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      Bubba Watson Knows People Are Mad. He Loves LIV Golf Anyway.

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      MARANA, Ariz. — A decade ago, Bubba Watson returned to Augusta National Golf Club as the Masters Tournament’s reigning winner. Back then, he seemed to be known as much as the champion who had cried as the one who had beaten Louis Oosthuizen in a playoff.He tied for 50th in 2013, and then he won another green jacket in 2014. Now, after leaving the PGA Tour last year for LIV Golf, the circuit bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to persistent questions about the kingdom’s intentions and its human rights record, Watson is the captain of the only LIV team that will have all four of its members competing this week in Augusta, Ga. Tournament play for the Masters, the year’s first men’s golf major, will begin on Thursday. It will be Watson’s first major since he played in last year’s P.G.A. Championship and then had knee surgery.In an interview last month near Tucson, Ariz., Watson, 44, reflected on Augusta National, the turbulence surrounding LIV and what he is expecting at Tuesday’s dinner for past Masters winners.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.There was no guarantee LIV players would be invited to play this year’s Masters. Did the possibility of exclusion weigh on you?It entered my mind because people asked questions. It never entered my mind like I thought they wouldn’t let past champions play. Their club is built on history, right? When you think about history, that’s one of the things they sell to the masses. They tell you past champions can play here until they call it quits. They honor the past, and so I thought for sure I was going to be able to play.Now, you start having doubts when you see stories and people are asking you more questions. But in my house, I thought for sure we’d be able to play.Have you played Augusta since your meniscus surgery?I was just there. What was interesting was No. 13, the new tee box. It’s amazing to me how they can make it look like it’s been there for 100 years. If you know 13, they had that stone wall, and they took it apart like a jigsaw puzzle and put it back together — they just moved it back.I was so focused on 13, I didn’t even think about 11: It’s been moved back, but shifted over. That helps me out tremendously being left-handed and wanting to cut the ball. I can swing for the fences, and the fairway’s a little bit wider.Thirteen, I thought was very hard. It was into the wind when I played it. I hit it around 310, and I still had 230, 231 to the flag. I played two rounds, and so I think I had 226 and 231, and I hit 3-iron and a 4-iron, so it was a real golf hole.Watson hits from the trap on the second hole during second round play at the Masters in 2019.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAugusta is one of golf’s tougher walks. How did your knee hold up?I’m 100 percent. There’s no swelling, there’s no pain. But if I play bad, I’ll say it was the knee.This will be your 15th Masters, and you’ve missed the cut just once. Beyond Augusta, you’ve played 42 major tournaments and missed 19 cuts. What is it about Augusta that works for you?As a kid, this is the one you always look at, this is the one you always see. You watch this course every single year, so no matter how old you are, it’s the same venue every time, so you get to practice and prepare. They don’t trick up the course with high rough, thin fairways; it’s just weather that’s really going to dictate how tough it is.Seeing it year after year, wanting to play there, knowing that I can hit hooks and cuts around trees, through trees because there’s not this crazy high rough. You can play out of the pine straw, you can play out of the semi-cut rough. It’s something that we know and we can hold in the back of our minds: miss it here, miss it over here. When you transfer courses year after year, you don’t ever have time to see that. That’s what makes the Masters the Masters. You’ve seen it for so many years. You know shots. You remember shots. Even if you’re not playing, you remember this, this, this and that.But does it being at the same place risk complacency?You can never rest easy with it. There’s something new every year. There’s conditions, there’s tee box changes, there’s adding a tree, taking away a tree. There’s always something going on there.But it doesn’t matter how old you are, how young you are. When you go down Magnolia Lane, you’re a kid in a candy shop. It’s like it’s the first time you’ve been there.When you get to No. 10, do you think about the playoff shot every time you’re there?It depends on who I’m playing with. People will ask, even when the tournament is going on. The caddies tell me that people still ask when amateurs come and play throughout the year. They still want to see where I hit the shot from because it’s fresh on people’s minds.Ted Scott, who was on your bag for your two victories, is now Scottie Scheffler’s caddie. How does someone like him help decipher Augusta when the pressure is greatest?He’s a great green-reader. He understands the game, but a great caddie is a great reliever of stress. It’s so hard to be on that leaderboard every week, but when you’re there, you’ve got to have a guy on the bag — and Teddy is that guy — who can relieve stress, who can make you focus on something else. Or he’s got to learn your system and what makes you tick and then he’s got to focus on that.Watson talked with his caddie Ted Scott on the ninth green during the Masters in 2020.Patrick Smith/Getty ImagesThe biggest key to a caddie is how you calm someone down. Bad moment, tough moment, pressure-packed moment, whatever that is, they’ve got to be able to calm you down and get you dialed back in to where you’re supposed to be. Green-reading is nice. Getting the yardages correct is nice and the wind is nice, but it’s really when you’re under pressure. If you’re like a Scottie Scheffler or one of these big-name players who are going to be there a lot, he’s got to be able to get you locked in and focused on the right things. That’s what Teddy does so well.When you won in 2014, a runner-up was a Masters rookie named Jordan Spieth. In two of the last three years, we’ve seen Masters rookies finish second. Is Fuzzy Zoeller’s 1979 victory-in-debut one of those things that people will get close to but not actually achieve again?It’s definitely going to happen. History is meant to be broken. You never thought Aaron Judge was going to do what he did, right?I think what holds some of the guys back — I know it holds me back — is thinking about where you’re at. Am I ready for this? And then you lose what got you there. You’re over a putt and thinking about winning instead of thinking about the putt, or you’re over a shot and you’re not thinking about the shot and you’re thinking about the big atmosphere that you’re in.The veteran golfers are like, “I’m not failing no more. I’m going to focus.”You first hosted the dinner for past champions a decade ago. What kind of vibe are you expecting at this year’s gathering?It’s great every year, and the celebration of Scottie is obviously about the Masters, but he’s been playing so well, winning all these tournaments, I think it will be a blast. And having new blood in the locker room, it’s always interesting. People will throw out stories.I think the vibe is going to be great. I’ve talked to Scottie a couple of times. I can’t wait.So you’re expecting a normal vibe at Augusta for the week?You said Champions Dinner!Let’s go more broadly: Do you expect a normal vibe at Augusta?No, and the reason why — the sad