cut at the 1956 U.S. Open, at Oak Hill Country Club, outside Rochester, and he never played in the British Open.Frank Litsky, a longtime Times sportswriter, died in 2018. William McDonald and Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting. More

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      At the British Open, a Mom’s Influence Looms Large for Many Golfers

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      Golf has long had a tradition of fathers and sons, but when the British Open was last held at Royal Liverpool in 2014, Rory McIlroy put golf’s moms on equal footing.In the beginning, there was Old Tom Morris and his son, Tommy, both of St. Andrews. The father won the British Open — the only championship then — four times and his namesake son won it four times, too. Yes, wet wool, 19th-century golf, in all its paternalistic glory. The men marched off the first tee and into a heavy sea wind and nobody knew when, or if, they would come back.And ever since, fathers have been raising sons in the game, both generations dreaming of hoisted trophies. O.B. Keeler spilled barrels of ink writing about Bobby Jones and his little-boy-blue start in golf at the behest of his golf-loving father, Robert Purmedus Jones (also known as ‘The Colonel’) who was a prosperous Atlanta lawyer.If Arnold Palmer said it once, he said it a thousand times: his father, Deacon, the course superintendent and head pro at Latrobe Country Club in western Pennsylvania, taught young Arnold how to grip a club once and only once. Palmer never changed it.Jack Nicklaus’s pharmacist father, Charlie, a three-sport athlete at Ohio State, started his son, Jackie, in golf as an oversized 10-year-old in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 1950, at their club, Scioto Country Club. Mid-country, midcentury — middle class, at its most northern tier. Donald Hall’s “Fathers Playing Catch with Sons” is largely about baseball but Charlie and Jackie on the course in the 1950s could have fit right in.Twelve years later, Jack Nicklaus defeated Arnold Palmer in an 18-hole playoff at Oakmont Country Club and claimed the first of his record 18 major titles, the 1962 U.S. Open. It was Father’s Day. Since then (after a date change) most U.S. Opens have concluded on Father’s Day and most years the father-son relationship is an elemental part of the winner’s life story.This next phrase is known throughout golf: Tiger and Earl. The green-side hug between father and son after Woods won the 1997 Masters Tournament is one of the iconic moments in golf history. It was Tiger’s first major as a pro and he won by 12 shots. Nine years later, Woods fell into his caddie’s arms, after winning the British Open at Royal Liverpool, 10 weeks after Earl Woods died at age 74.Tiger Woods and his father Earl after Woods won the 1997 Masters.Associated Press Photo Dave MartinBut in 2014 Royal Liverpool became the scene of an evolving narrative when Rory McIlroy, 25-years-old and the lone child of working-class parents from outside Belfast, won the British Open. It was his third major title and in a lovely, old-fashioned gesture at the awards presentation, with thousands of fans ringing the 18th green, McIlroy dedicated the win to his mother.“This is the first major I’ve won when my mum has been here,” he said. “Mum, this one’s for you.”Rosie McDonald McIlroy, who helped pay for her son’s overseas junior-golf travel by way of her shift work at a 3M plant, was beaming. Later, she tentatively put several fingers on the winner’s claret jug as her son grasped it tightly.Five years later, Woods won the 2019 Masters. It was kind of a shocker: he hadn’t won a major in 11 years. In victory, his mother, Kultida, born and raised in Thailand, was standing in a grassy knob about 10 yards off the 18th green. She couldn’t see her son’s winning putt, but she could hear the thunderous response to it. Her face was painted in pride. In victory, Woods spoke in a soft voice about how his mother would rise at 5:30 in the morning to drive Tiger in a Plymouth Duster to nine-hole Pee-wee tournaments, 90 minutes there, 90 minutes back.Last year, when Woods was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, ‘Tida,’ known within Woods’s tight circle for being tough and direct, was in the first row, beaming just as Rosie McIlroy was in 2014.Kultida Woods smiled as Tiger Woods made his way toward his family after winning the 2019 Masters.Mike Segar/ReutersWoods talked, without notes, about the many times his mother brought him to a par-3 course near Tiger’s boyhood home in Southern California, giving him 50 cents for a hot dog and 25 cents for the end-of-day call home. Woods staked his early and successful putting contests with those quarters his mother gave him. Tiger, telling personal stories about his mother, and Tida, laughing with cameras on her, was a rare personal moment for both.This year at the Los Angeles Country Club the final round of the U.S. Open fell, as usual, on Father’s Day, but the day belonged to a mother and her son.The winner Wyndham Clark had heard Woods talk about his own mother at Augusta National during the Masters and at the Hall of Fame induction. It stuck with him.Breast cancer had ended his mother Lise Clark’s life 10 years ago, when Wyndham was still a teenager. He nearly quit golf after she died. He said his mother had a nickname for him — ‘Winner’ — and had a two-word mantra for him: “Play big.”The technical aspects of the game were not her forte. They weren’t for Rose McIlroy or Tida Woods, either.When Clark was in high school, his mother came to one of his matches. She watched him make an eight-foot putt and clapped enthusiastically for her son.“Mom,” Clark told mother as he came off the green. “I just made triple bogey.”Mom didn’t know and mom didn’t care. Her son had holed a putt.Minutes after winning the U.S. Open, Clark said, “I just felt like my mom was watching over me today.” Mother’s Day, in a manner of speaking. A wistful one.“I just felt like my mom was watching over me today,” Wyndham Clark said after winning the U.S. Open in June.Matt York/Associated PressAnd now the British Open was once again at Royal Liverpool. After two rounds the English golfer Tommy Fleetwood was alone in second place, five shots behind the leader, Brian Harman. Everywhere Fleetwood goes on the course he is greeted as “Tommy-lad.” Even McIlroy went out his way to find Fleetwood, after an opening-round 66, to give him a “Tommy-lad!” of his own.Fleetwood, one of the most likable players in the game today, grew up in modest circumstances about 30 miles north, in Southport, where his mother was a hairdresser. Fleetwood has a distinct look, an upturned nose that is often sunburned, blue eyes that look almost plugged in, and long, flowing hair. Sue Fleetwood longed to cut her son’s hair but Tommy-lad wouldn’t have it. Sue Fleetwood died last year at 60, two years after a cancer diagnosis.“She took me everywhere,” Fleetwood said Friday night, on the one-year anniversary of her death. Rain was starting to fall and the air was cooling.“She was always the driver. She would always take me to the range. To the golf course. To wherever I wanted to go. She was always a very supporting influence. She was a very tough woman but she never said no to taking me anywhere. She was great to me.”There was nothing maudlin about his tone. Fleetwood was talking about golf and his mother and he was smiling. Another mother’s day, in a manner of speaking, was coming. Win, lose or otherwise, another mother’s day was coming for another golfing son. More

