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      Brooks Koepka Surges to the Lead at P.G.A. Championship

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      After his second consecutive four-under-par 66, the LIV golfer Koepka will be in the final pairing on Sunday at Oak Hill Country Club.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Four years ago, less than a week before he won his second consecutive P.G.A. Championship, Brooks Koepka allowed the world inside his swaggering mind.“One hundred fifty-six in the field, so you figure at least 80 of them I’m just going to beat,” he said at Bethpage in 2019. “You figure about half of them won’t play well from there, so you’re down to about maybe 35,” he added. “And then from 35, some of them just — pressure is going to get to them. It only leaves you with a few more, and you’ve just got to beat those guys.”Keep in contention long enough, he reasoned, and “good things are going to happen.”He returned to the mix last month at the Masters Tournament, where he surrendered his lead to Jon Rahm during the final round. And now he is in the mix this weekend at the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, where he fired a field-best four-under-par 66 on a rain-soaked Saturday, giving him a one-stroke lead over Corey Conners and Viktor Hovland with a round to play. He had also scored a tournament-leading 66 on Friday, after a 72 on Thursday.All of that is rumbling forth from a man with a wrenching medical history, a man who last year was trying (and failing) to shatter car windows at Augusta National Golf Club after a missed Masters cut, a man who just on Thursday played a round that he said was “the worst I’ve hit it in a really long time.” He finished that day tied for 38th, a day after he declared the try-and-beat-me algorithm he detailed in 2019 still worked just fine.Maybe he was right, though.Sunday, of course, will have pitfalls. With its often firm and narrow fairways and a rough whose verdant hue makes it appear more appealing than it actually is, Oak Hill has been a devilish test since the first tee shot on Thursday. After two rounds, only nine players were below par. After three, that figure had shriveled to seven.Conners held a lead that crawled as high as two strokes for much of Saturday, helped along by a front nine that passed without a bogey and made the possibility of his first major championship victory all the more real. Born in Ontario, not all that far from Oak Hill, he has been a favorite of the galleries, energized by an April victory at the Texas Open and confident in his putting, a welcome status for a player with a reputation for expert ball striking. But a double-bogey on the 16th hole sent him tumbling out of the top spot.And Hovland again lurked at and around the top of the leaderboard throughout Saturday. He has been there before: Since the start of last year’s British Open, he has been in the top-10 at the end of every major tournament round. His afternoon darkened quickly, with bogeys on two of his first five holes, before a spree of three birdies left him poised to take the lead on the 14th hole. A sand wedge from about 75 yards brought him just inside the green’s edge, but he missed a birdie putt, settling for par. He missed another birdie try at No. 16.Viktor Hovland on the 18th green waiting to putt. He lurked at and around the top of the leaderboard throughout Saturday.Six pairings ahead, Hovland’s playing partner in last year’s final round at St. Andrews, Rory McIlroy, rediscovered some of the form that eluded him at the Masters and beyond. (Neither Hovland nor McIlroy won that Open, which Cameron Smith left with the claret jug.) McIlroy, often drenched, shot a 69 for the second consecutive day, taking him to one under and putting his ambition to win his first major since 2014 not fully out of reach.“I probably hit it a little better off the tee today than I did the first couple of days, but I think this tournament and especially in these conditions and on this golf course, the nonphysical parts of the game, I think, are way more important this week than the physical parts of the game,” McIlroy said Saturday. “And I think I’ve done those well, and that’s the reason that I’m in a decent position.”Koepka has not gone as long as McIlroy without a major victory, though he has been more battered with injuries these last few years. He began to gain ground early on Saturday, with birdies on the fourth and fifth holes. At No. 5, christened Little Poison, his 179-yard tee shot landed neatly on the green, setting up a putt for birdie. Unlike plenty of other past major champions, including McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, on Saturday, he avoided a bogey at No. 6, a havoc-inducing par-4 that has been playing closer to a 5.A second shot at No. 13 landed in the rough, leaving Koepka 96 yards from the hole. His next stroke put him on the green, setting up a birdie putt from roughly 18 and a half feet. That putt, though, seemed puny at the 17th hole, when Koepka rolled one in from about 47 feet.One of the central questions entering the tournament at Oak Hill was whether Koepka would much resemble the player who punished almost the entire field at Augusta. Playing in the LIV Golf league afterward, he had assembled a middling performance in Australia, a third-place finish in Singapore and a sixth-place outing last weekend in Oklahoma.Before that tournament near Tulsa, he had mused over how he enjoyed the rigors of the majors: “the discipline, the mental grind that comes with it all, the focus.” In the hours after his letdown at Augusta, he said this past week, he did not sleep, that swaggering mind suddenly left looking for answers. The answers took shape within days.He said on Saturday that he had learned that he should “never think the way I thought going into the final round.”Koepka on the fourth fairway. A victory on Sunday would give him his fifth major tournament championship.“I won’t do it again the rest of my career,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that you can’t go play bad — you can play good, you’ll play bad, but I’ll never have that mind-set or that won’t ever be the reason.”A victory on Sunday would give him his fifth major tournament championship, and his first since that heady week at Bethpage in 2019.Others are not so well positioned. Rahm, the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, shot two over on Saturday to bring his tournament score to six over. Justin Thomas, the winner of last year’s P.G.A. Championship, and Phil Mickelson, who has won the event twice, were five over on Saturday, moving their scores to 10 over.“This golf course, with how difficult it is, it all starts by putting the ball in the fairway,” Rahm said. “It’s not an easy task. It’s very, very difficult. If you can do that, then you can maybe give yourself some chances and it all starts with that. A little bit of it is trying to keep the club head dry and manage it but again, there’s an element — there’s only so much you can control — so a bit of an element of luck.”With the wet conditions forecast to clear, players expected the tees to be moved back for Sunday’s final round. The P.G.A. of America, the three-time major winner Padraig Harrington noted, is deeply skilled at setups.“If they want us to go out there and shoot a good score, being 68, they’ll set it up that way,” he said. “They could if they want set it up for a low one for sure, but that wouldn’t suit the leader. The leaders always want a tough challenge on Sunday so they can play safe and the chasers get caught out.”But the universe of chasers is a small one. Again, its members are pursuing Koepka.The field will chase Koepka in the final round on Sunday. More