part — is we’ve got to get clicks, man. They’re going to ask tough, hard questions, questions that mean nothing about the Masters, and that’s the sad thing. We need to focus on the Masters.If you’re on that organization, I’m on this organization, we’re going to be friends. Like, I’m not upset with you. I love the PGA Tour. I think [Commissioner] Jay Monahan has done phenomenal. I chose a route that’s best for me and my family and more fun for me and my family. A team atmosphere is what I wanted to do.It’s the questions that I think will draw the cloud or the smoke. But in the Champions Locker Room, we’re all champions. We’re happy we get to go to that dinner every year. We’re all going to be wearing a green jacket.Phil Mickelson and Watson are both past Masters champions that left the PGA Tour to play for LIV Golf.Kevin C. Cox/Getty ImagesDid anyone tied to Augusta National pressure you not to join LIV?Not one person. I’ve talked to many members. They had plenty of opportunity to say stuff to me, and I think they just know that I’m a different seed.If there wasn’t a team element to LIV, would you be here?I would not be. This league has been thrown around for many years, and team is what we all strive to do. You have high school team, you have college team, and then pros, you’re on your own.Was there a moment in your career when you realized, “If there’s a team format I could play on regularly, I’d jump on that instantly?”You don’t think about it. But here’s the follow-up to this: As a kid, I never dreamed of the Olympics, and now I’m an Olympian. Things evolve, things change. In 2012, 2013, I never thought about a league with a team atmosphere.I asked former President Trump last year whether he had entertained any second thoughts about hosting LIV events given the noise surrounding the series and Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Did you ever have any hesitations, any misgivings about joining LIV?Always.I prayerfully do every decision in my life, and we think about it. There are very few that I do right away. It was think about it and see what it’s like. My close friends, my close family, they know what I’m about. They know that I want to help.So, yeah, it was a hard decision because of the backlash. Is the backlash warranted? Maybe not to a certain level, but we all have questions and want to have answers. It was a tough decision, but at the end of the day, I’m so thankful I made that decision: more time with my family, more time with trying to grow a business — this is awesome, this is a fun thing — and then the three boys and the people around them and their caddies, I get to try to help them.You’ve said you don’t read the newspapers, don’t pay attention to what is said in the press. Do you hear people who are skeptical or critical of your choice?I try not to watch Golf Channel because of things said. They say things that are more negative than positive, and I want positive things in my life. But then Scottie Scheffler and Teddy get keeping on the leaderboard, so I’ve had to pull for them, right? We went to Bible study together! I have to watch it.“I prayerfully do every decision in my life,” Watson said.Ash Ponders for The New York TimesBut I try to get off of it. Going to the ESPN app and they’ll say stuff about golf and you want to click on it, but you just see the headline and the headline is like, “World is coming to an end in the game of golf.”You were in the spotlight for a long time on the PGA Tour. Does the spotlight on LIV feel different?Outside the U.S., LIV is loved. It’s a great atmosphere. Look at how many major champions there are, look at how many Masters champions, and people want to see us.In the U.S., it’s being blocked from negative press. Unfairly? 100 percent.Who is the best player in the world right now?Scottie Scheffler.Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, they’re definitely up there, don’t get me wrong. There are other guys in our league who are up there, but right now, Scottie Scheffler just keeps doing it.Anything else?The one that really upsets me — I’m going to talk to Jay Monahan, I still text with Jay Monahan — but the PNC, the parent-junior event. That’s the only thing: It’s a part of the tour but not really, so that’s the one thing, going back on this, I wish me and Caleb could play in it.Just give me one wish. That would be my wish.More than a third green jacket?I think I have a better chance of winning the green jacket right now than I do playing that. I’m in the field. I’m not in the other field.Watson with his son, Caleb, at the pro-am ahead of a LIV Golf event in Marana, Ariz. last month.Idris Erba/Liv Golf/LIVGO, via Associated Press More

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      2023 Masters: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson Are Back

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      Players set out for official practice rounds ahead of the first men’s golf major of the year although more than a few have tested the course recently.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Augusta National Golf Club will be thick with spectators Monday, as one player after another sets out for official practice rounds before the Masters Tournament, the year’s first men’s golf major.But plenty of them have tested the course recently, making special jaunts to Georgia to size up the grounds in advance of the crowds, cameras and ropes — practice rounds for the practice rounds, if you will.They have the potential to inspire confidence: Rory McIlroy made the trek and played 54 holes, and in one round, he apparently recorded an otherworldly 19 putts across 18 holes.“Look,” he said recently, “I had two good days.”More critically, the rounds before the clamor give players chances to take the measure of changes to the course under less stressful conditions. The 13th hole, for instance, will play 35 yards longer this year, so Scottie Scheffler, the 2022 champion, has been sketching how his strategy might change.“I used to hit 3-wood there because I can sling hook a 3-wood,” Scheffler said last month. “I can’t sling hook a driver on purpose. The ball just doesn’t spin enough. I can do it on accident, but I can’t quite sling it on purpose because I like to fade my driver more off the tee, and so when it comes to that tee shot and hitting a hard hook with the driver, it’s not really a shot that I’ll try just because it’s not worth the risk for me.”Scottie Scheffler, the 2022 Masters champion, waited to greet winners of the Drive, Chip and Putt competition on Sunday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesScheffler, appearing far more comfortable than he usually is before reporters, went deeper into overthinking No. 13.“That hole was one where I’d hit the same shot I hit on 10,” he said. “The 3-wood, it has enough spin where the ball can actually stay in the air. With the driver, when I hook it, the ball doesn’t have enough spin to where it can stay in the air and hook that much. It kind of nose-dives. But the 3-wood, I can sit up there and it will just be like a boomerang. But that’s really the biggest change for me. Now I’ll just hit driver kind of out toward the corner and try and use more of the contouring to get the ball that way versus before.”And for players making their Masters debuts, the spins through Augusta National can be a chance to stamp out at least some jitters.