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      Brooks Koepka Seizes Masters Lead After 2nd Round

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      The LIV golfer was at 12 under with a three-stroke lead after two rounds when play was suspended because of inclement weather.AUGUSTA, Ga. — After the Friday round of last year’s Masters Tournament, Brooks Koepka stormed to a Mercedes-Benz parked at Augusta National Golf Club. He was in a fury, a four-time major tournament champion with a beat-up body, a war chest of pent-up ambition and another missed cut.He tried twice with his fist to break the back window, which did not so much as crack, a pair of low moments in a year so overrun with them that one of the finest golfers of his generation found himself wondering whether he should play on.“If I wasn’t going to be able to move the way I wanted to, I didn’t want to play the game anymore — it’s just that simple,” Koepka said on Friday, when he recounted how it sometimes took 20 minutes to get out of bed, or how he had sometimes feared demanding too much of his knee.But as Koepka gave the world a new glimpse into his tormented mind and sustained agony, it was as the leader of the Masters, where his five-under-par 67 in Friday’s second round gave him a three-stroke lead when play was suspended for the day because of inclement weather.Koepka walked past the pond on the 16th hole.A victory on Sunday — or whenever the tournament ends, given a Saturday forecast of two inches of rain and winds reaching 30 miles per hour — would be of an exorcism of sorts for Koepka, who went from champion to close-but-not-quite to cut material over just a few years. It would also be a singular achievement for LIV Golf, the circuit Koepka joined last year after Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolled it with billions of dollars, and assure Koepka that, even as much of the golf establishment denigrates his new league, he can play the Masters for life and, likely, other majors for at least five more years.“If you win one here,” Koepka said Friday, “it kind of ticks a lot of boxes, doesn’t it?”Indeed. It would also put him a British Open victory away from a career Grand Slam.Koepka approached the first tee on Friday sharing one-third of the lead with Viktor Hovland and Jon Rahm, who had also carded 65s on Thursday. With poor weather looming, he figured an early start would be an advantage. By the time Augusta National briefly suspended play for the first time on Friday, he was well past signing his scorecard, and Rahm and Hovland had not even made the turn. Rahm had not gained so much as a stroke after six holes, and Hovland had surrendered one after seven.Meanwhile, Sam Bennett, a 23-year-old amateur from Texas A&M University, had picked up four shots to move to eight under. His 68 on Friday matched Marvin Ward’s Masters record from 1940 for the lowest second round by an amateur. No amateur has ever won the tournament, first played in 1934.But Bennett, who trailed Rahm by a stroke after the world’s third-ranked golfer birdied the eighth and ninth holes, certainly outmaneuvered many professionals. Rory McIlroy, No. 2 in the Official World Golf Ranking, had a miserable Friday and was poised to miss the cut at the conclusion of the second round, which Augusta National officials hope to restart on Saturday.Although the cut line could shift and some were still playing, the past major champions Bryson DeChambeau, Sergio García, Louis Oosthuizen and Bubba Watson were all in significant danger of exiting the tournament. That would dent the showing of the LIV circuit that upended golf’s outward civility and turned players, in the minds of the league’s critics, into symbols of greed and a surreptitious Saudi quest to repair the kingdom’s tarnished reputation.For Koepka, who earned about $38 million in prize money on the PGA Tour, LIV has been his most prominent proving ground lately. He has won two of the circuit’s events, including a tournament in Florida last weekend.Koepka made birdie on the second hole.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Friday at the Masters, he scarcely waited to break the tie he faced at daybreak. He moved to the top of the leaderboard with a birdie at No. 2, one of those eminently gettable holes where a potential champion should make headway.He made par on the next five holes, and then he reached No. 8, the 570-yard par-5 that Rahm eagled on Thursday.After his drive, Koepka figured he had about 256 yards to the pin. A smear of mud encrusted part of the ball, leaving Koepka to wonder what it would do. He wanted to leave the ball short of the pin, clutched his 3-iron and took a swing that, he said, he could not have made not all that long ago, not with that uphill lie and a lack of power.The ball landed just short of the green, and then bounced onto it, rolling toward the right. A putt later, he, too, had an eagle at No. 8. Birdies at No. 13, which is playing 35 yards longer this year, and No. 15 sealed his 67, a bogey-free round on a day when McIlroy had four just on the front nine.“He drove it well, hit his irons well, chipped it well and putted it well,” said Gary Woodland, the 2019 U.S. Open winner who was grouped with Koepka on Thursday and Friday. “It was a clinic for 36 holes.”Such a show of force seemed improbable until only recently, and it was still so unexpected that Koepka being able to linger in a crouch at No. 13, which he birdied on Friday, was notable.For some time, he said afterward, he had been angry when he did something so simple and standard for a professional golfer, angry about how he had slipped at home and dislocated a knee — and burst a kneecap and tore a ligament when he tried to relocate the knee himself.Had he been healthy, he acknowledged Friday, the decision to join LIV, with its guaranteed money and 54-hole, no-cut tournaments, probably would have been a closer call. Around the time LIV’s first season ended in the fall, he said, he began to believe he was on the verge of a revival. By the end of January, he felt all but certain of it.Koepka, right, and Gary Woodland congratulated each other after finishing their round on the 18th green.Doug Mills/The New York Times“I’ve got a completely different knee, so the normal is a little bit different, but swing-wise, it still feels the same,” he said. “I’m able to do everything I need to, and the confidence is there. The confidence was lost just because of my knee and that was it.”Hovland, who was through 10 holes when play was suspended, and Collin Morikawa, who had finished his round, were tied for fourth at six under, just behind Rahm and Bennett.The nearest LIV player to Koepka’s score was Phil Mickelson, who trailed the leader by eight strokes. For the embattled league, that gap is almost beside the point. Koepka’s surge at Augusta is perhaps the circuit’s most welcome reprieve after months of setbacks, including legal defeats, a miserly television contract in the United States and, according to a court filing from LIV, revenues of “virtually zero.” (A federal judge in California ruled Friday that a trial in the acrimonious litigation between the PGA Tour and LIV would not begin in January 2024, as had been planned. The judge did not immediately set a new trial date.)LIV’s detractors and rivals, particularly the PGA Tour, have reveled in its troubles and pined for its demise. At the same time, many in the golf establishment fretted over the possibility that a LIV player could soon enough prevail at one of the sport’s grandest competitions.At last summer’s British Open, a reporter asked the R&A’s chief executive whether a LIV player hoisting the claret jug would amount to the governing body’s “worst nightmare.”After all, the executive, Martin Slumbers, had just lashed LIV’s model as “not in the best long-term interests of the sport” and “entirely driven by money.”“Whoever wins on Sunday is going to have their name carved in history,” Slumbers replied then, “and I’ll welcome them onto the 18th green.”The sport’s leaders came only so close to such a scene last summer. One like it might now be only two rounds away — once, of course, the second round actually concludes. More

