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      Ryder Cup: Home Team Gets a Course Advantage

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      This year the competition is in Rome, which means the European team controls the course setup and can adjust it to its players’ strengths.Max Homa returned from a scouting trip to the site of this week’s Ryder Cup in Rome incredulous with how the course had been set up.Not only were the fairways reduced in width where a tee shot might land, but the rough was grown so thick, high and gnarly that slightly errant shots could disappear.“One day someone hit it over a bunker, and we just lost it in the regular rough,” Homa said. “The whole first day I didn’t see a single ball from the rough hit the green.”The one exception: Justin Thomas hit a ball in the rough onto the green from 100 yards away, a distance where touring pros are thinking about getting the ball to within a few feet from the hole, not just on the putting surface.“The rough is borderline unplayable,” Homa said. “There’s going to be the highest, highest premium placed on being in the fairway, but they’re narrow.”In other words, this sounds like a typical setup for a Ryder Cup played in Europe, where the home team hasn’t lost the biennial competition in 30 years.Luke Donald playing his way out of a bunker at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club during the Italian Open in May.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe Ryder Cup, which alternates between Europe and the United States, is the rare event in elite golf where the home team has an advantage, given that it gets to determine how the course will be played. At regular professional events, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour work with local tournament directors to bring consistency from week to week. For the major championships, the governing bodies dictate how the courses will be set up, and typically lay them out in predictably difficult ways.But the Ryder Cup is different: What the captain of the home team says goes, right up until Sunday night of tournament week. And it’s codified in the Captains’ Agreement, which starts: “It is recognized that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the setup and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and/or preparation will be limited to course architecture/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness.”This year, there’s an added bit of home team advantage at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, because very few of the U.S. players are familiar with the course under any conditions. Several players on the European squad have at least played the course when it hosted the Italian Open on the DP World Tour.In the hope of getting an understanding of how the course would be set up for the Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson, the U.S. captain, took the team on a scouting trip earlier this month.“This is a course that most if not all of our guys have not played,” Johnson said in an interview. “To get their feet on the ground of Marco Simone ahead of the Cup is very important. Having some practice time there can only make a very trying, different, sometimes difficult week of the Cup that much more manageable and comfortable.”Johnson, a five-time Ryder Cup player, knows the setup gambits both sides play. “Because it’s in Europe, there are tendencies their team seems to employ, with regard to course setup among other things,” he said. “We will utilize past experiences and data to make decisions.”The setup shenanigans ultimately equal out. One of the most famous setup tweaks came when Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 U.S. squad, set up the course at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky., to take advantage of his players’ ability to drive the ball farther off the tee than their European opponents.All the hazards — bunkers, much thicker rough — were in the areas where the shorter-hitting Europeans were likely to land the ball, while the rough past the bunkers was cut shorter to make it easier for the American side to escape from wayward drives.A view of the first tee grandstand for the 2023 Ryder Cup. After visiting Marco Simone, Max Homa noted that the rough on the course was so thick and high, errant shots could disappear. Naomi Baker/Getty ImagesIn 2016, at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn., Davis Love III, the U.S. captain, put many pins in the middle of the greens, making it easy for the player, but less exciting to watch.The European side has historically gone with a setup that features narrow fairways and higher rough, under the premise that American golfers are less accurate, along with greens that are much slower than those typically found on the PGA Tour. This year was no different, Homa said.That leaves an obvious question: Why do the officials allow this?The Ryder Cup is jointly sanctioned by the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe, which is a blend of three organizations in Britain and Europe. Officials at the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe said the setup was fair and it could reward or penalize