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      An Eye on the Sky Fine-Tunes the Golf Tournament Below

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      Few professional sports scrutinize weather forecasts like golf. The P.G.A. Championship, played in meteorologically challenging western New York, has been a test.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Well before daybreak on Thursday, Stewart Williams joined an urgent discussion in a small second-floor room at Oak Hill Country Club, near the nation’s northern border. The night had brought cool temperatures, clear skies and gentle winds — and that was a problem.Frost was thickening on the golf course and, less than two hours before the P.G.A. Championship’s scheduled start, the tournament’s top official needed to know when it would melt. For the moment, one of the world’s most prestigious golf tournaments would be shaped not by the athletic genius of a Rahm or a Koepka or a McIlroy, but by the instincts and data of a meteorologist from High Point, N.C., who barely plays the game.By midmorning, with competition underway at last, Williams was thinking about the next hazard: a front that threatened to drench the course during Saturday’s third round.“Nobody,” he mused in the sunlight, “was focused on the rain until the frost moved on.”But there are few sports that focus on the weather like golf, and few that rely as much on meteorologists who travel to venues to assemble pinpoint forecasts. Local television stations and weather apps may offer forecasts for vast regions; specialists like Williams, who has spent the better part of three decades around golf courses, are building outlooks for areas of just a few square miles.Lee Kyoung-hoon, left, and Kim Si-woo bundled up against temperatures in the 30s during a practice round at Oak Hill Country Club near Rochester, N.Y., on Wednesday.At a popular event like the P.G.A. Championship, his predictions may not affect the tournament as much as the rule book, but they will influence course agronomy and pin placements, television broadcast preparations and emergency planning. A 350-acre property with relatively few shelters, organizers often note, takes much longer to evacuate than most places.“When you see a red line that spans about 400 miles north to south, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that it’s coming,” said Sellers Shy, the lead golf producer for CBS, which will air weekend rounds and keeps a weather map in its bank of production monitors. “But their technology and their expertise literally gets it down to how far away it is, as well as when it will arrive and when the horn will blow to within five minutes, probably.”Shy uses the forecasts to plan for interruptions in play — there is still airtime to fill, whether or not someone is trying to escape Oak Hill’s rough — but Kerry Haigh, P.G.A. of America’s chief championships officer and the man who so desperately needed to know the timing of the frost melt, relies on them for course setup, shifting his thinking about tee and hole locations to accommodate conditions over a 72-hole tournament.“You almost can’t do without them in running any spectator championship, or really any golf event,” said Haigh, whose desk at Oak Hill is essentially a putt away from Williams’s, where the forecaster toggled his laptop screen among maps, models and charts.Outside, next to a wading pool, a battery-powered tower Williams had erected was aloft, detecting electrical charges that could give just a bit more warning before lightning, the greatest concern at a sprawling golf tournament, strikes. An anemometer spun at the top.A map showing temperatures around Rochester.Williams uses an anemometer to monitor wind.Golf executives have yet to find a convenient locale with a guarantee of perpetually sublime conditions, and tournament histories are thick with disruptions that some experts believe will become more common as the climate changes. Last year’s Players Championship concluded a day late because of miserable weather in Florida, much like this year’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am in California. In Augusta, Ga., in April, the Masters Tournament dodged its first Monday finish since 1983 — but it had to squeeze the end of the third round and the entire fourth round into Sunday. And the 2018 P.G.A. Championship had Friday play upended when electrical storms pounded the St. Louis area. The next year, six people were injured after lightning strikes at a tournament in Atlanta, where fast-developing thunderstorms are a summertime trademark.Oak Hill Country Club, in a suburb of Rochester, is no place for an entirely predictable forecast, especially in May, when the region’s weather patterns are in transition. The nearby Great Lakes add to the puzzle since they can inject moisture and unusual winds. Williams covered the 2013 P.G.A. Championship at the club, an experience that was only so valuable this time around since that tournament unfolded in August.For this year’s event, he began closely studying the region’s weather tendencies about a month ago, noting which forecasting models seemed more accurate than others in the area. He also examined historical trends.“You’re always trying to stay in tune with how do the data sources behave at the site you’re at, so you can understand tendencies and bias that helps alter how you forecast,” said Renny Vandewege, a vice president at DTN, the weather company that employs Williams and works with the PGA Tour, the L.P.G.A. and the P.G.A. of America. (It is not always a private sector endeavor; Britain’s national meteorological service, which is under contract with the R&A, sends forecasters to the British Open.)The influx of data, Williams and Vandewege said, helps, especially with technology that has rapidly improved in recent decades and models that now yield projections every hour. The human element, they insist, matters, perhaps more than ever in an era of easily accessible weather data.Patrons on the 18th green at the 2023 Masters. Rain forced tournament organizers to squeeze the end of the third round and the entire fourth round into Sunday. “For us as meteorologists, I look at this model, and then maybe I look at a different one — it may have this further east, having everything arrive faster,” Williams said as he sat next to Vandewege and weighed the approaching storm system. “That’s when you start using your instincts.”Tournaments vary in the number of official forecasts they issue on a daily basis, but players and caddies pore over them once they hit inboxes and are posted at the first and 10th tees. Some routinely approach Williams seeking even more specific details for the days ahead, and the course superintendent is always looking for projected evapotranspiration rates, or how much moisture leaves the grass and soil. Davis Love III, Williams said, also liked to ask what to expect for his fishing trips.“You’re not going to not look at information that they’re giving you,” said Collin Morikawa, a two-time major champion, who figured nearly every player also had two or three weather apps close at hand.“We look at everything,” he said. “I think you have to take everything into account.”Others, like Haigh, try to avoid a torrent of forecasts. Whatever Williams predicts, they say, is what will principally guide their thinking.“They are the professionals — that’s what they do week in and week out, and they’re very good at it,” Haigh said. “They have better and more high-tech equipment than I certainly have on any apps.”The frost melt forecast was right on time.Williams checks on a battery-powered tower that detects electrical charges before lightning, the greatest concern at a golf tournament, strikes. More