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      Masters Leaderboard: Viktor Hovland, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka Tied on Top

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      Viktor Hovland, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka all shot 65s in the opening round of the first Masters of the LIV Golf era.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The gallery was thick from the start, as it almost always is at Augusta National Golf Club’s first tee. And, as it almost always is when Tiger Woods is lurking at a Masters Tournament, nearly no one was there for the rest of his group, Viktor Hovland or Xander Schauffele.They probably should have been — especially for Hovland, the only man of the three never to have won a major tournament or finish as a runner-up. By day’s end, after all, he would be in a three-way tie for the lead.“If you get a little too cocky and you want to push a few spots that you probably shouldn’t, it will punish you very quickly,” Hovland, who scored a seven-under-par 65, said of the course. He is tied for the lead with Jon Rahm and the LIV Golf player Brooks Koepka. “So you know a good score is out there, but you can’t really force it. You’ve just got to let it happen, and if you have some makable putts, you’ve got to make them, and then you can get into a rhythm.”But, he warned, “It’s one of those things, you push too hard, and it will backfire.”He plainly learned plenty in his first three Masters appearances. But before a waterlogged weather system threatened to turn Augusta National’s hills into the most emerald of slip-and-slides, especially on Saturday, the course was modestly less menacing than usual. Winds were calm, when they rustled the pines at all, and punishing humidity kept the course soft.Hovland closed his round with four straight pars.With those conditions, Hovland was almost certainly not going to end Thursday as a runaway solo leader, and he did not. Rahm, who endured a frustrating March after winning three PGA Tour events in January and February, overcame a double bogey on the first hole to also finish at 65. And Koepka, who won a LIV Golf event over the weekend, birdied the last two holes to earn a share of the lead, lending the second-year circuit a dose of the credibility that it might require and crave in equal measure.“It’s full focus on this and trying to walk out of here with a green jacket,” said Koepka, one of the headliners of the LIV circuit funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to considerable condemnation and skepticism.Koepka, a four-time major tournament winner, drew attention Thursday evening from the tournament’s Competition Committee, whose chairman said that officials had “questioned” Koepka’s caddie and others “about a possible incident on No. 15.”“All involved were adamant that no advice was given or requested,” the chairman, James B. Hyler Jr., said in a statement. “Consequently, the committee determined that there was no breach of the rules.”Beyond Koepka, LIV, whose 54-hole competitions provoked wide debate over whether its players would be ready for the rigors of 72-hole major tournaments, had a mixed day. Cameron Smith, the reigning British Open champion, opened with a tee shot that stopped closer to the ninth fairway than the first. When sundown came, though, he had signed for a two-under-par 70. Phil Mickelson, a three-time Masters champion, was one under par, as was Dustin Johnson, the 2020 winner.Brooks Koepka viewed his early tee time for Friday, with rain in the forecast, as an advantage.But Bubba Watson, a two-time Masters winner who has missed Augusta National’s cut only once in his career, bogeyed or worse on six holes to score a 77. Louis Oosthuizen put together a 76, and Bryson DeChambeau, who had a six-shot U.S. Open victory less than three years ago, finished at 74.Still, for all of the embittered theatrics that have seeped into men’s golf as LIV stormed onto the scene last year, much about the inaugural Masters of the LIV era seemed like most any other one.Fans — pardon us, patrons — clutched plastic cups that sweated more conspicuously than some of the players. A woman dozed at the base of a tree close to the 11th fairway, and just a bit deeper into Amen Corner, Larry Mize, the 1987 champion playing his final Masters, approached the 12th tee box to gentle applause. Woods, the 15-time major winner was, as usual, an attraction, by design or happenstance.“You’re just in time: You can see Tiger tee off,” a gallery guard at the No. 7 crossway told an elderly man sporting a hat from the 2007 P.G.A. Championship. (Fittingly, Woods won that tournament.)He saw Woods, yes, his journey to a two-over-par 74. But he also glimpsed the handiwork of Hovland and Schauffele, who would end at four under on a day when he felt he had exacting command of his ball.Hovland’s lurch toward the top of the leaderboard began on the second hole, the 575-yard par-5 that played as the easiest hole at last year’s Masters. His tee shot thundered to the middle of the fairway, leaving him about 209 yards from the pin, by his estimate. He gripped his 6-iron and expected his ball to crash around the green’s front edge.Tiger Woods had five bogeys and three birdies in his round.It went much farther, landing close enough for Hovland, who has sometimes struggled to conquer the intricacies of the short game, to putt for eagle. He later birdied five holes, including the newly lengthened 13th, and had no bogeys.“Around here, there’s never just a normal golf shot except maybe on the par-3s because everything is all different lies,” said Patrick Reed, the 2018 winner.“Because of that, you have to have full control over what your club’s doing, especially what you’re trying to do through impact,” added Reed, a LIV player who shot a 71 on Thursday. “I feel like Viktor has always done that really well. If he gets going and his putter starts working, he’s going to go out and do what he’s doing on this golf course right now.”Rahm summoned similarly consequential magic on the eighth hole, the one christened Yellow Jasmine that demands 570 yards.Rahm stood in the tee box and hit, in his estimate, “about as hard a drive as I can.” He figured he had about 267 yards left to the hole and pictured hitting a draw 4-iron. The right bounce, he thought, might position him around the back of the green.Then he hit it lower than he wanted.“It carried about 8 on and obviously on a perfect line and released all the way to 3 feet,” he said. “I would hope I would get that close, but being realistic, it doesn’t usually happen that often. I’m happy it did. I mean, it was a really good swing, and for that to end up that close is a huge bonus.”Hovland shot par or better on every hole.Eagle. The leaders will take a two-stroke advantage over Cameron Young and Jason Day, who were tied for fourth, into Friday.Augusta National may not be so relatively easy in the days ahead. The tournament’s official forecast warned that rain would threaten for much of Friday, when thunderstorms could upend afternoon play. Saturday’s outlook was even more miserable, with up to two inches of rain and wind gusts of 25 miles per hour expected.Koepka said his 8:18 a.m. Eastern time appointment at No. 1 — 30 minutes earlier than initially planned — could be his greatest advantage on Friday.“I think I might be able to squeak out a few more holes than everybody else before it starts dumping,” he said.Plenty of people will be chasing.Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked golfer and last year’s Masters winner, missed a birdie putt at No. 18 and ended his day at four under. Rory McIlroy shot a 72, the first time since 2018 he had played a first round at Augusta to par or better.The cut will happen Friday evening, weather permitting, with the line being the top-50, plus ties, leaving DeChambeau, Watson and Woods more vulnerable than most after their showings in the first round.“Most of the guys are going low today,” Woods said. “This was the day to do it.” More