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      Phil Mickelson Interviewed in Antitrust Inquiry Into Pro Golf

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

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      Rory McIlroy Seeks a Sharper Swing and a Clearer Mind At PGA Championship

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      Rory McIlroy has had a stretch to forget. At this week’s P.G.A. Championship, he is looking to fix small troubles in his swing.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — About six weeks ago — that is, a missed Masters Tournament cut, a self-imposed hiatus and a tie for 47th at the Wells Fargo Championship ago — Rory McIlroy talked about pies. Back then, he appeared ready to win big again and exuded as much as confidence as you did before your Thanksgiving dessert became a fire hazard.“I’ve got all the ingredients to make the pie,” McIlroy said at Augusta National Golf Club, where his quest to complete the career Grand Slam would stall again. “It’s just putting all those ingredients in and setting the oven to the right temperature and letting it all sort of come to fruition.”This week’s P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, the second major tournament of the year, cannot elevate him into the Grand Slam fraternity since he has won the event twice. But a victory or a strong showing would quiet the doubts that have arisen around McIlroy, who is No. 3 in the Official World Golf Ranking but perpetually shadowed by his failure to capture a major championship since 2014. The skepticism has only sharpened in 2023, which began with a win in Dubai but has subsequently toggled between admirable outings and head-spinning letdowns.Despite his membership at Oak Hill, McIlroy has been reluctant to declare some sort of home-course advantage since he, after all, lives in Florida. He understands well that his prospects hinge not on a throng of well-wishers but, in part, on whether he can adequately stamp out the harsh distractions: the critics, the history, the noise surrounding his place as arguably the PGA Tour’s leading spokesman in an era of tumult in professional golf.On Tuesday, he seemingly wanted nothing to do with the uncertainty in the sport (“I don’t have a crystal ball” was his six-word response to a 34-word question). Nor did he want to dwell on whether his break after the Masters had worked. (“I don’t know,” he replied. “I needed it at the time. Whether it works this week or not remains to be seen.”)But, perhaps more revealing, he was also a top-tier athlete openly copping to the sense that he needed to play with fewer expectations instead of more. The bravado was measured, the confidence present without being stifling or sanctimonious.“It wasn’t really the performance of Augusta that’s hard to get over, it’s just more the — it’s the mental aspect and the deflation of it and sort of trying to get your mind in the right place to start going forward again, I guess,” he said. Later, he added that he was simply “trying to go out there, play a good first hole of the tournament, and then once I do that, try to play a second good hole and just sort of go from there.”McIlroy missed the cut at the Masters Tournament and will have to wait until next year for an opportunity to complete the career Grand Slam.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHe may be able to ascertain his prospects quickly since his swing has been a subject of heightened concern in his circle in recent weeks. His troubles — “club face was getting a bit too open on the way back, really struggling to square it on the way down, and then sort of re-closure was getting a little too fast,” as he summarized them Tuesday — are the kind of pinpoint problems that would go unnoticed, or at least unfixed, on most driving ranges.At a forum like the P.G.A. Championship, those travails separate the elite from the crowd of also-rans that will be thick since the field includes 156 players. McIlroy, who noted that the precise timing of a swing can be the difference between a ball rocketing 20 yards to the left or 20 yards to the right, has hardly dawdled on his pursuit of a fix. A four-time major tournament winner, McIlroy spent last week with his coach in Florida, eschewing the FaceTime analyses that undergird plenty of modern professional careers.McIlroy is finessing, not overhauling, insistent that there is “nothing drastic that I need to change.” Perhaps he is right, because golf delights and betrays with only so much warning: Jon Rahm’s March included a tie for 39th, a withdrawal from a tournament and then a tie for 31st. Then came April and a Masters green jacket.“It’s ups and downs,” Rahm said on Tuesday as he broadly contemplated the challenge of sustaining success in sports, especially one as fickle as golf.“Even Tiger had downs,” he said later, referring to Tiger Woods, the 15-time major tournament winner. “Maybe his downs were shorter, maybe his downs were different in his mind, but everybody had them. It is part of sports. I’m hoping — I guess as a player you’ve got to hope that your low is not as low as others’.”McIlroy has not missed two major cuts in a calendar year since 2016, and he has not missed consecutive major cuts since 2010. His recipe this week to avoid a return to that dark era, beyond an adjusted swing and a clearer mind, will rely on discipline and patience and detours around the course’s 78 bunkers.He is sure, more humbly this time, that he is close to a breakthrough.“If I can execute the way that I feel like I can, then I still believe that I’m one of the best players in the world and I can produce good golf to have a chance of winning this week,” he said.But he is past, he suggested, being defined by one scorecard or another, past the need for the ferocious mind-set that propelled him to his last P.G.A. Championship victory, in 2014.“If I don’t win another tournament for the rest of my career, I still see my career as a success,” McIlroy said. “I still stand up here as a successful person in my eyes. That’s what defines that.”He would not, however, mind finishing up that pie. More