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      Scheffler, Hovland and Conners Share the Lead at P.G.A. Championship

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      Jordan Spieth, who needs a victory at Oak Hill to complete the career Grand Slam, and Justin Thomas, who won last year’s tournament, just made the cut at five over.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Justin Rose, the golfer you remember but maybe have not thought all that much about lately in major tournaments, had hit two fairways all day. He had birdied as often as he had bogeyed.And when he walked off the course on Friday, his tournament score at one under par, he was positioned to contend at the P.G.A. Championship this weekend. He had figured, he said, that four under could win the tournament at an Oak Hill Country Club where the fairways seem to be awfully hard to find.“There are chances,” said Rose, the 2013 U.S. Open winner who only in February ended a four-year drought of PGA Tour victories. “If you do drive the ball in play, there’s a few fun pins. Those are the moments in your round you have to pick up three, four birdies and then ride some of the tougher holes and tough breaks that you’re going to get out there.”So it went during the second round at Oak Hill, which had been hardly prone to compromise on Thursday and stayed fearsome on Friday. By nightfall, only nine men in the 156-player field were under par; the 2008 P.G.A. Championship was the last with fewer than 10 players below par after two rounds.Corey Conners, Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler shared the lead at five under, while Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Suh trailed by two strokes and were tied for fourth.The par-70 course has never yielded a major champion who was not in the top three after the opening two rounds.“It’s nice to be back to have a chance, but at the same time, we’ve got a lot of golf left,” Hovland said. “We’re only halfway, and a lot of things can happen.”The cut, the top 70 golfers plus ties, claimed the rising stars Tom Kim and Sungjae Im and the reigning U.S. Open winner Matt Fitzpatrick. Jordan Spieth, who needs a P.G.A. Championship victory to complete the career Grand Slam, and Justin Thomas, who won last year’s tournament, just made the cut at five over, along with Phil Mickelson and Zach Johnson, the captain of this year’s American Ryder Cup team.Rose, left, on his way to the fifth green, where he would make par.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThrough his first two rounds in suburban Rochester, Rose was never in much danger of joining them. But it has been an up-and-down decade since his Open victory at Merion. There were two runner-up finishes at Augusta National Golf Club, but never one of the green jackets that Masters Tournament champions don. He finished the 2018 British Open at Carnoustie two strokes behind Francesco Molinari, who missed this week’s cut. There were a few top 10 showings at P.G.A. Championships, a third-place performance at a U.S. Open and the sustained aggravation of going winless for so long on tour.A renewal of confidence came at Pebble Beach, the site of that third-place Open finish, in February, when he finally found a victory.“Just the fact of knowing I can do it again is important,” said Rose, who is seeking to become the first British player to win a P.G.A. Championship in 104 years.So far at Oak Hill, he has found his iron play pleasing and his putting encouraging, but his game still in need of some tightening. A dose of hard-won realism probably did not hurt, either.“When I did catch a bad lie in the rough, took my medicine and pitched out and tried to avoid the big number,” he said. “I felt like making a bogey or two around here is no big deal.”He was probably right, since even the leaderboard’s highest reaches were speckled with green, bogey-signaling squares on Friday. Dustin Johnson, who shot a 67 in the opening round, raced downward on Friday, when he stumbled to a 74. Less than a week after a victory in an LIV Golf tournament in Oklahoma, Johnson had four bogeys and a double bogey, his frustrations eased only by a pair of birdies.Dustin Johnson, who shot 74 on Friday and is one over for the tournament, putts on the 10th green.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesMin Woo Lee, on the other hand, used a day of exceptional putting to make five birdies on Friday’s front nine to reach even par. Brooks Koepka played the first half of Friday’s round to par but had five birdies on the back nine to move to two under, a four-stroke swing from Thursday. Patrick Cantlay, the highest-ranked player in the world (No. 4) without a major tournament victory in his career, gained three strokes to stand at one over.“If you hit great shots all day, you can play a good round, and if you just get a little off all day, you can play a round like I did yesterday where I shot four over par,” Cantlay said on Friday. “It’s just the line is that small. You’d better be on the right side of it.”Michael Block, the head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club, southeast of Los Angeles, was just above Cantlay on the leaderboard, at even par, a score more than sufficient for him to make the P.G.A. Championship cut for the first time.“People out there, they understand: They’ve hit that ball out into the bushes on the right side and they don’t know what’s happening, but the lucky thing about me is I figured it out pretty quick where I was going wrong,” Block, who is appearing in his fifth P.G.A. Championship, said. “Club pros, I always heard, figure it out within a couple shots. Tour pros figure it out within one shot, and I was lucky enough to figure it out within one shot this time.”Michael Block, a club pro, shot consecutive rounds of 70 and was even par for the tournament,Desiree Rios/The New York TimesOak Hill has narrow fairways — No. 18’s is as skinny as 20 yards — and surging winds made them even trickier to stick on Friday than they had been on Thursday, when Rory McIlroy, the No. 3 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, landed in only two. On Friday, shots that rocketed off the tee and appeared promising frequently tumbled into a rough almost inevitably described as penal.“I had a couple back-to-back drives on 16 and 17 where I thought it was dead in the middle, landed in the perfect spot, and just the fairways are so firm, it just rolled right in the rough,” said Sepp Straka, whose 71 on Friday brought him even for the tournament. “There’s not much stopping the ball out there right now other than the rough, and when you get in the rough, it’s really tough to score.”Weather conditions are expected to worsen Saturday, when rain and wind could batter the course.“I think that’s going to throw off the comfort level again,” Rose said. “This is just going to be four days of kind of getting the most out of each day.” More

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      Bryson DeChambeau Rediscovers His Groove at the P.G.A. Championship