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      Forecast for the Masters: Water, Water Everywhere

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      Plus, Mike Weir had to figure out the back nine by himself, and Will Zalatoris got yet another dose of terrible luck.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Augusta National Golf Club was warm and sticky on Thursday. It might be the best run of acceptable weather at the Masters Tournament for a while.Friday is looking gloomy enough that tournament officials moved tee times 30 minutes earlier. And Saturday’s forecast calls for up to two inches of rain, with winds possibly gusting to 25 miles per hour. Rain showers could stretch into Sunday, Augusta National’s official forecast said, “before drier conditions finally return Sunday afternoon with a few peeks of sunshine.”The Masters has not finished on a Monday since 1983, so most of the 88-player field is in new territory. But there was a consensus around the course on Thursday that anyone with a low score from the first round was in a far more advantageous position than he might ordinarily have been.“Any week, you want to get off to a good start,” said Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner. “But we just don’t know what’s going to happen and how the weather might affect the rest of the week. So if you’re hanging around right from the start on a week like this, it’s probably helpful.”Scott sure hopes so: He shot a four-under-par 68, good for a tie for sixth.Mike Weir’s latest Masters riddle: How to play alone.Mike Weir played the final nine holes of his first round without a partner after Kevin Na withdrew from the tournament.Mike Blake/ReutersAsk any Masters champion about Augusta National, and he will tell you the course and the tournament are always poised to throw in a new twist. For Mike Weir, the 2003 winner, the new challenge came when his playing partner, Kevin Na, withdrew at the turn on Thursday, leaving Weir to play the back nine by himself.And since Na and Weir were the first players to head out Thursday morning, it fell to Weir to set the pace and, he acknowledged afterward, slow himself down.“I told my caddie I didn’t want to overthink and be too slow,” Weir said. “You kind of get in a routine, and you don’t want to take too much time and overthink things.”Thanks to a few frustrating putts, he shot a 37 on the back nine, bringing his Thursday score to a par 72 to finish tied for 37th. Part of the challenge, he said afterward, was that he had found himself without a valuable source of intelligence: the other guy’s play.“You do pick up on speed of greens,” he said of a typical round with another player. “You see how the ball’s flying through the air. When you’re trying to figure out the wind, you pay attention to ball flight and things like that — not so much on tee shots, but approach shots into the greens and around the greens, you see how the green’s reacting and things like that when you’re playing with somebody else.”Weir, 52, is hardly accustomed to playing alone in competition: Thirty-one years after he turned professional, he could not remember the last time he had played as a single.“The biggest thing is just getting the pace right of your walk and not kind of getting too caught up in my own game and just kind of having a laugh with my caddie and just kind of enjoying it,” he said. “That’s the approach I took: Let’s just enjoy this back nine. It’s beautiful out here. Let’s just have a good time, and then when we get ready to hit, let’s get dialed in.”A run of bad luck goes on for Will Zalatoris.Will Zalatoris finished second at the 2021 Masters in his debut, but had to pull out of this year’s tournament on Thursday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTwo years ago, Will Zalatoris made his Masters debut and nearly won: At the tournament’s end, he trailed the victor, Hideki Matsuyama, by a lone stroke. But his quest to actually win a major tournament — he has been a runner-up three times — is on hold until at least next month’s P.G.A. Championship after his withdrawal from the Masters before his tee time on Thursday because of an injury.The illness-and-injury scourge has hit Zalatoris harder than most lately. In August, he withdrew from the BMW Championship during the third round after hurting his back, an injury that also kept him from the Tour Championship and, quite likely, the Presidents Cup. Then a stomach bug chased him from the World Golf Championships match play event in Texas last month.“I’ve never had anything like that,” Zalatoris, who is eighth in the Official World Golf Ranking, recounted this week. “I lost about seven pounds in a week — feel great now. Kind of reset the system.”His best finish this year came in February, when he placed fourth at the Genesis Invitational.A three-time Masters winner gets subdued support.Phil Mickelson received muted applause when introduced.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersPhil Mickelson approached the first tee to begin his opening round at the Masters on Thursday just as Tiger Woods was making the turn from the front nine to the back nine about 40 feet away. Almost all eyes were on Woods, but once he had walked onto the 10th tee, several hundred fans diverted their attention to Mickelson.When he was introduced, Mickelson received muted applause, the kind produced by no more than 20 sets of hands. It was nothing like the enthusiastic ovations and zealous cheers Mickelson would have heard two years ago, when he last appeared at the Masters. In 2022, ahead of joining the LIV Golf tour, Mickelson took a leave of absence from competitive golf, including the Masters, which he has won three times.Thursday, after Mickelson hit his opening shot toward the first fairway, there was again very faint clapping. Mickelson, like most if not all of the LIV-affiliated golfers at this year’s Masters, was largely being given something akin to the silent treatment. As he walked off the tee toward his ball, three young men called out in unison, “Let’s go, Phil.” No one else in the gallery joined in, and Mickelson walked through a corridor of fans who stared at him but hardly made a sound.All around Augusta National this week, LIV golfers have not been shunned, and if there has been heckling, it has been rare or muffled. Augusta National galleries are nothing if not polite. But in a quiet way, it has also been a crowd that has seemed eager not to endorse those who defected to LIV.— Bill Pennington More