“I got the bug out,” Tom Kim, the 20-year-old PGA Tour player, said. “Once I get there, I can kind of just play.”Not that the veterans shun practice. Tiger Woods, ahead of his 25th Masters, was around the course on Sunday afternoon, striking balls and practicing his putting. He has not played a tournament round since February, when he tied for 45th at the Genesis Invitational. But everyone knew that he was largely using Riviera Country Club as a laboratory to prepare for the Masters.He essentially said as much himself: “After this event, we’ll analyze it and see what we need to do to get ready for Augusta.” He finished 47th here last year.Remember Phil Mickelson? He’s back, too.Phil Mickelson at the second tee during a LIV Golf event at Orange County National last week.Reinhold Matay/USA Today Sports, via ReutersPhil Mickelson’s Masters hiatus lasted only a year.Mickelson, a three-time winner at Augusta National, skipped the 2022 competition amid the international uproar that began after he acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s “horrible record on human rights” but said he was open to aiding LIV Golf, its emerging league, because it could force the PGA Tour to change its economic structure.“They execute people over there for being gay,” he told the journalist Alan Shipnuck. “Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”Mickelson soon after defected to LIV, which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund bankrolls. He played in two major tournaments last year, missing the cuts at the U.S. Open and the British Open.Now, he will try his hand at the major course that has been more favorable to him than any other.“I don’t have any expectations,” he said in a brief interview last month in Arizona. “I’m grateful we get to play because we were told — or there was talk — a year ago that you might not be able to play the majors. And now we can play the Masters; we can play in all of the majors.”Pressed, though, on whether he is anticipating this week to carry the feel of the other Masters he has entered, he replied, “I do, yeah.”At the 2021 Masters, not long before his P.G.A. Championship victory made him the oldest major winner, he finished in a tie for 21st.From Winter Garden, Fla., to Augusta, Ga.Brooks Koepka won the LIV Golf Orlando event at Orange County National on Sunday.Doug Defelice/Liv Golf, via LIVGO, via Associated PressThe PGA Tour players who are most likely to contend at Augusta National were off last week, when the circuit spun through T.P.C. San Antonio for the Texas Open. LIV golfers had no such respite: They played a tournament in Winter Garden, Fla., near Orlando, over the weekend, when Brooks Koepka emerged as the class of the field.Whether the schedule will make a difference at the Masters is anyone’s guess, or simply in the eye of the beholder.Bubba Watson, who won at Augusta National in 2012 and 2014, said LIV’s calendar had thwarted the approach he had employed for years: arriving on Friday; attending the Augusta National Women’s Amateur on Saturday before practice on the driving range; and usually logging a round on Sunday afternoon.Ordinarily, he said, he avoided playing the week before a major so he could take a mental break before facing the challenges of elite competition. But maybe, he confessed, a pre-Masters tuneup would prove helpful: “Maybe I need to gear up for it and see where I need to work or where I don’t need to work.”Other LIV players insisted that their schedule was compatible with their customary preparations.Mickelson, for example, stuck with his custom of visiting Augusta for part of the week preceding the Masters. If anything, he said, LIV’s three-day format offered him the option of more practice time in Georgia.And take Dustin Johnson, a two-time major winner. He last played a tournament the week before the Masters in pandemic-disrupted 2020, when he tied for second at the Houston Open and then stormed into Augusta, posted the lowest score in Masters history and claimed his first green jacket. Although Orange County National Golf Center is hardly Augusta National — Johnson earned his PGA Tour card when he played a qualifying school event there in 2007 — he said that any competition is good to have before a Masters.“That’s really good preparation,” Johnson said in an interview. “Any time you’re playing going into a major, it’s always good to get some rounds under you.”Zhang wins the Augusta National Women’s Amateur.Rose Zhang after winning the Augusta National Women’s Amateur tournament in a playoff on Saturday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHow breathtaking was Rose Zhang’s play across the first 36 holes of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur? She shot four over par in Saturday’s final round and still won the tournament.It was not easy — she had to outlast Jenny Bae, whose Saturday scorecard had her two under on the day, in a sudden-death playoff, as well as a weather delay — but a grip change during the round allowed Zhang to unlock her swing just in time.“When things matter the most and you have a big lead but the job’s not done, it definitely puts a lot of things into perspective,” Zhang, 19, said. “I tried to stay as composed as possible, but at the same time, I was a little tight the first couple holes. I just felt like my swing wasn’t comfortable, and I really just tried to stay in the moment. I figured out a little trigger point in my golf swing, and from then on, it was kind of smooth sailing, grinding from there.”Zhang had arrived for Saturday’s final round, played at Augusta National, with a formidable cushion built up during the competition’s first two days at nearby Champions Retreat. Her first-round score there, a six-under-par 66, was a tournament record. The new standard lasted until the end of Zhang’s second round, when she signed for a 65.“I really, really do love this golf course,” she said of Augusta National. “Sometimes, it’s just interesting that I never really get my A-game when I’m out here. When I was out at Champions, it felt so easy to me. Everything just came to me. I was making putts. I was hitting greens.”Zhang teed off on the 13th hole during the final round of play.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA single mistake at Augusta National, though, “is magnified,” she said.“I think that just being able to kind of get back on track, that was my biggest feat” on Saturday, Zhang said. “I was able to have the outcome that I wanted while staying in the moment.”With her victory at Augusta National, Zhang, a Stanford sophomore, has achieved what amounts to a career Grand Slam for women’s amateur golf; she had won the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the U.S. Girls’ Junior and an individual N.C.A.A. championship. Another Stanford golfer recorded a similar feat.You’ve probably heard of him, since his name is Tiger Woods.Wise withdraws: ‘I need to take some time away.’Aaron Wise, the PGA Tour’s 2018 rookie of the year, will miss this year’s Masters.Douglas P. Defelice/Getty ImagesAaron Wise, the PGA Tour’s 2018 rookie of the year, has withdrawn from this year’s Masters.“Golf is just as much a mental game as it is one of physical skill, and the mental piece of it has been a struggle for me recently,” Wise, 26, wrote in an Instagram story on Friday. “I don’t take the significance of playing at Augusta lightly, but know that I need to take some time away to focus on my mental health so I can get back to competing at a level I am proud of.”Wise has appeared in seven tour events so far in 2023, with his best finish a tie for 18th at the Tournament of Champions in January. Since then, he has missed four cuts and did not advance beyond his group at the match play event in Texas last month. He competed in one previous Masters, taking 17th place in 2019. More

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      LIV Golf Talks a Big Game to the Global Elite. Now Come the Majors.