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      It’s only one round, but DeChambeau, the once hard-swinging golfer who has struggled of late, shot a four-under-par 66 at Oak Hill Country Club.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Bryson DeChambeau walked onto his final green in the first round of the 2023 P.G.A. Championship on Thursday and the modest gallery awaiting him remained hushed. DeChambeau was leading the event and on his way to a sterling 18-hole score, his best at an American major championship in three years. And yet, the roughly 200 silent fans near the green stared at him as they would an exhibit in a museum.This is the place DeChambeau has come to inhabit in golf. Even at the conclusion of a sparkling performance, fans were curious but nonetheless wary about awarding him too much affection.Three years ago, he was feted and cheered as the game’s next revolutionary, one who would inspire a new generation to swing as hard as possible on every shot. It was the way to his record-setting 2020 U.S. Open victory. He promoted an intense workout regimen and a radical diet. His following was young and raucous.Then came a long series of uninspiring results, a defection from the PGA Tour to LIV Golf and more ineffective play that made him a relative afterthought. Once ranked fourth in the world, DeChambeau began Thursday ranked 214th.But the DeChambeau who attacked the demanding East Course at Oak Hill Country Club in the first round was wholly different, for a day at least. He was still powerful off the tee, often out-driving his playing companions Jason Day and Keegan Bradley by 40 yards. Stepping onto his last green, he was leading the tournament on a day when most players were floundering and cursing under their breath.In pursuit of long-distance drives, DeChambeau bulked up, once eating about 5,000 calories per day before abandoning that strategy.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFacing a 50-foot uphill birdie putt, DeChambeau knocked his golf ball to within a few inches of the hole. The fans watching finally relented and applauded politely.One spectator who appeared to be in his 50s — not the usual demographic for a Bryson die-hard — shouted, “Come on, Bryson! Come on buddy!”With a four-under-par 66, DeChambeau was second by the time play was suspended because of darkness with many players, including the leader Eric Cole, not having finished their rounds. He left the grounds smiling and with a hop in his step that seemed more than a reflection of the roughly 35 pounds he has shed from his once bulky frame.He stopped to sign a child’s golf ball, fist bumped a handful of fans and jogged off to the scoring tent and then lengthy meetings with reporters and television interviewers.All the while, DeChambeau grinned, even as he said repeatedly: “It’s been a tough last four or five years.”It is a quizzical statement for a golfer who since 2018 has had a runaway victory at the U.S. Open, six wins on the PGA Tour and 31 top-10 finishes. In that stretch, he earned more than $23 million on the PGA Tour.But DeChambeau would explain his view of what has transpired since 2018.For starters, he had been consuming about 5,000 calories per day and “eating lots of stuff that inflames your body.” He is now eating about 2,900 calories per day.He also had a hand injury, which he said has healed.“Obviously having the hand injury was no fun and then learning to play golf again with a new hand,” DeChambeau said.DeChambeau was once viewed as a potential revolutionary in the game by fans.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThere were dark days as his slump and ailments continued.“The emotions have definitely fluctuated pretty high and pretty low — thinking I have something and it fails and going back and forth,” he said. “It’s humbling.”He continued: “I will say that there have been times where it’s like, man, I don’t know whether this is worth all of it.”DeChambeau was notorious for hitting balls on practice ranges at PGA Tour events well past sunset, swatting away under lights that illuminated only him. He now seems ambivalent about putting in those long hours.“You see me out there on the range,” he said. “That’s something I don’t want to do. I don’t want to be out there all night.”But DeChambeau feels like he’s now discovered something, or in his words Thursday: “Trending in the right direction.”Asked if he was closer to the end of his journey to find, or regain, his swing, he answered: “The end of it, for sure. I want to be just stable now. I’m tired of changing, of trying different things.”But what of the predictions of him maybe being able to blast 400-yard drives? DeChambeau shook his head.“Yeah, I could I hit it a little further,” he said. “Could I try and get a little stronger? Sure. But I’m not going to go full force. It was a fun experiment, but I definitely want to play some good golf now.”“Golf is a weird animal,” DeChambeau said on Thursday. “But I feel like I’m trending in the right direction.”Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd, as he said, he is still plenty long enough.One good round at Oak Hill does not reverse many months of ineffectual play, but what next for DeChambeau?“Golf is a weird animal,” he replied. “But I feel like I’m trending in the right direction. Of course, playing like I did today makes it easier to feel that way.”DeChambeau was still smiling. He smiled easily and often two and three years ago, too.“Maybe it could all change tomorrow; it’s golf,” he said. “But I don’t think it will.” More

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      Ferocious Oak Hill Daunts P.G.A. Championship Field, With More to Come