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      Tiger Woods, On One Good Leg, Struggles in First Round at the Masters

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      AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods saw where his golf ball came to rest after his tee shot on the last hole Thursday and knew he was in big trouble.What happened next would likely determine whether he had any chance to remain a contender at this year’s Masters Tournament.It was bad enough that Woods’s ball was inches away from the edge of a deep bunker left of the fairway, demanding a very awkward stance for his next shot. The fact is that in every moment of Woods’s daily life since his right leg was rebuilt with a steel rod and metal screws following his 2021 car crash, practically any uneven surface had become awkward.But this instance carried with it higher than usual stakes. In one of the closing sequences of his Masters opening round, he would have to position his left leg on a grassy rise outside the bunker as he dug his reconstructed right leg into the sand several feet below the golf ball. The irregular posture had shoulders, arms and legs akimbo. All he had to do from there was shift his weight from leg to leg during a high-speed swing and make contact solidly enough to advance the ball more than 100 yards toward the uphill 18th green.As usual, Woods drew a lot of attention from fans.Nothing to it.As Woods conceded afterward, if he let his unbalanced stance over the ball distract him he could have easily shanked his ball to the right and onto an adjacent hole. From there, he would have almost certainly made a double bogey, or worse. And to that point, Woods had not played well enough — one over par through 17 holes — to survive such an ugly number on his scorecard. He would be staring at elimination from the Masters after two rounds, something that has never happened to him as a professional golfer.But since he’s Tiger Woods, he had an escape plan, albeit a risky one. And since he’s Tiger Woods, he did not choke under the pressure of the moment nor did he allow the infirmity of his right leg to affect the outcome. Woods somehow made crisp contact with an iron and the ball rose on a line drive toward a bunker just to the right of the 18th green.Then came the hard part.At two over par, Woods was nine shots behind the leaders.Just as he appeared ready to topple backward into the sand, Woods quickly yanked his good left leg back into the bunker and simultaneously took all weight off his damaged right leg, deftly lifting it above the sand as he hopped on his left leg four times.Woods’s play-by-play analysis of the sequence went like this: “Hop on the left leg, so it’s fine. If I did it on the other one, not so fine.”Up near the green, Woods would blast from a routine lie in the bunker and need two putts to finish the hole but it was, in golf parlance, a good bogey. His round of 74 was disappointing but not ruinous after all. Afterward, Woods noted that rainy, windy weather had been forecast for Friday and Saturday, and with those troublesome conditions he thought he could get himself back into the tournament. Experience in changing weather always matters at Augusta, and Woods is playing in his 25th Masters.“If I can just kind of hang in there, maybe kind of inch my way back, hopefully it will be positive towards the end,” he said.“I didn’t hit my irons close enough to the hole today,” Woods said, blaming those miscues for a subpar putting round. It would be an extraordinary comeback against very long odds — especially with so much of the field posting low scores on a sunny, pleasant Thursday — but Woods was willing to dream.“I didn’t hit my irons close enough to the hole today,” he said, blaming those miscues for a subpar putting round (32 putts). He drove the ball reasonably well, hitting 10 of 14 fairways.As has been the case for many years now, it is Woods’s physical capability that remains the biggest variable — and the one with the most influence on his scores. Thursday, he was limping more and more on his right leg after about nine holes. He also winced often, which is not surprising for a 47-year-old golfer who has had multiple, intricate back surgeries along with several operations on his lower legs.Through 13 holes, Woods was three over par and laboring up and down Augusta National Golf Club’s precipitous hills, which regularly feature elevation changes of at least 30 feet. Sweat soaked his shirt and his expression was pained. But then on the par-5 15th hole, Woods sank a curling 25-foot, left-to-right putt for birdie. On the par-3 16th hole, the scene of so many spectacular Woods heroics that have led to five Masters victories, his iron approach stopped 10 feet from the hole and Woods made that putt as well to lower his score to one over par.Woods on the 13th green. He was three over par after the hole.Anything seemed possible at that moment and the massive gallery that had followed him throughout his round grew boisterous. With a birdie on the 18th, an even par score was in the cards, which would have been a meaningful comeback. Then his drive from the 18th tee, which was heading for the center of the fairway, took an unlucky bounce to the left and cozied up next to a yawning bunker.But hopping on one leg in a timely fashion, keeping his equilibrium in more ways than one, Woods survived to chase a sixth Masters victory for another day.Woods hoped variable weather conditions Friday could help him get back into the tournament. More