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      Despite setbacks, LIV’s executives insist the Saudi-backed league is soaring. For many fans, the rhetoric is less important than results at events like the Masters Tournament.MIAMI BEACH — On Thursday afternoon, one week before the Masters Tournament, Greg Norman sat not at a golf course, but in a building populated that day by billionaires, royals and former prime ministers.He had a case to make: that LIV Golf, the insurgent circuit that he has built with a 10-figure pot of money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, has made itself into a muscular, undaunted rival to the PGA Tour.Norman might have been too sanguine at times — in court documents, LIV’s own lawyers said the league had been relegated to a “secondary” television network and that it had faced revenues of “virtually zero” — but it may matter only so much. For many casual fans, LIV’s legitimacy, if the league lasts, is most likely to be settled at places like Augusta National Golf Club, not at meetings of the global elite or in a thicket of antitrust case filings.LIV players have competed in major tournaments since their defections from the PGA Tour with varied results: Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson finished in the top 10 at last July’s British Open, where Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson missed the cut. This year, though, offers a more formidable test because it will be the first time some of the Saudi-backed league’s golfers will play the full cycle of the Masters, the P.G.A. Championship, the U.S. Open and the British Open, after months of reveling in a slimmer competition schedule.If one of the players can break through and claim a green jacket or a claret jug or one of golf’s other great prizes, LIV will have achieved its mightiest measure of vindication to date.A major championship would not solve LIV’s myriad troubles, including executive upheaval, exclusion from the Official World Golf Ranking and a product often drowned out by a PGA Tour loath to acknowledge that it has maybe taken a few recent cues from a new rival. Such a victory would certainly not extinguish the perception among critics that the league is tarnished by its association with Saudi Arabia.But it could enchant fans and encourage at least some of them to keep tabs on a league that has, so far, largely been marked by bravado. It could intensify the pressure on the organizers of the major tournaments to find ways to keep LIV golfers more easily in the qualifying mix, and it would curb the notion that 54-hole tournaments are no way to prepare for golf’s most pressurized tests.“Anytime you win the Masters or the Open, that’s usually a pretty big statement,” Koepka, who won two P.G.A. Championships and two U.S. Opens before he switched to LIV, said ahead of the circuit’s pre-Masters competition near Orlando, Fla. Even PGA Tour stalwarts have begrudgingly acknowledged that a LIV victory in a major, especially an early one like the Masters, would unleash a shower of athletic attention on a league that has frequently drawn more headlines for its finances.Cameron Smith, who won the 2022 British Open, may have the best chance of being LIV Golf’s first major winner.Mike Ehrmann/Getty ImagesThe league’s best chance may come in Cameron Smith, whose thrilling Sunday showing at last year’s British Open earned him his first major title less than two months before he moved to LIV. But Johnson, who won the 2020 Masters with the lowest score in the event’s history, lurks. LIV will have five other past Masters champions in Augusta and an array of past major winners, such as Koepka and DeChambeau, looking to prove that they can contend again.“At least for myself, it’s going to be business as usual going out and playing,” said Patrick Reed, who won the 2018 Masters. “Would I like to have LIV be up at the top? Of course. But really at the end of the day, it’s all of us going in there and just trying to play the best golf we can and be ready for the four biggest weeks of the year.”Mickelson, who has six major tournament victories over his long career, the most of any LIV golfer, recently shrugged off the chatter about whether the league’s players will be prepared as “tongue in cheek.” Johnson has done much the same.“Doesn’t make a bit of difference, no sir, not to me,” he said in an interview last month. “It’s golf. You play how many ever days you can.”The results will bear out whether that talking point has any staying power, the evidence available for anyone to evaluate. LIV may not require an outright victory at Augusta, where PGA Tour stars such as Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm are arriving after months of generally excellent outings. But if the league’s players are well clear of the top of the leaderboard, the snickers will grow as much as some of the golfers’ bank accounts have.LIV executives and Saudi officials have known for years that for a league to prove viable, it would have to include the biggest names in golf. LIV has attracted some, but relevancy is fleeting, and the majors represent the league’s best opportunity to dazzle people into interest in a new product. But if players such as Smith and Johnson are unable to recreate their past magic sooner than later, the league’s prospects could diminish into a circuit of also-rans.Yasir al-Rumayyan, left, the governor of the Public Investment Fund in Saudi Arabia, with Majed Al Sorour, then the chief executive of Golf Saudi, and Norman at the Bedminster Invitational in Bedminster, N.J., in 2022.Seth Wenig/Associated PressNorman did not mention that possibility during his appearance on Thursday in Florida. Instead, he talked of administrative and operational “headwinds,” which he blamed on the PGA Tour, such as the challenge of securing vendors and sponsors.But Norman’s presence on the stage in Miami Beach was somewhat remarkable, following months of a lower profile after he provoked broad condemnations for statements that downplayed Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses. (In perhaps the gravest conflagration, he appeared to diminish the gravity of the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, saying, “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.”)Norman’s appearance on Thursday carried the imprimatur of Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor who took the stage hours before Norman declared that “our partnership and our investor is 100 percent sustainable — we are not going to go anywhere.”LIV’s star turn at the event in Florida could be seen as a vote of confidence in Norman, who has defied months of speculation that his ouster as LIV’s commissioner was imminent. It was also a signal that Saudi Arabia’s interest in global sports has not vanished amid plentiful turbulence, not least in an American court system that has dealt the kingdom a series of blows.Al-Rumayyan, who in addition to being LIV’s patron and the chairman of the English soccer team Newcastle United, said nothing in public about whether he intends to steer the wealth fund toward new sports investments. Before the audience of tastemakers and sought-after investors, though, Norman appeared to suggest that some in the Saudi orbit regard LIV much like a test drive.“We know as we look at our platform and our business model, that can be replicated in other sports as well,” said Norman, a three-time runner-up at Augusta National. “Our first proof point is proving out what we’re doing.”For the people who ultimately dictate a product’s significance — fans, not investors — the majors would be a good place to start. More

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      PGA Tour-LIV Golf Rivalry Could Make for a Tense Masters Dinner

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      Players from the competing tours will be shoulder to shoulder at the traditional Champions Dinner. Feelings about that are mixed.This might get awkward.Forget the menu of cheeseburgers, firecracker shrimp, rib-eyes and redfish. This year’s Masters Champions Dinner on Tuesday night will have PGA Tour players meeting face-to-face with six former colleagues who have defected to LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed league.The LIV golfers Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson, Patrick Reed, Sergio Garcia and Charl Schwartzel will be close together for drinks and dinner with Tiger Woods, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, all outspoken critics of the former PGA players who left for LIV Golf.There have already been heated public exchanges between the players. And while some players downplay the interaction at the dinner, others say it’s impossible to ignore the rift.Scottie Scheffler, who won the Masters Tournament last year and is hosting the traditional event at which past Masters winners are invited, recently joked that Watson should have a separate table. Watson took the comment in stride.“Hey, as long as I’m at the Champions Dinner, I’m fine,” Watson said at a recent news conference. “I’ll sit wherever he tells me. It’s fine. As long as I’m allowed back, I’ll sit wherever he wants me to. I’ll sit outside and just stare in the window.”As the winner of last year’s Masters, Scottie Scheffler is allowed to choose the menu for the Champions Dinner.Doug Mills/The New York TimesScheffler later put the evening in perspective.“With Augusta National being such a special place and with the history of the game and whatnot,” he said. “I think we can put all our stuff aside and just get together for a fun meal, all in a room together and just kind of celebrate the game of golf and Augusta National and just hang out.”Johnson, the 2020 Masters champion, said recently that he didn’t expect any problems at the dinner.“I heard what was said about possible tension at the dinner, but there will not be any tension from me.” he said. “Besides, I still have a great relationship with all my fellow Masters champions,”The two-time winner José Olazábal of Spain told the golf writer Bernie McGuire that “if Bubba Watson asks me to pass the salt or whatever, I will be happy to pass him whatever Bubba or any other of the fellow Masters winners wish for.“Each one of us who sit down at the Champions Dinner are in the room that night as we have won at Augusta National and, as I said, I respect each and everyone in the room as they are fellow Masters winners, and also what they have achieved in their careers,” Olazábal said.Patrick Reed, who won the Masters in 2018 and now plays for LIV Golf, said the dinner should focus on Scheffler, not the ongoing drama.