players on either team.Zach Johnson, the United States team captain, talking with reporters in Rome earlier this month. Johnson took his team on a scouting trip to the course to increase their familiarity with it. Andrew Medichini/Associated Press“You are looking for it to be tough, but fair, and provide an exciting challenge,” said David Garland, director of tour operations for Ryder Cup Europe.Kerry Haigh, chief championships officer at the P.G.A. of America, said: “The Ryder Cup is unlike our other championships in that the home captain has a lot of influence as to how the golf course is set up. Our aim is to make any Ryder Cup golf course setup fair for both teams.”Once play starts, it’s up to the officials to maintain the course as it was at the outset. “If you want six-inch rough, four-inch rough or two-inch rough, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Haigh said.Setup aside, both officials emphasized that this year’s course has some shorter holes that are meant to increase the excitement of the matches.“There are a couple of drivable par 4s, the fifth and the 16th, which are both over water,” Garland said. “The course was completely rebuilt a few years ago for the Ryder Cup with the drama of match play in mind.” More

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      When Professional Golfers Are Also Course Designers

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      Golf course design is now in an era of star architects, but professional golfers are still bringing their name and vast playing knowledge to projects.Ernie Els, a four-time major champion, won the 2007 HSBC World Match Play Championship at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England, host of this week’s BMW PGA Championship.The club, a sprawling complex of three 18-hole golf courses and a plenitude of amenities, was working to refresh the West Course, which hosted championship golf. Els was the architect in charge of the work.Wentworth is the home of the European Tour, which runs the DP World Tour, and has hosted this week’s flagship event since the 1980s. (Three times, Els finished as runner-up in the event.)The West Course was originally designed by Harry Colt nearly 100 years earlier. Colt was one of the early 20th century’s great golf course architects. He worked on some 300 courses, including the original routing of Pine Valley, often the top-ranked course in the world.Under Els’s direction, the bunkering at the par 3, second hole at West Course Wentworth was redesigned.David Cannon/Getty ImagesBut the game had changed, and Els, who was known for his smooth swing, was brought in to restore some of the original challenges that Colt had created — but that longer-hitting pros had rendered obsolete. One of the key fixes was rebuilding all the greens so they would have the firm bounce and fast speed that pros are used to.Ten years after that victory at Wentworth, Els finished the renovation. “There’s certainly no other golf course in the world that I know as well as Wentworth’s West Course, so you could say we were the logical choice,” Els said. “Obviously to have that opportunity was an honor, not just professionally but personally, too. I’d say I fell in love with the West Course before I’d even played it, seeing the World Matchplay on television, watching some of my heroes.”What Els had been asked to do, though, was something that has faded from popularity: be a tour pro who renovated a course.With the help of Brooks Koepka, shown at the Houston Open in 2021, Tom Doak was able to redesign Memorial Park and bring his vision for the course to life.Carmen Mandato/Getty ImagesPros once lent their vast playing knowledge to golf course design projects — often with an enormous real estate development attached — but when the economy cooled in 2008 and new golf course construction dried up, so, too, did pros’ involvement.Golf course design is now in an era of star architects, such as Tom Doak and Gil Hanse, whose vision for the game focuses more on purity and enjoyment than on creating overly penal courses that will frustrate amateurs and most likely never host a professional tournament. The original golf course boom in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, however, was fueled by great golfers like Willie Park Jr., who won the British Open twice, and Donald Ross, a pro from Scotland.Despite the recent trend, pros still maintain a role in course design, even if it is a very different one from decades past. It’s more in the collaborative mode of Els at Wentworth than the splashy one that saw golf stars of the 1970s and 1980s like Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Don January and Billy Casper lend their names to developments.Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion, shown during the third round of that competition, is now a director at the design firm OCM Golf. He said it helps him to be able to talk about his experiences at various courses.Stuart Franklin/Getty Images“If someone’s been a good golfer, people believe they probably know everything about golf,” said Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion and a director at the design firm OCM Golf. “Some do; some don’t. But when I’m meeting members, I think it helps when I can wax on the virtues of the 13th hole at Augusta National because I’ve played there. It makes it easier.”His firm has worked on major restorations of courses in Australia and is currently working on Medinah Country Club’s Course 3, which will host the 2026 Presidents Cup, a series of matches between the United States and an international squad. (Ogilvy played three times on Presidents Cup teams.)But he has two partners in the design firm who know the intricacies of building a course. “It’s better to have three minds in there,” said Ogilvy, who won 12 times on the PGA and European Tours. “They’re routing and designing it. I’m working on a lot of the playability stuff. What would tour guys hit from here? Will guys go for that shot or get scared?”That intuition, particularly on the psychological part of the game, is valuable to designers, said Bobby Weed, an architect who worked with 17 PGA Tour player consultants when he build out the Tournament Players Club Network, a group of courses designed to host professional tournaments.“What I liked was their input into what scared them on a shot,” said Weed, who was mentored by the designer Pete Dye. “I liked to understand how they’re thinking, what their process was. It’s so different from the amateur golfer.”He said not every pro was as involved or knowledgeable and that some got more credit after the course opened than they deserved. But many of the pros who have helped design enduring courses relied on a solid team under their brand name. Jack Nicklaus had Bob Cupp and Jay Morrish. Greg Norman had Jason McCoy. Ben Crenshaw had Bill Coore. Jack Nicklaus, left, helped design the Sebonack golf course with Tom Doak. Michael E. Ach/Newsday Rm, via Getty Images“The first thing the pros bring is their name. They’re much more famous than any of us who never played professional golf ever will be,” said Doak, an architect who worked with Nicklaus to build Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, N.Y.“What they bring is much more focus on the individual golf holes and the strategy of the individual golf holes. What they don’t bring is the perspective that everyone who plays golf isn’t out there trying to shoot their career best.”Large destination courses are still being built, but many course designs these days are renovations — and they often lack the budget of a large, tournament-focused club like Wentworth.“The pendulum has swung toward architects because most of the market is being driven by remodeling,” Michael Hurdzan, whose course designs include Erin Hills in Wisconsin, which hosted the U.S. Open in 2017, said. “That means you’re going into an existing facility and fixing someone else’s mistakes with a limited amount of time, a limited amount of money and 300 critics who are members. It takes a lot of time, a lot of hand holding.”One such example is the Medalist Golf Club, in Hobe Sound, Fla. It’s a tough, popular course among pros. When it was built, Norman was given top billing as the architect, with Pete Dye second. But when the club underwent a renovation, Weed, who has worked closely with Dye, was called in to do the work.Some pros understand that their skills lie elsewhere in a project.Mathew Goggin, who played in 279 events on the PGA Tour, is developing Seven Mile Beach, a golf course in his hometown, Hobart, Australia. But he is clear that being a professional golfer does not make him a great architect.“I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough to design a course,” he said. “You let the design team do what they do. I think you’re doing a disservice to golf-course architecture unless you really do it. I have no expertise in it whatsoever. What am I going to say? ‘Move that bunker over there?’”And good architects know what to listen to. Goggin said he complimented the architect, Mike DeVries, for creating what even Goggin thought was a really hard hole at Seven Mile Beach. DeVries listened and redesigned it. He wasn’t building it for a PGA Tour pro.Goggin said he used his reputation as a great golfer from the area to push the project along. “I used my profile to get a meeting with the government ministers,” he said. “I showed them the success of Barnbougle Dunes [a course in Tasmania], and we talked about how destination golf has an economic impact.”There are advantages architects get from working with pros that they can’t get elsewhere. Doak designed Memorial Park with Brooks Koepka, and the course hosts the Houston Open on the PGA Tour. With the help of Koepka, a great ball striker, it was much easier for Doak to see his vision come to life.“On the resort courses or the member course, you visualize the shot you expect to see — and you sometimes wait months to see it,” he said. “At a course for a tour event, you really only have to wait two or three groups to see it.” More

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      LIV Golf Has Embraced Trump, but Others Are Keeping Their Distance