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      European Tour May Punish LIV Golfers, Arbitrators Rule

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      The decision by a panel in London was an early test for the Saudi Arabia-backed circuit, which is also facing legal battles in the United States.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Golf’s European tour may punish players who defected to the rival Saudi-financed LIV Golf series, an arbitration panel in London ruled in a decision released on Thursday, the first day of the Masters Tournament.With litigation in the United States possibly years from a conclusion, the panel’s decision about the European series, the DP World Tour, was the subject of immense anticipation and anxiety among players and executives. All sides saw it as a crucial test of whether long-established tours could easily discipline players who joined LIV, the league bankrolled with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.The ruling in Europe will have no effect on the Masters, where 18 LIV players are in the field. But it was a blow to a rebel league that had hoped the days of tournament play would deliver a springboard to greater credibility, not renewed discussion about its appeal and risk to big-name pros.The decision is also likely to shape the European roster for the Ryder Cup, the wildly popular U.S.-vs.-Europe competition that will be held in Italy this fall. To be eligible for the European team, players must be members of the DP World Tour.The case before the arbitrators in London involved a narrow issue: the conflicting events policy of the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, which bars players from participating in certain tournaments without approval. In their ruling, announced after a five-day hearing in February, the arbitrators concluded that rebel players had committed “serious breaches” of the tour’s rules.The arbitrators found that the violations “increased the likelihood that commercial partners would be tempted to terminate or limit relationships with the tour.” Citing “the scale and importance of the potential harm” to the tour, the panel said that Keith Pelley, the tour’s chief executive, had “acted entirely reasonably” when he turned down the players’ requests to appear at LIV events.In a statement hours before the start of the Masters, Pelley embraced the ruling.“We are delighted that the panel recognized we have a responsibility to our full membership to do this and also determined that the process we followed was fair and proportionate,” Pelley said.LIV did not immediately comment on the decision.Even though the case dealt only with a specific tour policy, many sports lawyers predicted that its outcome could shape ambitions to create alternatives to marquee leagues, tours and federations. A victory for the tour, that thinking went, would lend fresh support to the kinds of rules leading sports organizers have created to protect their television rights agreements and market power. A ruling for the players might have encouraged athletes — and not just in golf — to weigh more seriously overtures from start-up leagues and competitions offering richer paydays.The subject has bubbled up repeatedly in recent years, with particularly fraught cases involving soccer, speedskating and swimming, and could become more common as athletes assert greater autonomy and as wealthy Persian Gulf states look to invest more heavily in sports. The women’s golf world, for example, has been rife with speculation that Saudi Arabia will eventually underwrite a women’s league similar to LIV, a competition that has fractured the men’s game.That split became conspicuous last June at a course near London, when longtime tour players like Ian Poulter, Charl Schwartzel and Lee Westwood appeared at LIV’s first event. The tournament offered early glimpses at just how much money golfers stood to make if they shunned traditional tours in favor of the Saudi-backed circuit: Schwartzel won $4.75 million at the three-day event, thanks to his individual and team performances. He had earned close to 17.7 million euros, or more than $19 million, over his tour career, where his first win was in 2004.Tour officials, wary of allowing individual golfers to undercut their multimillion-dollar television contracts and sponsorship arrangements, responded with suspensions and fines. Poulter, though, was among the players who won a stay of the punishments, pending the arbitrators’ ruling. This week’s decision ultimately covered 12 players — four others had abandoned their appeals — who competed in the LIV event in Britain or a subsequent one in the United States, a group that included Poulter, Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed. Schwartzel and Sergio García were two of the players who had withdrawn from the case.García, Reed and Schwartzel, all of whom are past Masters winners, are among the LIV players competing this week in Augusta.LIV’s skeptics routinely see the circuit, with its 54-hole, no-cut tournaments, as promoting a diluted version of golf and as a way for Saudi Arabia to put distance between itself and its human rights record. LIV executives insist they are only trying to electrify and repopularize a sport they judge stagnant, and the league’s players, many of whom signed contracts that guaranteed them tens of millions of dollars, see themselves as independent contractors who should be free to compete when and where they choose.“There is no difference whether I’m on the PGA Tour or on LIV: I’ve always played two tours,” Reed said in a January interview at a DP World Tour event in Dubai, where he was wearing a LIV hat on a driving range. “So all these guys saying that you can’t basically double-dip, you can’t — What’s that cake phrase they love to use? Make your own cake and eat it, or something like that? — well, Rory, myself, all these guys have played on multiple tours.” (Rory McIlroy, a star of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, has been among the most outspoken opponents of LIV.)In their decision, the arbitrators said pointedly that the independent contractor argument was “overplayed.”“Individual players have to accept some limitation on their freedoms inherent in tour membership,” the panel said. No player, the arbitrators noted, “suggested that he had given up his independence by signing up to onerous (albeit remunerative) obligations to LIV.”The tour, the arbitrators ruled, had not broken laws governing competition or the restraint of trade.“It is no part of competition law to require incumbents to offer no resistance — they are entitled to react and retaliate, even if dominant,” the panel added.The ruling by the arbitrators is unlikely to have a direct effect on the legal battles in the United States, where LIV and the PGA Tour are mired in bitter and expanding litigation. The American dispute will not go to trial before next year.The British newspaper The Times had reported on Tuesday that the arbitrators had ruled in the DP World Tour’s favor, triggering a wave of chatter around Augusta National’s grounds. With the text of the ruling then still unreleased, McIlroy largely deferred comment but said, “If that is the outcome, then that certainly changes the dynamic of everything.”If LIV players resign from the tour, their prospects of making the Ryder Cup team will vanish under the eligibility rules. Sticking around might not guarantee a place on the roster, either.“I can only do what I can do, and that is to play the tournaments I can play, try to play them the best way possible, and then everything else is out of my hands,” García said on Tuesday. “So the decisions if we can get picked or will get picked or anything like that, it’s not going to come down to me.”Instead, he said, his Ryder Cup fate could be settled by whether the European captain, Luke Donald, “thinks that I’m good enough. We’ll see.” More