“The thing is, the Champions Dinner has nothing to do with myself or any other person in that room except for Scottie Scheffler,” Reed told Golf Digest. “That’s his dinner. My experiences during those dinners have been amazing. We’re always talking about past experiences at Augusta, how the other guys have won the [Masters], what obstacles they had to overcome, the shots they pulled off in their experiences.”The 1960 Masters Champions Dinner.Augusta NationalSergio Garcia, another LIV Golf player who won the Masters in 2017, said he didn’t expect any problems.“I’m going to feel fine,” Garcia said in March. “I don’t have any problems with anyone, and I try not to make a big deal out of it. I’m going to be there because I earned it, because I deserve it, and I’m going to enjoy it. I hope the rest of the guys do the same.”Tom Clavin, who wrote “One for the Ages: Jack Nicklaus and the 1986 Masters,” said in an interview that the dinner would be interesting because it mixes young LIV golfers with the elder statesmen.“It is fascinating that the Champions Dinner must be the first time since the schism that several of the prime players are breaking bread together,” Clavin said. “But there’s also the generational aspect. At other tourneys there is nothing like the presence of older players like at the Masters. Imagine [Ben] Crenshaw sitting next to a young LIV player, or [Jack] Nicklaus and Mickelson. Yet Masters tradition also demands civility. I would love to be a fly on that wall.”Phil Mickelson, second from left, is one of the former Masters winners who have joined LIV Golf.Chris Thelen/The Augusta Chronicle, via Associated PressAt a recent LIV event in Tucson, Ariz., Mickelson, the three-time Masters champion, did not address the dinner specifically, but spoke about reuniting with friends from the PGA Tour.“No expectations,” he said. “We are grateful to just be able to play and compete and be a part of it. A lot of the people there that are playing and competing in the Masters are friends for decades, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again.”During a news conference at the Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles in February, Tiger Woods was asked what his demeanor would be at the dinner and if the dinner would be uncomfortable.“That’s a great question because I don’t know because I haven’t been around them,” Woods said about the LIV Golf players. “I don’t know what that reaction’s going to be. I know that some of our friendships have certainly taken a different path, but we’ll see when all that transpires.”Woods agreed that any spat shouldn’t take away from honoring Scheffler.“The Champions Dinner is going to be obviously something that’s talked about,” Woods said. “We as a whole need to honor Scottie, Scottie’s the winner, it’s his dinner. So making sure that Scottie gets honored correctly but also realizing the nature of what has transpired and the people that have left, just where our situations are either legally, emotionally. There’s a lot there.” More

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

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      Woods shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday at the Genesis Invitational in Southern California. Every stroke amounted to research for the bigger ambitions that still linger.The world’s 1,294th-ranked golfer arrived at the tee box on Thursday afternoon. The No. 2 player, Rory McIlroy, was there, too. So was Justin Thomas, ranked seventh.But the 47-year-old man wedged between William Nygard and Marcos Montenegro in the Official World Golf Ranking still believed, however fantastically, that he could win the Genesis Invitational, a tournament he had never conquered.For all of his scars, that man, Tiger Woods, has barely changed his approach to the mental battleground that so often separates the sports elite from the rest. His birthday in December did not openly blunt the competitiveness that raged so hard for so long that it helped define an entire professional sport; his disappearing acts from golf did not extinguish his hopes of upending his rivals’ ambitions.What Woods cannot mask — indeed, what he does not even try much to mask — is that every competitive round is effectively 18 holes of rehabilitation research and development. There are days when the experimentation works better than others. He shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday, ahead of a second round on Friday morning, with each stroke and step at Riviera Country Club a data point in his team’s quest to make a rebuilt body hum to a higher-than-normal standard.“The communication between myself, my staff, my training team, it’s an ebb and flow daily trying to figure out the right tape job, the right angles, the padding that we need. That all changes from day to day,” Woods said after his round. “Look at where we were last year. It has completely changed, and it will continue to change.”The toll has been immense because professional golf does not ordinarily pair well with a quick recovery from a car wreck that nearly cost one of the sport’s finest players a leg.At Augusta National Golf Club last April, when Woods played the Masters Tournament to make his post-wreck return, he said he would face “lots of treatments, lots of ice, lots of ice baths, just basically freezing myself to death” before the next day’s round. After he withdrew from the year’s next major tournament, the P.G.A. Championship, where he was 12 over par after three rounds, he abandoned his plan to play the U.S. Open because, as he put it later, there was “no way physically I could have done that.” At the British Open in July, after he missed the cut, he said it was “hard just to walk and play 18 holes.”“People have no idea what I have to go through and the hours of the work on the body, pre and post, each and every single day to do what I just did,” he said then. About four months later, after he concluded that he could not play a low-key event in the Bahamas because of plantar fasciitis, he acknowledged without elaboration that his year had included undergoing “a few more procedures because of playing.”Beyond the surgeries, his 2022 results were at once brilliantly defiant — he did, after all, play nine rounds at major tournaments than two years after he sustained open fractures of the tibia and fibula of his right leg — and newly humbling. His best finish was 47th at the Masters, his worst outing at Augusta National since 1996. (He bounced back from trouble particularly well in those days: He won his first green jacket the next year.)This year threatens, but does not necessarily promise, more of the same. These days, Woods said this week, an ankle is his greatest menace.“Being able to have it recover from day to day and meanwhile still stress it but have the recovery and also have the strength development at the same time, it’s been an intricate little balance that we’ve had to dance,” said Woods, who nevertheless declared that he is still very much a shotmaker when his endurance matches his ambition. “But it’s gotten so much better the last couple months.”Riviera, the course west of downtown Los Angeles where Woods played his first PGA Tour event in 1992, when he was a 16-year-old amateur, is but another laboratory, an in-the-spotlight version of the practice complex in his backyard or Medalist Golf Club in Hobe Sound, Fla. Just about every day, he says, he is striking balls, and he is doing plenty of chipping and putting. When he grows weary, he mounts a cart — something he cannot do on the PGA Tour — but has seen his outings go from a few holes to 18.“It’s just a buildup, and it’s built up fantastic to get to this point,” he said. “Then, after this event, we’ll analyze it and see what we need to do to get ready for Augusta.”Woods stopped to adjust his shoe on the 12th hole. He said that of all the injuries he sustained in his 2021 car wreck, his right ankle has given him the most trouble.Ronald Martinez/Getty ImagesThere will be much to do since, so far this year, he has not walked 72 holes across four consecutive days, and Augusta is among the most topographically rigorous destinations in golf. But Woods, who intends to maintain a dramatically curtailed playing schedule in the future and is not expected to compete before the Masters in April, believes that his own record means he should not be counted out, not yet.“There was a touch and go whether I would be back after my back fusion,” he said, referring to the complex operation he had in 2017 after failed back surgeries and a need for opioids. “I didn’t know if I was going to walk again after that and I came back and had a nice little run. Same thing with this leg: I didn’t know if I was able to play again and I played three majors last year. Yes, when you get a little bit older and you get a little more banged up you’re not as invincible as you once were.”But the nature of golf, he insisted, makes it possible to ignore ordinary retirement timelines for athletes.“There’s no contact, I don’t have 300-pound guys falling on top of me,” said Woods, who is still dealing with the plantar fasciitis that sidelined him in the autumn. “It’s just a matter of shooting the lowest score. We have the ability to pick and choose and play a little bit longer.”That is true. Arnold Palmer played his 50th and final Masters in 2004, when he was 74. Gary Player appeared in 52, his last when he was 73.This week in California, moments after Woods made clear he would not be looking to match Player or Palmer at Augusta, a reporter asked Woods to peer into the future. “If you’re 60 and you don’t wake up with the irrational belief ‘I could win this tournament,’” the question went, “could you still enjoy any of it?”Maybe — maybe — someday, the response effectively went.“If I’m playing in the event I’m going to try and beat you. I’m there to get a W, OK?” he said. “So I don’t understand that making the cut’s a great thing. If I entered the event, it’s always to get a W.”Reality looms, though, and his next sentences showed it.“There will come a point in time when my body will not allow me to do that anymore, and it’s probably sooner rather than later,” he said. “But wrapping my head around that transition and being the ambassador role and just trying to be out here with the guys, no, that’s not in my DNA.”Until then, his research and development will continue. He started Thursday’s round with a 4-foot putt for a birdie. Three bogeys surfaced as the afternoon progressed — and so did three consecutive birdies to end the afternoon.“As soon as I get back to the hotel, it’s just icing and treatment and icing and treatment, just hit repeat throughout the whole night,” Woods said. More

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      Anthony Kim Was Compared to Tiger Woods. So Why Did He Walk Away From Golf?