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      Birdies were at a premium for many of the 156 golfers vying for the Wanamaker Trophy at Oak Hill Country Club during the first round of the major tournament on Thursday.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Scottie Scheffler had, at least in the moment, a share of the P.G.A. Championship lead when he offered a foreboding prediction Thursday afternoon: Oak Hill Country Club, already playing to the point of menace in the first round, would only become more terrorizing.The winds are expected to bluster. Rain is coming. And, for good measure, the East Course has been recently restored to bring back the diabolical, century-old wizardry of the architect Donald J. Ross.“It’s just one of those places where you hit one shot maybe barely offline, and sometimes can you hit a good shot and end up in a place where it’s pretty penalizing,” said Scheffler, the 2022 Masters Tournament winner, who nevertheless had his first bogey-free round in a major championship Thursday. “There’s lots of tough holes out there.”The rough is showing itself to be ferociously retributive, the fairways so firm that balls are only so often staying in them — even after the frost that delayed Thursday’s start by nearly two hours had softened the turf. Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion, hit two fairways all day as he dueled with crosswinds off the tees.But there was no parade of aggrieved players publicly fuming over the setup just outside Rochester, N.Y. Instead, as the tight leaderboard took shape before play was suspended because of darkness, a brand of begrudging, knowing admiration took hold, even as the likelihood of a runaway winner seemed distant.Sahith Theegala of the U.S. slammed his putter after missing a shot on the 18th hole.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesKeegan Bradley bogeyed on No. 7 but finished at two under par.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Very difficult golf course,” said Bryson DeChambeau, whose four-under-par 66 put him in second place, one shot behind the solo leader Eric Cole, who did not complete his round on Thursday night. “As I was looking at it throughout the week, I’m like, man, I don’t know how shooting under par is even possible out here on some of the golf holes.”“It’s playing tough,” said Kurt Kitayama, who was at even par. “I don’t think anyone’s really comfortable.”“It stacks up with some of the toughest major championship venues that I have ever played,” said Corey Conners, who has had three top-10 finishes at the Masters, after his three-under-par round.The sterling performance by DeChambeau, who has routinely sputtered since his 2020 U.S. Open victory in New York at Winged Foot, often seen as similar to the recharged Oak Hill, came after an early bogey on the 12th hole. (With a 156-man field, tournament organizers opted for a two-tee start. Because of the frost delay, the last group’s tee time was pushed back to 4:32 p.m., less than four hours before sunset.)He moved to under par for the first time on his seventh hole — No. 16 — and finished his front nine at one under. Three birdies on his back nine, including one at No. 6, the hole that the course restorer Andrew Green has judged as Oak Hill’s most threatening, brought him to four under. Afterward, having become “so used to hitting it everywhere,” he reveled in a day of straight drives that, he conceded, could be little more than a memory by Friday evening.“You always think you have it one day and then it just leaves the next,” DeChambeau said. “Just got to be careful.”Bryson DeChambeau overtook Scheffler for the lead but stood one shot behind Eric Cole once play was suspended due to darkness.Doug Mills/The New York TimesScheffler, only a week removed from a round near Dallas in which he made birdie or eagle on five of his first six holes, found something approximating a groove on the par-5 No. 4. His tee shot rocketed wayward and landed miserably near a tree. He ultimately saved par anyway.“We got a wind switch and had a really good up-and-down to keep the round going,” said Scheffler, who ended the day tied for third with Conners and Dustin Johnson, another Masters winner. “You would hate to bogey a par-5, especially when there’s only two of them around this place. That was good momentum.”Cole, 34, charged up the leaderboard late in the day, when three consecutive birdies brought his score to five under. He had played in one other major in his career, the 2021 U.S. Open, where he missed the cut.“When I did have an opportunity, I kind of felt like I happened to read it right and hit a good putt, and they went in today, so that was good,” Cole said Thursday night.The first round, with 11 groups scheduled to resume play Friday morning, was more boggling for others.There was Kazuki Higa, a Japanese golfer who missed the cut at the two other majors of his career, opening his day with birdies on four of his first five holes, only to end it with four consecutive bogeys or double bogeys. Jon Rahm, the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking and the winner of last month’s Masters Tournament, later finished at six over, the worst single-round showing at a P.G.A. Championship by a world No. 1 since 1987. And Brooks Koepka, who dueled with Rahm in the final round at the Masters but found himself with a two-over-par 72 on Thursday, said the first round “was the worst I’ve hit it in a long time.”Jordan Spieth, who withdrew from a tournament last week because of a wrist injury, played Thursday and signed for three over, tying him with the past major champions Shane Lowry and Gary Woodland. McIlroy, who has lately struggled and missed the Masters cut, ended his day at one over. But his outing included an uphill putt from nearly 37 feet to save par at No. 2, delivering the kind of jolt that he suggested could perhaps keep him a contender.“Depending on what happens over the next three days and what I go on to do, you know, I may look back at that shot as being the sort of turning point of the week,” he said.Corey Conners of Canada on the 18th hole.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesRory McIlroy after a chip shot on No. 2.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe rigors of an event like this week’s helped shape Green’s thinking when he began work on the course, which hosted P.G.A. Championships in 2003 and 2013, as well as a Ryder Cup and three U.S. Opens.“Knowing that the golf course has a wonderful major championship legacy, and knowing that was something the club wanted to continue to do, we had to blend the Donald Ross design elements with modern championship golf,” Green said in an interview this year.The greens took on unorthodox shapes again, bunkers assumed greater brutality and more so-called chocolate drops — the turf-shrouded mounds that were a Ross signature — appeared.“You play really well and hit fairways and greens, you can make some putts, you can shoot a few under par,” said Viktor Hovland, who finished at two under on Thursday. “But if you’re a little bit off, the rough is just so penal. If you are short or you make a couple bogeys, you want to attack the pin, and you hit it more in a bad spot and it’s just a never-ending cycle.”The cut is scheduled for Friday evening, daylight permitting, with the top 70 and ties advancing to the weekend. Then the rain will start. More

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      How Oak Hill Was Returned to Its Roots