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      A New Twist for the Tradition-Bound Masters: The LIV Golf Era

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      LIV, Saudi Arabia’s breakaway league, split men’s professional golf. Now, the drama is coming to one of the sport’s most hallowed stages.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The mystery started in earnest last spring and lasted until autumn’s twilight. But Phil Mickelson — among the most famous frontmen for LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — insists that he believed he would be allowed to play the 2023 Masters Tournament, which opens Thursday.Never mind any discomfort, or how on-course rivalries had transformed into long-distance furies tinged by politics, power, pride and money. No, Mickelson reasoned, tradition would prevail at Augusta National Golf Club, surely among sports’ safest wagers.“The history of this tournament, the history of the majors, is about bringing the best players together, and it really needs to rise above any type of golf ecosystem disruption,” Mickelson, a three-time Masters winner, said in an interview last month.“I wasn’t really worried,” said Mickelson, who spent the 2022 Masters in a self-imposed sporting exile after he effectively downplayed Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. But, he allowed, “there was talk” of exclusion from one of golf’s most revered events.Augusta National extinguished the talk on Dec. 20: If a golfer qualified for the Masters through one of its familiar pathways, like being a past champion, his 2023 invitation would be in the mail.The club’s choice will infuse its grounds through at least Sunday, when the tournament is scheduled to conclude, weather permitting. All of the customary narratives that surround a major tournament are bubbling: Will Scottie Scheffler become the first repeat winner in more than two decades? Might Rory McIlroy finally complete the career Grand Slam? Can Jon Rahm regain his dominant winter form? And, as ever, what will Tiger Woods do?But an undercurrent of ambition, curiosity and gentility-cloaked discord is present, too.Dustin Johnson, Mickelson and Harold Varner III, all LIV golf athletes, on the 18th green during a practice round on Tuesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFor LIV, the competition will be a breakthrough if one of its players dons the winner’s green jacket. For the PGA Tour, the Masters is an opportunity to showcase that its 72-hole approach to an ancient game is still king. And for Augusta National, the tournament is an opportunity to depict itself as skeptically above golf’s chaotic fray.“At the Champions Dinner, I would not have known that anything was going on in the world of professional golf other than the norm,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said Wednesday, the day after the traditional gathering of past Masters winners.He added: “So I think, and I’m hopeful, that this week might get people thinking in a little bit different direction and things will change.”It was virtually certain that this week would not descend into open brawling, and it has not. Some players have complained about a news media hyperfocus on any potential tensions — and acknowledged that they, too, had wondered about the vibe and contemplated the stakes for their tours.Cameron Smith, at No. 6 the highest-ranked LIV player, said PGA Tour players had greeted him with hugs and handshakes. Asked what, exactly, he had anticipated, he replied: “I wasn’t really sure, to be honest.”He seemed more certain that LIV could use a strong showing on the leaderboards around Augusta National’s hallowed stage.“I think it’s just important for LIV guys to be up there because I think we need to be up there,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of chatter about these guys don’t play real golf; these guys don’t play real golf courses. For sure, I’ll be the first one to say the fields aren’t as strong. I’m the first one to say that, but we’ve still got a lot of guys up there that can play some really serious golf.”Cameron Smith, LIV’s highest-ranked player, said PGA Tour golfers had greeted him with hugs and handshakes.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMcIlroy, seemingly approaching sainthood in the eyes of PGA Tour executives for his steadfast defense of their circuit, said the Masters was “way bigger” than golf’s big spat and that he relished the opportunity to go up against 18 LIV players who are among the world’s finest golfers. Being around them again, he suggested, can build rapport, though he acknowledged restored proximity was not a guarantee of perpetual harmony.“It’s a very nuanced situation and there’s different dynamics,” McIlroy said. Referring to Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, the LIV stars and major winners, he added: “You know, it’s OK to get on with Brooks and D.J. and maybe not get on with some other guys that went to LIV, right?”For its part, Augusta National, whose private membership roster is believed to include at least two former secretaries of state, has sought to tamp down theatrics.Groupings for Thursday and Friday are about the most anodyne possible, at least in the PGA Tour vs. LIV context. Woods and Bryson DeChambeau, who recently suggested that Woods had all but excommunicated him, will not have a reunion at the first tee. Fred Couples, a PGA Tour loyalist who called LIV’s Sergio Garcia a “clown” and Mickelson a “nutbag,” is scheduled to play alongside Russell Henley and Alex Noren. McIlroy is grouped with Sam Burns and Tom Kim.And Ridley said that Augusta National had not invited Greg Norman, the LIV commissioner, to the club, where the leaders of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour have held court in recent days.“The primary issue and the driver there is that I want the focus this week to be on the Masters competition,” Ridley said. He said he believed Norman had attended the tournament twice in the last decade, once as a radio commentator.Ridley also sidestepped a query about whether Augusta National had become complicit in “sportswashing” Saudi Arabia’s image.“I certainly have a general understanding of the term,” Ridley said. “I think, you know, it’s for others to decide exactly what that means. These were personal decisions of these players, which I, you know, at a high level, don’t necessarily agree with.”“I want the focus this week to be on the Masters competition,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWith tournament play scheduled to begin Thursday morning, the week’s emphasis is rapidly shifting toward the competition itself. The event’s American television broadcasters appear unlikely to dwell on off-course subjects unless they must.“We’re not going to put our heads in the sand,” said Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, which will broadcast the third and fourth rounds on Saturday and Sunday. “Having said that, unless it really affects the story that’s taking place on the golf course, we’re not going to go out of our way to cover it, and I’m not sure there’s anything that we could add to the story.”ESPN, which will air the tournament’s first two rounds, has suggested it is even less interested in golf’s geopolitical soap opera. Curtis Strange, the two-time U.S. Open champion who is now a commentator, said he didn’t “see us mentioning the Roman numerals at all.”“We have to give respect to the Masters Tournament,” he said. “The only way I could ever see anything coming up — and not even mentioning LIV — but some of these players haven’t played a lot of competitive golf. So how sharp can they be?”LIV golfers have said that they will be prepared for the rigors of the Masters, even though they have been playing 54-hole events, instead of 72, at courses that some doubt will have them ready for Augusta’s challenges.That dynamic will make this year’s tournament more of a proving ground than usual. But there is always next year: When Augusta National released its Masters entry criteria for 2024 on Wednesday, there were no changes that immediately threatened LIV players.Mickelson’s bet was still proving safe. More