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      A young man is walking briskly across a stretch of mowed grass, on his way to someplace entirely new. Hundreds of people are clapping as he passes. They are hollering his name. The young man lowers his head, tugs off his white cap and holds it in the air. A smile flickers across his face, then disappears.This is Anthony Kim. It is 2008, and he is 22 years old and one shot away from earning his first win in a first professional golf tournament. When he reaches the 18th green, he pauses, not only to line up his final putt, but also, he later reveals, to let a simple fact swirl into his consciousness: My life is about to change. Kim taps the ball, and it clunks into the cup. He punches the air twice, screams “Yes!” twice. He takes a bow.He is $1.2 million richer.“That walk up 18 was the best feeling in my entire life,” he says later that day.“I want to recreate that as many times as possible now.”The feeling would prove fleeting. Four years after that first win, after more rousing victories that established him as one of golf’s biggest stars, Kim took a sudden leave from the game. Injuries were hampering his play, and he needed time to heal. But beyond his physical troubles, some invisible, unknowable forces must have been churning inside him.Because he never came back.‘Golf’s Yeti’A full decade after Kim stopped playing professional golf, people are still fascinated by him, still asking where he is, still curious if he might ever return.They wonder, in part, because of his talent. His power, his touch, his moxie — they were a recipe for sustained greatness. More than that, though, they wonder because he never bothered to explain himself. In a world of interminable retirement tours and heart-tugging valedictory speeches, Kim walked away in 2012 without saying goodbye and has made almost no public appearances or utterances since.Kim was supposed to be the next Tiger Woods. Instead he became the sports world’s J.D. Salinger. Sports Illustrated called him “golf’s yeti.” Pictures and stories hinting at his whereabouts regularly go viral on social media. Last summer, when the new LIV Golf circuit began recruiting players with huge, guaranteed sums of money, many people’s minds went to the same place: Could Kim, still just 37, be coaxed back to the game?Anthony Kim celebrated his victory at the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte, N.C., in 2008. It was his first professional win.Chuck Burton/Associated PressSports careers are rare and valuable. They are hard won, involving years of tedious and often lonely practice. And they are fragile, susceptible to the ravages of age and injury. Most athletes, for these reasons, tend to treasure them.Kim’s total retreat, then, stirs all kinds of questions about sports and celebrity: What duty does a person have to his God-given talent? What does that person owe to his fans? And in the age of TMZ and T.M.I., what does it mean, really, to disappear?‘He Was Transcendent’Kim was born and raised in Los Angeles, the only son of South Korean immigrants. Though his golf swing would come to appear effortless, his skills were intensely honed during his childhood years by his father, Paul, and a string of coaches. By the time Kim reached college, he could make a golf ball do whatever he wanted.“His talent was beyond anything I had ever seen before,” said Rocky Hambric, an agent who signed Kim after his three years at the University of Oklahoma. “And I know it’s sacrilege, but that includes Tiger Woods.”Two months after that first PGA Tour win came a second. It was only his second year on the tour, but he was operating with the prowess of a veteran. He finished the 2008 season with eight top-10 finishes, $4.7 million in winnings and a tornado of hype.That Kim emerged just as Woods was navigating the first real turbulence of his career — in the form of injuries and marital turmoil — heightened speculation about whether he could be the game’s next superstar.And the highlights, for a little while, kept coming. On the second day of the 2009 Masters Tournament, in a stirring display of his daredevil approach to the game, Kim fired off 11 birdies, setting a tournament record that still stands.In a traditionally staid sport, Kim often felt like a gate-crasher, providing surprising bursts of flair and color.He demolished two-dimensional stereotypes about both golfers and Asian Americans. He wore garish belt buckles bearing his initials. He talked trash — and backed it up. He had an admitted love of partying. He was gregarious with fans and generous with his time and money. He signed a multimillion dollar endorsement deal with Nike. He spoke often about wanting his own reality show.“He was transcendent and attracted interest from all segments of sport, music and entertainment, which was especially rare for golf at the time,” Chris Armstrong, another former agent, said in a text message.Kim was known on tour for flashy clothing and a love of nightlife.Streeter Lecka/Getty ImagesHe appeared with the actress Jessica Alba on “The Jay Leno Show” in 2010.Justin Lubin/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesIn a span of a few weeks in 2010, he appeared on “The Jay Leno Show,” where he gave the actress Jessica Alba a putting lesson, and played in the celebrity game at the N.B.A.’s All-Star weekend, where he was matched up against the comedian Chris Tucker.“I’d rather have 50 people love me and 50 people hate me,” Kim said in an interview with ESPN in his rookie season, “than have 100 people who don’t even know who I am.”At some point during this ascent, Kim took out an insurance policy on his body. When injuries forced him to step away from the game, he began receiving monthly checks that reportedly would cease if he returned to competition. The payout, according to a Sports Illustrated article from 2014 that cited anonymous sources close to Kim, landed somewhere between $10 million and $20 million and was the primary reason, they said, for his prolonged absence.Yet there has remained something unsatisfying about that line of reasoning. Few other golfers relished the simple act of competing as much as he so plainly did.Near the end of the 2008 season, in a performance that cemented his status as golf’s most exciting young player, Kim trounced Sergio Garcia, the Spanish star, in the opening singles match of the Ryder Cup, a prestigious team competition. Kim swaggered around the course all day, feeding off the energy of the clamorous crowd.“I wouldn’t trade this for $10 million,” Kim said that day.At the Range With Tommy ChongKim last spoke publicly about his golf career in 2015, three years after he left the game.In an interview with an Associated Press reporter, he confirmed that he was receiving insurance payments, but he denied that the money was the reason he was not returning to competition. He also shot down more fanciful rumors, including one that he was homeless.He said he needed time to rehabilitate an assortment of injuries, including to his ankle and back. He was hiring a new trainer. In all, he sounded optimistic, saying he was happy with his progress. “My goal right now for the next year is to get healthy,” he said.Communicating through friends, Kim declined to be interviewed for this article.Those who know him say he splits time between Texas, California and Oklahoma. He became a father in 2021 and got married last summer. He has broad investments, including in real estate. He and his wife own The Collective, a popular food hall in Oklahoma City.To answer a question on everyone’s mind: Kim plays golf, but only sporadically. Adam Schriber, who has been Kim’s swing coach since he was a teenager, said in an interview that he played twice with Kim in the past two years.