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      Oak Hill Country Club, near Rochester, N.Y., has been a familiar stop for men’s professional golf for decades: Since 1956, it has hosted three U.S. Opens, three P.G.A. Championships and a Ryder Cup.But when the P.G.A. Championship returns to Oak Hill on Thursday for the first time since 2013, the East Course will be different than it was for some of the elite tournaments it has hosted. In recent years, the club brought in Andrew Green to interpret and restore some of Donald J. Ross’s original design from the 1920s.Green, who has also worked on overhauls at other major championship courses — Congressional Country Club, Inverness Club and Scioto Country Club — can sometimes be seen as “fairly radical,” as Jack Nicklaus, who grew up playing at Scioto and won the 1980 P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill, put it recently.In an interview this spring, though, Green said he had regarded the Oak Hill project as an opportunity to reemphasize Ross’s approach, which includes unorthodox shapes for greens.“I took the most pride in being able to reestablish a few of the golf holes that had been lost to time,” said Green, who, to try to decipher the thinking of Ross, who died in 1948, studied his writings, pencil sketches and formalized drawings, as well as a selection of historical photographs.An archival map shows both the East and West courses at Oak Hill Country Club.Oak Hill Country ClubRoss’s influence at Oak Hill had faded over the decades, particularly with the work of the uncle-nephew duo George and Tom Fazio in the 1970s. Their changes, by Oak Hill’s own account, “created a more challenging layout for the several major championships that followed” but also promoted “significant criticism since they did not fit” in Ross’s original design. Hundreds of new and ultimately overgrown trees, the club also said, had shifted the course away from Ross’s vision.“As the evolution of the golf course had occurred, players and critics and the golf world had always felt there was a disconnect within the golf course itself,” Green said. “Really, the primary goal was to reinfuse Ross and make the entire course feel as if it had always been there.”No. 5: Little PoisonPar 3, 180 yardsNo. 5 emerges from a thicket of sand, rough and steep slopes. Evan Schiller, Oak Hill Country ClubThe par-70 course measures 7,394 yards, 231 yards more than the 2013 P.G.A. Championship but 151 yards less than how Augusta National Golf Club played during last month’s Masters Tournament. With the rough expected to be challenging and parts of Oak Hill strikingly narrow, even after many trees were removed, Green thinks the P.G.A. Championship could show “an interesting balance to see if the guys who can really bomb it and gouge it out have a leg up on everyone else, or if someone that really finesses it around the golf course will still be able to mount a good run.”An early glimpse at finesse will come at No. 5, where a long tee shot will all but stifle hopes for a birdie and could even make tapping in for par a formidable challenge. Positioned between the fourth hole and what was No. 15, the target emerges from a thicket of sand, rough and steep slopes. Green and his colleagues envisioned No. 5, where the green has two tiers, as a midiron test.Oak Hill Country Club“It will be a bit of a nervy shot, but aiming for the center of the green and trying to make a putt would be my suggestion,” Green said. “The whole vision for it was to play off of what Ross had on his original sixth hole.”No. 6: Double TroublePar 4, 503 yardsNo. 6 offers several hazards.Evan Schiller, Oak Hill Country ClubAfter an escape at No. 5, the hole Green believes is now the course’s most perilous awaits.Allen’s Creek runs alongside the right side from the start, forcing a player to choose between the risk of dropping his tee shot into the water — but perhaps also getting a better angle into the green if he avoids the hazard — or facing a longer second shot.