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      At the Masters, Tiger Woods Begins to Show Acceptance

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      AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods has many kinds of smiles.Some are genuinely welcoming. Some are a cultivated response, a performance learned from decades in the spotlight. Some, when he is about to say something barbed, are meant to be caustic. And some are a form of defiance, a reflex when he feels he is being challenged.At a news conference on the eve of last year’s Masters Tournament, reporters were treated to the last of those looks — a grinning but pugnacious Woods. When asked if he could win that week, roughly a year after a horrific car crash nearly cost him his right leg, Woods answered curtly: “I wouldn’t show up to an event unless I think I can win it.”The smile turned to a smirk.It is now a year later. Two days before his 25th Masters, Woods, 47, has learned a new kind of smile, that of the dignified aging champion who is all too aware of his limited physical capabilities and an ever narrowing window to win a 16th major championship. He still yearns for that victory and has lost no fight for the cause, but several times on Tuesday Woods sounded as if he was trying to gracefully acquiesce to a fate he may have never before contemplated.“The ability and endurance of what my leg will do going forward will never be the same,” he said. “I can’t prepare and can’t play as many tournaments as I like. But that’s my future, and that’s OK. I’m OK with that.”Woods admitted that when he now comes to Augusta National, he wonders if it will be the last time as a competitor. “I don’t know how many more I have in me,” he said.Most telling, after a nine-hole practice round Tuesday with his longtime buddy, Fred Couples, 63, Woods joked that he was not far from joining Couples on the 50-and-over PGA Tour Champions circuit, where competitors ride in golf carts and skip the miles of walking that send pain shooting up Woods’s right leg.Tiger Woods, Fred Couples and Justin Thomas walk the second fairway on Tuesday.With a laughing smile, Woods said: “I’ve got three more years from where I’ll get the little buggy and be out there with Fred. But until then, no buggy.”Later in his news conference, while addressing a proposed rule that may inhibit how far the ball played by professionals will fly, he was asked how the new dictum might affect him. The new rule would not be imposed until 2026.Woods snickered playfully: “By the time it takes effect, I may be long gone. As I said, I may be in the buggy and off we go.”Woods repeatedly explained Tuesday that his right leg, surgically rebuilt in the hours after his high-speed, tumbling car wreck outside Los Angeles in February 2021, aches even more than it did last year in competition, when he sometimes needed to use one of his irons like a cane to walk from shot to shot. At the P.G.A. Championship last May, Woods nearly collapsed into a practice area bunker when he stumbled and lost his balance. He saved himself by using one of his clubs as a support. But not long afterward, after shooting the highest one-round score of his 22 P.G.A. Championship appearances, Woods withdrew from the event.During his practice round on Tuesday, Woods limped noticeably, especially when ascending Augusta National’s many hills. Walking downhill was no easier. He slowed as if he was worried about his leg buckling and winced periodically.Woods, with his surgically repaired right leg, struggles walking hilly terrain over four rounds.“I can hit a lot of shots but the difficulty for me is going to be the walking,” he conceded. “I wish it could be easier.”There was only one moment Tuesday when Woods showed a version of his old bravado.When asked if some of the favorites at this year’s Masters, like Woods’s good friends Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas, still view him as a threat to win this week, Woods mostly demurred. Woods is known for tutoring McIlroy and Thomas, neither of whom have won the Masters, in the nuances of the devilish Augusta National layout.“Well, I don’t know — threat or not — I just think it’s understanding, picking some guys’ brains and figuring out what they need to do to win this tournament,” he said.Woods said he was schooled similarly by Couples, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.“That’s what this tournament allows us to do, to pass on knowledge and gain knowledge from the past and apply it,” he said.But the original question lingered. Woods paused.“Whether I’m a threat to them or not, who knows?” Woods said with maybe the slightest impish expression. “People probably didn’t think I was a threat in 2019 either, but it kind of turned out OK.”Woods is known for tutoring Rory McIlroy, left, on the intricacies of winning at Augusta National.In 2019, 11 years after his last major championship victory, Woods won his fifth Masters title.It is a memory, along with so many others in Woods’s nearly 30 years as a public figure, that has kept sports fans flocking to watch him play. It was no different late Tuesday morning as Woods, who spent a long stretch as the world’s most famous athlete, played the final hole of his practice round.The ninth green at Augusta National, on a hilltop in front of the sprawling clubhouse, was surrounded by only a smattering of fans as Woods hit his last tee shot of the day 460 yards away. But suddenly, like passengers disembarking from a vast caravan of buses, a horde of fans appeared from around a bend in the course and began to clamber up the steep hill from the ninth fairway to the putting surface.Within minutes, the crowd enveloping the green was a dozen deep. Applause erupted when Woods’s second shot from about 160 yards landed safely about 15 feet from the hole. As Woods walked, or limped, toward the green, people pushed against the ropes restraining the gallery in an effort, it seemed, just to be closer to him. Adults held children on their shoulders so they could see above the throng, while others stood on their tiptoes.“The ability and endurance of what my leg will do going forward will never be the same,” Woods said on Tuesday.Once reaching the green, Woods was cheered but as soon as he began to practice his putting from various spots, the congregation fell silent. Woods’s putter making contact with his golf ball could be heard in the quiet from 75 feet away.Finally, when finished, Woods doffed his hat and raised it above his head as an ovation erupted all around him.He smiled. More