“It’s the same swing you remember,” Schriber said.Kim during the second round of the 2010 Masters Tournament in Augusta, Ga.Harry How/Getty ImagesEric Larson, Kim’s caddie from 2008 to 2009, fondly recalls splitting a couple buckets of balls some years ago at a public driving range in Los Angeles with Kim and Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, whom Larson befriended during their overlapping stints in federal prison.In an interview, Larson said that he had asked Kim on the phone recently about whether he would participate in the LIV Golf tour. Kim demurred.“He goes, ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’ ” Larson said. “I said, ‘Come on, man, get the old clubs out. Go out there and have some fun.’ And he starts laughing at me. He goes, ‘That’s what everybody wants me to do!’”Anthony Kim SightingsThere is a point where talent, at its most rarefied levels, starts to feel collectively owned. The dynamic is pronounced in the sports world, where people use the first-person plural form to refer to their favorite teams, where athletes return the favor by winning championships for the city and dedicating awards to the fans.This can explain why, for sports fans, there is something so disconcerting about watching a star player walk away at a young age. When talent feels like a winning lottery ticket, squandering it can be processed almost as a betrayal.Consider Bjorn Borg, who was one of the top tennis players in the world in 1983 when he retired, seemingly out of the blue, at 26. The decision bewildered his fans, but Borg’s justifications hinted at an often unseen tension: that success in sports can close as many doors as it opens.“Basically, over the years, I was practicing, playing my matches, eating and sleeping,” he told The New York Times in 1983. “But there’s other things besides those four things.”Borg explained his decision. What Kim has done — to walk away and become entirely inaccessible to an adoring public — feels different and extraordinary, particularly at a time when name recognition has never held more value.He is hardly in hiding — today it seems a person can be deemed a recluse or misanthrope for merely declining to maintain a social media account — but still, any evidence of him engaging with society in even the most banal way tends to inspire wonderment.In 2019, Ben Bujnowski, 48, a technology sales consultant from Great Falls, Va., was on vacation with his family when he spotted Kim outside a Los Angeles restaurant. A longtime golf fan, Bujnowski could not resist circling back to say hello, and Kim gladly obliged his request for a picture.Bujnowski posted the photo to Instagram — “AK sighting in the wild,” he wrote — where it was soon picked up and circulated by the golf news media. The comments section of the original post became a message board of sorts for strangers to post their own sightings of Kim.In this way, each public photograph of Kim inspires its own little news cycle: Kim crouched in a group photo in somebody’s backyard; an inadvertent shot of the back of his head at a bar; an unintentionally cryptic Instagram post from Schriber. In 2018, No Laying Up, a golf media company, posted a brief video of Kim, surrounded by at least six dogs, expressing support for Phil Mickelson before his exhibition match against Woods (“Need to see him holding today’s paper,” somebody tweeted in reply).“It almost feels like his life story in golf hasn’t been completed yet,” said Bujnowski, who sometimes gets recognized on the street by golf fans. “People want to know what happened.”A Carefree SummerThe sports world craves neatly legible narratives. But Kim’s path offers a reminder of how frequently the industry’s most common tropes — the underdog stories and redemption arcs, the last shots and legacies and love of the game — fall short of capturing the complexities of the people who inhabit it.Fans may want their heroes to stay in their assigned roles, but there are gifted people everywhere turned off by the relentless pursuit of external validation. And failure, in the eyes of others, may represent freedom for the individual.Kim hinted at a possible worldview in a 2009 interview with Golf Digest, when he responded to question about his apparent fearlessness on the course by deflating its very premise.“It’s just golf,” he said.Photo illustration by Mike McQuade; photograph by Hunter Martin/Getty ImagesSome close to Kim can recall moments that seemed to foretell his eventual ambivalence toward his golf career.Larson, Kim’s former caddie, thinks back to the week after the 2008 Ryder Cup. Kim led the field by two strokes after two rounds at the Tour Championship. But that Saturday, in the third round, his momentum spiraled. He hit only four fairways. One of his tee shots struck a fan, sending him to the hospital with a head wound. Kim slumped to a tie for third place.Larson was sure that Kim imploded because he had, somewhat inexplicably, gone out late that Friday night.“I don’t know what he thought, but you don’t just go out and party all night Friday night when you’re leading the Tour Championship.” Larson said. “That would have been his third win that year, but we ended up losing that tournament by a shot, and he was out Friday night, late, and I’m just like, ‘What are we doing?’”Schriber, the swing coach, recounted another moment that, in retrospect, felt loaded with meaning. It was 2010, the night after what turned out to be Kim’s final PGA Tour win, at the Houston Open. Schriber and the rest of Kim’s team were on a private jet to Georgia happily passing around a bottle of tequila, but Kim seemed withdrawn.“We were just getting pummeled celebrating — because winning’s hard — but he didn’t even drink after the win,” Schriber said. “He said, ‘Schribes, I don’t feel anything, I don’t feel the joy.’”A week later, Kim finished third at the Masters.Schriber is reluctant to speculate too much on his friend’s mind-set, but, in his view, Kim’s childhood and the continually rocky relationship he had with his father had a deeper and more lasting effect on Kim than most realized.The story of how Paul Kim tossed one of his son’s second-place trophies in the trash is part of Anthony’s lore. Later, when Kim was in college, he and his father had a fight that resulted in a two-year stretch of silence between them. After Kim turned professional, his father publicly acknowledged that he was too hard on his son, that he was too cold, that when other parents asked him how to mold their children into top athletes, he advised them against it.Schriber doubted that golf, even during Kim’s loftiest moments, was the respite the young man needed it to be.“I think it was the feeling of, ‘It’s not taking the pain away like I hoped it would,’” Schriber said.Schriber was also there when, in his eyes, Kim got an early glimpse of an alternate path.It was 2006, the summer after Kim left college. He was staying at Schriber’s house in Traverse City, Mich., laying the foundation of a golf career, practicing every morning and sleeping on a couch in the living room at night. In the afternoons, stuck in a sleepy town with few other options, he hung out with Schriber’s children, kayaking, fishing, hiking and doing all manner of other activities that he, as a child golf prodigy, had rarely had time to enjoy.That September, Kim played in the Valero Texas Open, his first PGA Tour event. He tied for second, won nearly $300,000 and soon after moved into an upmarket condo in Dallas. But he never forgot those lazy days in Michigan, when nobody knew who he was and life felt pleasantly small.“Best summer of my life,” Kim said often, according to Schriber.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Dow Finsterwald, Golfer Known for Some Close Calls, Dies at 93