“The green allows for a ball to be run into the approach, if they need to with a longer club or if they get in trouble off the tee,” said Green, whose restored course has water in play on six holes. “The green itself, front hole locations are fairly accessible, but the back right location is very demanding, very tough to get to. My guess is they’ll probably put the hole back there and move the tees forward on a certain day during the championship.”Oak Hill Country ClubPart of the challenge is that the creek does not simply run in a straight line off the tee, or even away from it. Instead, it ultimately moves diagonally across the approach and then up to the left side of the green.No. 6, Green said, was naturally the trickiest hole, given its placement and the parcel of earth on which it sits. With the fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth holes slotted in a relatively narrow sliver of earth, he assumed that Ross had “tried to find the most unique way to set those golf holes kind of side by side, and the result of that differentiation from hole to hole was what we got on the sixth.”Green added: “He had four golf holes that, on a very flat piece of ground, would be potentially very much the same way, but the way he utilized the ground and the creek made them all night-and-day different, and he was a genius at that. It was a very awkward piece of property that he had to work with — it wasn’t just a giant rectangle — and so the way he created the variety he did is just mind-blowing to me.”No. 13: Hill of FamePar 5, 623 yardsThe longest hole on the East Course travels uphill.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe longest hole, No. 13, could be a showcase for the equipment that is helping top players drive the ball farther than ever. The hole goes uphill, bringing players toward the clubhouse, with Allen’s Creek making an appearance at around the 325-yard mark.The evolution of equipment, Green predicted, will entice top players to hit the ball over the creek, which has been a relatively rare occurrence through Oak Hill’s history.“We added a new tee, but I still think the golf course at times will be set up where players would be tempted to play over that and get home in two,” Green said.Water is not a threat beyond the creek, but the vicinity of the newly reshaped green has two of Oak Hill’s 78 bunkers.No. 15: The PlateauPar 3, 155 yardsIf the tournament moves to a playoff, No. 15 will be a part of it.Evan Schiller, Oak Hill Country ClubWhen Jason Dufner won the 2013 P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill, the 15th hole included a man-made pond stationed menacingly near the putting surface and a rock wall.“It was a very dramatic shot for major championship golf and TV,” Green said, “but it wasn’t very good for member play, and it didn’t represent anything Ross would have done.”So the pond is gone. Missing left will send a ball into a bunker that guards the left side. Missing right will have the ball moving away from the target in short grass, forcing a player to make a delicate shot onto the skinniest portion of the green, which is narrow left to right and deep front to back — maybe, Green said, a club-and-a-half difference, front-to-back.Oak Hill Country Club“It will be a very demanding shot in order to both control distance and spin to get close to the hole locations,” Green said.If the tournament moves to a playoff, No. 15 will be a part of it, along with the 14th and 18th holes.No. 18: Goin’ HomePar 4, 497 yardsThe green on No. 18 sits on the edge of a steep hill.Evan Schiller, Oak Hill Country ClubEyes always turn toward the 18th hole at any major championship. For Green, it was the one he fretted over most.“Unfortunately, that green really kind of stuck out a little bit in its shape as being very modern and out of character with the others,” Green said.Now the green, which sits on the edge of a steep hill that a player should look to carry with a second shot, has been extended on the right side and made deeper. The left side is shallower, front to back, and there are effectively three distinct surfaces within the green to place the hole.Oak Hill Country Club“Hitting a good drive is critical — absolutely critical,” Green said of the hole, where the fairway width can be as tight as 20 yards. “There are some very deep bunkers down the right-hand side that will make it very difficult to get home.”A player who successfully hits from the fairway to get his ball onto the zone of the green where the hole is will have a shot at a birdie. Otherwise, Green said, “it will be quite a dramatic putt to make that three.” More