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      2023 Masters: Rory McIlroy Looks to Make Up Ground as First Round Begins

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      Plus, N.C.A.A. champions will be invited to play the Masters, and Larry Mize and Sandy Lyle are preparing to say farewell to the tournament.AUGUSTA, Ga. — In the last five years, Rory McIlroy has spent 27 weeks ranked as the world’s best men’s golfer. He has earned nine PGA Tour victories, including at the Tour Championship and the Players Championship. He was on a Ryder Cup-winning team. In the final round of last year’s Masters Tournament, he carded an eight-under-par 64.But the last time he shot par or better in a Masters first round? April 5, 2018.2019: 73.2020: 75.2021: 76.2022: 73.At least the trend line is improving? It stands to reason that if McIlroy is to become the sixth modern player to achieve the career Grand Slam, he is very likely going to have to refigure out Thursdays at Augusta National Golf Club. (When he made his Masters debut in 2009, he shot a first-round par 72.)“It’s been tentative starts, not putting my foot on the gas early enough,” McIlroy said this week. “I’ve had a couple of bad nine holes that have sort of thrown me out of the tournament at times. So it’s sort of just like I’ve got all the ingredients to make the pie. 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. But I know that I’ve got everything there.”McIlroy is keenly aware that Augusta National, where he has lately played more than 80 holes of practice, is “a very difficult course to chase on.”“You start to fire at pins and short-siding yourself and you’re missing in the wrong spots, it’s hard to make up a lot of ground,” he said.Dottie Pepper, the CBS commentator and a two-time winner of women’s major championships, said she thought McIlroy had made some of the shifts necessary to contend, like switching putters and drivers. But Thursday, she said, may well reveal if it will be enough.“He has played himself out of the tournament year after year on Thursday, and all of a sudden, gets it in gear and it’s a gear too late,” she said. If he can sort out the first round, she predicted, “it could be a pretty spectacular movie come Saturday and Sunday.”McIlroy, who will play with Sam Burns and Tom Kim for the first two rounds, is scheduled to tee off at 1:48 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.A new pathway into the Masters: the N.C.A.A. titleGordon Sargent, the reigning Division I men’s individual champion, was invited to this year’s field before Augusta National announced that N.C.A.A. title winners would be automatically invited next year.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesAugusta National announced the entry criteria for the 2024 Masters, and although the standards did not change much for professionals, America’s male college golfers have a new incentive to win the N.C.A.A.’s Division I individual title: It now comes with a Masters invitation.“That is a major amateur championship, and I thought it was time that we acknowledged it,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said of the N.C.A.A. competition. Gordon Sargent, a sophomore from Vanderbilt University who is the reigning Division I champion, is in the 88-man field this week, having received an invitation from tournament organizers before the new policy was announced.“It really goes back to our roots, and that is that Bobby Jones was the greatest amateur of all time,” Ridley said, speaking broadly about the place of amateurs at Augusta National. “He believed in the importance of amateurs in the Masters. I had the personal experience of enjoying that on three different occasions, and I can tell you that it changed my life.”Past N.C.A.A. individual champions include Bryson DeChambeau, Luke Donald, Max Homa, Phil Mickelson, Curtis Strange and Tiger Woods.Sargent, who is from Birmingham, Ala., has reveled in the experience, even if he has been mistaken around Augusta National for, say, a participant in the youth Drive, Chip and Putt competition.“I’m walking around, and no one is with me,” Sargent said. “I don’t even know if I had my badge with me — I think I probably still had it in the car or something. I was like, ‘Can I have player dining?’ They’re like, I don’t know, player?”He eventually made it inside.“It was pretty funny,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Where are your parents? Like, did they send you by yourself?’ I was like, ‘No, they’re coming in. I can travel by myself sometimes.’”Ridley also said Wednesday that the winner of the N.C.A.A.’s individual women’s championship will be invited to play in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Stanford’s Rose Zhang, the reigning Division I champion, won that tournament over the weekend.Two past champions are ending their Augusta National careers.Larry Mize, the 1987 Masters victor, is the only Augusta, Ga., native to win the tournament.David Cannon/Getty ImagesRidley, ever diplomatic, did not identify Larry Mize as a reason Greg Norman was not invited to this year’s Masters. But it was Mize who hit a brilliant chip — from 140 feet away — at No. 11 in 1987, making Norman a Masters runner-up for a second straight year.Mize, 64, has played every Masters since, and this one will be his last. It will be also be the final Masters for Sandy Lyle, 65, who won in 1988.“Club head speed lowers down without you even trying sometimes, and then the course is getting longer and I’m getting shorter,” Lyle said. “Not a good combination. The young ones are so good these days that I can’t really compete against that.”Mize, the only Augusta native ever to win the Masters, has spent part of the week doling out counsel to newcomers.“Trust your talent, believe in it, and just let it go,” said Mize, who added, “You’ve got to respect this golf course, but you can’t fear it. You can’t play in fear out there, or it’s going to be a long week.”Mize, Lyle suggested, struggled to get through his remarks at Tuesday’s private dinner for past champions. He had figured Mize would be at ease. He was not.“He clammed up like a clam shell,” Lyle said. “He just stood up there and had a glass of water and another glass of water.” As it turns out, Lyle said, “He’s tough enough to win a Masters, but when it comes to that kind of emotional thing, we’ve all got feelings.” More