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      Finsterwald was one of the sport’s most consistent money winners. But he may be best known for twice narrowly missing out on winning the Masters.Dow Finsterwald, who captured the 1958 P.G.A. Championship and twice narrowly missed out on winning the Masters while becoming one of golf’s most consistent money winners, died Nov. 4 at his home in Colorado Springs. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his son Dow Jr., The Associated Press reported. No cause was given.Finsterwald won 11 PGA Tour events and finished in the money in 72 consecutive tournaments in the 1950s. That streak was the second longest at the time, after Byron Nelson’s 113 consecutive tournament cuts in the 1940s.“My conservative play brings the highest rewards,” Finsterwald told The New York Times after winning the P.G.A. Championship by two shots over Billy Casper. “I just keep trying to move the ball toward the hole.”Finsterwald won the 1957 Vardon Trophy for best scoring average of the year and was named the 1958 pro golfer of the year by the P.G.A.He played on four Ryder Cup-winning teams and was the nonplaying captain of the victorious 1977 American squad, which faced a British-Irish team for the last time before the event became a competition between Europe and the United States. But for all his achievements, Finsterwald endured frustration at the Masters.He finished two strokes behind the victorious Arnold Palmer, a close friend, in 1960 after incurring a two-stroke penalty for taking a prohibited practice putt. He finished tied for the lead with Palmer and Gary Player after four rounds at the 1962 Masters, but he fell to third place in the 18-hole playoff, which Palmer captured with a late charge.Finsterwald may have lacked the flair that would appeal to the galleries, but he did have a fine short game.“Jerry Barber and I were playing a practice round, $5 or $10 Nassaus,” he told The Columbus Dispatch in 2007, referring to a type of bet. “He chipped in two or three times and I called him a ‘lucky something.’ He said, ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’“That was the first time I’d heard that. If I was able to get a decent short game, it was because I think I worked at it a little harder than others.”Dow Henry Finsterwald was born on Sept. 6, 1929, in Athens, Ohio.When he was 14, his father, Russell, a former head football and basketball coach at Ohio University in Athens, got him a summer job at the Athens Country Club. He bought a set of clubs, went on to play for the Ohio University golf team, played on the PGA Tour as an amateur, and turned pro in November 1951.Finsterwald was the runner-up in the 1957 P.G.A. Championship, when he was upset in the final by Lionel Hebert. It was the 39th and last time the event used the match play format.He had won only four tour events going into the 1958 P.G.A. Championship, which was held at Llanerch Country Club in Havertown, Pa.Entering the fourth round, Finsterwald was two strokes behind the leader, Sam Snead, and one behind Billy Casper. He shot a 31 on the first nine on Sunday, finished with a 67 and won by two shots over Casper.Two years later, Finsterwald endured a shattering experience at the Masters.When he set the ball down for a practice putt after holing out on a second-round green, Casper, his playing partner, warned him that this was prohibited by the course rules, which were printed on the back of the scorecards.Finsterwald, unaware of the prohibition, told Casper that he had in fact taken a practice putt on a green after holing out in the first round.He then reported his transgression to the officials, who retroactively assessed a two-shot penalty for his first-round practice putt. But they did not invoke the usual automatic disqualification of a golfer who turns in an incorrect scorecard, which Finsterwald had done for the first round, in view of the delay in imposing the penalty.Palmer birdied the last two holes of the fourth round and beat Ken Venturi by one stroke — and Finsterwald by the two shots he had lost to his penalty.Finsterwald, who was considered an expert on the rules of golf, was an official at the 2013 Masters, at which Tiger Woods made an improper drop after hitting into the water in the second round. Finsterwald mentioned his 1960 Masters misadventure to the head of the competition committee, believing that it might serve as a guide on how to penalize Woods.Woods was assessed a two-shot penalty for the infraction. But, like Finsterwald, he was not disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard, since the penalty was imposed after the second round had ended. He finished in a tie for fourth place, four shots back. (Adam Scott defeated Angel Cabrera in a playoff.)After retiring from regular tour play in 1963, Finsterwald served as the director of golf at the Broadmoor Golf Club in Colorado Springs.Finsterwald’s wife, Linda Pedigo Finsterwald, died in 2015. They had a daughter, Jane, and four sons, Dow Jr., John, Russell and Michael, who died shortly after birth. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.Although Finsterwald twice fell short at the Masters, the attention he received led to a job as the host of a series more than 150 syndicated television vignettes about the early 1960s, “Golf Tip of the Day,” in which he gave pointers to athletes and show-business figures.The rewards for Finsterwald were mostly limited to his becoming a modest presence as a TV personality. As he told the news website TCPalm in 2011, the shows paid him what “today would be called small peanuts.” More

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      Augusta National and U.S.G.A. Drawn Into Justice Department Antitrust Inquiry

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      The Justice Department is investigating the PGA Tour for anticompetitive behavior in its dealings with LIV Golf, the breakaway Saudi-backed league.DORAL, Fla. — The Justice Department’s antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf — a sport splintered this year by the emergence of a lucrative circuit financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — has in recent months come to include the organizers of some of the most hallowed and influential tournaments in the world, according to people familiar with the matter.The United States Golf Association, which administers the U.S. Open, acknowledged on Wednesday that the Justice Department had contacted it in connection with an investigation. Augusta National Golf Club, which organizes the Masters Tournament, and the P.G.A. of America, which oversees the P.G.A. Championship, have also drawn the gaze of antitrust officials.The federal inquiry is unfolding in parallel with a separate civil suit filed in California by LIV Golf, the new Saudi-backed series, accusing the PGA Tour, which organizes most of the week-to-week events in professional golf, of trying to muscle it out of the marketplace. Moreover, LIV has contended that major tournament administrators, such as Augusta National and the P.G.A. of America, aided in the PGA Tour’s urgent efforts to preserve its long standing as the premier circuit in men’s golf.LIV, for instance, has accused the leaders of the R&A, which runs the British Open, and Augusta National of pressuring the Asian Tour’s chief executive over support for the new series. LIV also said that Fred S. Ridley, the Augusta National chairman, had “personally instructed a number of participants in the 2022 Masters not to play in the LIV Golf Invitational Series” and that the club’s representatives had “threatened to disinvite players from the Masters if they joined LIV Golf.” (A handful of golfers, including Phil Mickelson, joined the lawsuit but later withdrew their names from it, content to let LIV Golf wage the courtroom fight.)LIV executives have also fumed over perceived stalling by Official World Golf Ranking administrators to award ranking points to LIV players, who include Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith. The ranking system’s governing board includes executives from each of the major tournament organizers, as well as the PGA Tour.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More