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      Phil Mickelson Interviewed in Antitrust Inquiry Into Pro Golf

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

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      Inside the love life of Rory McIlroy and the whirlwind romance and story behind meeting wife Erica Stoll

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      ROCHESTER, New York has been good to Rory McIlroy.His first trip came in 2013, one year after winning the PGA Championship, where he was given a hero’s reception.
      Rory McIlroy celebrates winning the 2021 Wells Fargo Championship alongside wife Erica Stoll and their daughter PoppyCredit: Getty
      Stoll and McIlroy’s whirlwind romance began in Rochester, New York in 2015Credit: Getty
      His second in 2015 set tongues wagging in the local community, as he began dating local, Erica Stoll.
      The world No3 had just split from a high-profile romance with former tennis No1 Caroline Wozniacki.
      That break-up became a tabloid fodder for a man who didn’t feel comfortable in a celebrity couple.
      But this was a more intimate and quiet affair.
      Read more on golf
      They took in 2Vine, now known as Redd, for a dinner date. The new couple were also spotted at the Magpie Irish Pub grabbing a drink, as onlookers spotted them looking loved up.
      Within eight months, McIlroy and Stoll got engaged in Paris. The City of Love.
      In 2017, the pair walked down the aisle at the five-star Ashford Castle found on Ireland’s west coast.
      Stevie Wonder and Ed Sheeran provided the entertainment, according to E!
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      Three years later, McIlroy and Stoll welcomed daughter Poppy into the world at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida.
      SunSport goes inside their whirlwind romance, starting with how they met.
      She worked for the PGA
      Stoll was a keen tennis player at high school, and graduated with a marketing degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008.
      She soon scored a job as the PGA’s manager of championship volunteer operations, and often interacted with players and told them where they needed to be.
      It was her awareness that saved McIlroy from missing his tee time at the 2012 Ryder Cup, after some confusion over the time zone.
      She alerted officials and a police escort was organised to make sure he got there on time.
      He was forever grateful and from firm friends they soon became much more.
      McIlroy’s romance with Stoll began as a friendship in 2012, when she saved him from missing tee time at the 2012 World CupCredit: Getty
      Two years after they met McIlroy and Stoll walked down the aisle togetherCredit: Getty
      ‘Down-to-earth’
      The buzz around town on their first date made it hard for McIlroy and Stoll to be discreet.
      A waitress told the Democrat and Chronicle as they left 2Vine: “Everybody in the restaurant was shouting, ‘Oh my God, that’s Rory McIlroy! That’s Rory McIlroy!’”
      But, what McIlroy loved about Stoll and their relationship was she was unaffected by that and was down-to-earth.
      He told the Irish Independent in 2017: “I can be myself around her.
      “I love that (she) knows everything about me, and there was no judgment there. There was no judgment from day one, which is huge, because that’s very hard to find for someone in my position.”
      McIlroy has revealed he feels at ease with StollCredit: Getty
      Stoll and McIlroy keep their relationship privateCredit: Getty
      Privacy is key
      All the while, as their romance blossomed, the two kept their relationship to themselves.
      To this day, Stoll’s Instagram is set to private.
      And there were plenty of stipulations producers had to agree to when filming McIlroy for Netflix documentary series Full Swing.
      He told the Golf Channel: “I made sure that the parameters were very much like, look, you can film me at — you’re not coming to my house, you’re not coming in my car, you’re not coming anywhere near my family, but you want to do some stuff with me at golf tournaments, totally fine.”
      When it came to announcing they were expectant parents, McIlroy made the big reveal just two days before Poppy arrived in the world.
      Speaking at the BMW Championship, he said: “We’re about to be parents very soon, so we’re obviously super excited. Yeah, we’ve been sharing the news with friends and family, obviously, but I didn’t think it was something that I really particularly needed to share out here.
      “It’s a private matter, but we’re really excited and can’t wait for her to get here.”
      Read More on The Sun
      McIlroy has got a lot to be thankful for when it comes to Rochester, New York.
      Maybe with the PGA Championship taking place there at Oak Hill, a tournament win would give him something else to be grateful for.
      McIlroy was keen to protect his family’s privacy during Netflix’s filming of Full SwingCredit: Getty
      McIlroy revealed he and Stoll were soon to become parents just two days before daughter Poppy was bornCredit: Getty More