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      Jon Rahm Wins Masters, Surging Past Brooks Koepka

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      Rahm trailed Brooks Koepka by two strokes at the start of Sunday’s final round but surged as Koepka faltered to claim his second major tournament victory.AUGUSTA, Ga. — It was early for a debacle at the Masters Tournament — the first hole of the first round — but on Thursday morning, Jon Rahm’s internal speedometer had seemingly vanished. Accustomed to calibrating his putts just so, Rahm found his speed off, his ball sliding long and escaping right, before logging a double bogey.“Well,” Rahm thought as he headed to Augusta National Golf Club’s next tee, “I miss, I miss, I miss, I make,” paraphrasing Seve Ballesteros, the greatest Spanish golfer of all and himself a victim of a Masters putting misadventure. Rahm considered something else, too: Unlike Ballesteros, he had 71 holes to recover.He most certainly did.Rahm, the towering Spaniard who dominated the PGA Tour in 2023’s first months, won the Masters on Sunday, overcoming days of punishing humidity, plunging temperatures, green-saturating rains and tree-toppling winds, as well as that Thursday mess on No. 1, to claim his second career major championship. His victory, beneath an eggshell blue sky, came after he began the final round trailing Brooks Koepka, a four-time major winner who missed the Masters cut last April, by two strokes.Rahm ultimately won by four strokes, 12 under par for the tournament.“I’m looking at the scores, and I still think I have a couple more holes left to win,” Rahm said. “Can’t really say anything else. This one was for Seve. He was up there helping, and help he did.”Rahm, playing his shot from the fourth tee, had two birdies on the front nine in the final round.Rahm’s win kept at bay, at least for this month, a premier ambition of LIV Golf, the second-year league that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolled and then watched split men’s professional golf into embittered factions. Koepka has been one of the rebel circuit’s headliners and won a LIV event in Florida last week. Following it with a victory at Augusta National would have marked the first time a golfer had earned a major title as a LIV player. The league’s next chance will come in mid-May, at the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, near Rochester, N.Y.But Rahm methodically extinguished the league’s 2023 bid in Augusta, where the 88-player field included 18 LIV golfers. Although the league had a robust showing behind Koepka and Phil Mickelson, whose sensational Sunday outing at seven under eventually vaulted him into a tie for second with Koepka, the tournament ended with Rahm, a PGA Tour stalwart, poised to select the menu for next year’s dinner of Masters champions.Mickelson, a three-time Masters winner, will presumably be there, too. Koepka will not, even after finishing the first three rounds with at least a share of a lead, showing a consistency — until it disappeared — that was all the more remarkable given the meteorological and scheduling turmoil.“I led for three rounds, and just didn’t do it on the last day,” Koepka said. “That’s it, plain and simple.”When Koepka made bogey on the sixth hole Sunday, after a drive past the green, a chip that zipped well past the pin and a par putt that scooted just past the hole, he also surrendered the lead.The par-5 eighth hole was a place where either man could gain ground: Both had made eagle there during the tournament. Koepka’s Sunday afternoon tee shot, though, came to rest on a stretch of pine straw, forcing a punch-out onto the fairway. Rahm guided his third shot onto the green, positioning him for a tap-in birdie that grew his advantage to two strokes.But there were charges toward the top of the leaderboard playing out elsewhere among the pines. When Koepka and Rahm each made bogey at No. 9, a cluster of aspiring contenders hovered much nearer than they had hours earlier. Rahm stood at 10 under, and Koepka at eight under, tied with Jordan Spieth, who started the round at one under. Another five players — Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Russell Henley, Cameron Young and Patrick Cantlay — were at six under or seven under.Rahm, left, and Koepka on the sixth green, where Koepka surrendered his lead with a bogey.The gap between Rahm and Koepka stayed at two strokes until the 12th hole, that wondrously botanical landmark in the heart of Amen Corner. The hole, a 155-yard par-3, is the shortest test at Augusta National. Koepka lifted his tee shot high, and then it plunged toward the turf just behind the green, though he avoided the bunker. His second shot did not quite reach the green, and his third cruised to the right and beyond the pin. He made a putt for bogey.That put Mickelson, 52, already done with his round, in a solo second place.Koepka birdied the 13th hole to pull even with Mickelson, but Rahm preserved his three-stroke advantage with a birdie, his first since No. 8.It did not last — because Rahm’s lead swelled to five strokes on the next hole. Rahm’s second shot, from near the tree line, plunked onto the green and then rolled in something approximating a semicircle until it stopped near the cup, setting up a putt for birdie. Koepka’s second shot also reached the green, but it rolled farther from the pin. A long try for birdie missed, and a much shorter one for par lipped out, sticking Koepka with a bogey, his fifth of the round.He came close to making a putt for eagle at the 15th before settling for a birdie there.Rahm led by four strokes with three holes to play. Koepka cut it to three with a majestic birdie after his tee shot cleared the water at No. 16, but his comeback possibilities were still narrowing quickly. It did not help that his ball, on his second shot at the 17th hole, went from a shadowed patch of east Georgia mud to where some spectators were sitting. He had made bogey on the hole near the end of the third round; he carded another as the tournament drew toward its conclusion, pushing Rahm’s advantage back to four strokes.Rahm and Koepka, on the eighth fairway, had each made eagle on the hole earlier in the tournament.Rahm, whose lone major victory had been at the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, was virtually assured of a green jacket and, some months from now, a Masters trophy engraved with the signatures of every man he beat.Once he made his tournament-ending par putt on the 18th green surrounded by a thick, roaring gallery, he jubilantly lifted his arms skyward, clinched his fists and then briefly covered his face with his hands. He plucked his ball from the cup and tipped his hat.“Never thought I was going to cry by winning a golf tournament, but I got very close on that 18th hole,” he said.Even by the standards of a star who first reached the No. 1 spot in the Official World Golf Ranking in 2020, Rahm has played especially well in recent months. In November, he won the DP World Tour Championship by two strokes. In January, he won two PGA Tour events, both with scores of 27 under par, and he captured the Genesis Invitational title in February.He stumbled in March, with a tie for 39th at the Arnold Palmer Invitational; a withdrawal from the Players Championship with a stomach illness; and a mediocre showing at a World Golf Championships match play tournament. But he insisted he was an unbothered “week-to-week guy,” content to play one event to the next without becoming all that mentally hemmed in by his booms or busts.“Every single tournament I go to, my plan is to win, and my mind-set doesn’t deviate from that,” he said last week.Until Sunday evening, he had never finished better than fourth at Augusta National. But for this year’s tournament, his seventh Masters appearance, he arrived with such a storehouse of knowledge of the course that he suggested it would be challenging to use in full.“I feel like it’s very difficult to apply everything you learn from each round here at Augusta National,” Rahm, on the sixth hole, said.“I feel like it’s very difficult to apply everything you learn from each round here at Augusta National,” he said.He added: “Obviously, the more you play, the more comfortable you get with a little bit of the lag putting out here, I would say. It can be very deceiving to understand some of the breaks and some of the speeds on the putts. You know, a little bit of learning and things like that, but at the end of the day, it’s a golf course where you have to come out here and play good golf, right? It’s plain and simple. There’s no trick to it. The best player wins, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”He did it, on what would have been Ballesteros’s 66th birthday. More