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      LIV Golf has embraced the former president. But much of golf’s establishment is keeping its distance, even as LIV and the PGA Tour seek a détente.Walking toward a tee box in Virginia in May, former President Donald J. Trump offered an awfully accurate assessment of the way many golf executives viewed him.“They love the courses,” he said, forever the salesman for his family company’s portfolio of properties, “but I think they probably consider me a little bit controversial right now.”As much as some leaders of men’s golf are trying to patch the rupture created by the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, a tour Trump has championed, they seem to be in no rush to end the former president’s exile from their sport’s buttoned-up establishment. Even in an era of gaudy wealth and shifting alliances in golf, Trump remains, for now, a measure too much for many.The consequences have been conspicuous for a figure who had expected to host a men’s golf major tournament in 2022. Now, his ties to the sport’s elite ranks often appear limited to LIV events and periodic rounds with past and present professionals. Jack Nicklaus, the 18-time major champion, caused a stir in April when he publicly stopped short of again endorsing a Trump bid for the White House.Nevertheless, on Thursday, when he was playing a LIV pro-am event at his course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump insisted he was in regular conversations with golf executives about top-tier tournaments.“They think as long as you’re running for office or in office, you’re controversial,” he said.Golf has been a regular respite for Democratic and Republican commanders in chief. But no American president has had a more openly combustible history with the sport than Trump, and perhaps no president besides Dwight D. Eisenhower, who is thought to have averaged about 100 rounds annually when he was in the White House, has had so much of his public image linked to golf.In the years before Trump won the presidency, he had at last started to make significant headway into the rarefied realms of golf.Trump watched his shot from the fairway.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn 2012, the U.S. Golf Association picked the Bedminster property for the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open. Two years later, the P.G.A. of America said it planned to take the men’s P.G.A. Championship to the course in 2022. Also in 2014, Trump bought Turnberry, a mesmerizing Scottish property that had hosted four British Opens, and he imagined golf’s oldest major championship being contested there again.Once in the White House, Trump played with a parade of golf figures (though some of them appeared more attracted to the magic of the presidency than to Trump himself): Tiger Woods; Rory McIlroy; Ernie Els; Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour; and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club.Trump’s 2016 campaign and presidency had given some in golf heartburn. But it was the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol that most clearly chiseled away at his golf dreams. The P.G.A., which is distinct from the PGA Tour, which has dueled with LIV for supremacy over men’s professional golf, immediately moved its 2022 championship from Bedminster. The R&A, which organizes the British Open, made clear that it would not be bound for Turnberry anytime soon.LIV soon emerged as something of a life raft, an insurgent league with a craving for championship-quality courses and plenty of money to spend. It did not hurt that Trump had been strikingly cozy with the government in Riyadh whose wealth fund was ready to pour billions of dollars into LIV — and let some of those dollars, in turn, roll toward the Trump Organization for reasons that have been the subject of widespread speculation.Trump became a fixture at LIV events held at his courses, routinely jawing about the PGA Tour with variable accuracy. (He did, however, predict something like the planned transaction between the wealth fund and the PGA Tour.) This week’s event in New Jersey is his family’s fourth LIV tournament, and a fifth is planned for the Miami area in October.But the budding détente between the Saudis and the PGA Tour does not seem to be leading to an immediate one between Trump and the broader golf industry, which the Saudis could have enormous sway over in the years ahead.The PGA Tour has not publicly committed to maintaining the LIV brand if it reaches a conclusive deal with the wealth fund, and the tentative agreement says nothing about the future of men’s golf’s relationship with Trump. The PGA Tour has a history with Trump but ended its relationship with his company during the 2016 campaign. Tim Finchem, who was the tour’s commissioner then, denied at the time that the decision was “a political exercise” and instead called it “fundamentally a sponsorship issue.”To no one’s surprise, the tour’s 2024 schedule, which the circuit released on Monday, features no events at Trump properties. And although Trump said a few months ago that he thought the Irish Open might be interested in his Doonbeg course, the DP World Tour, which is also a part of the agreement with the Saudi wealth fund, has said the course is not under consideration.Other top golf figures who are not bound by any deal with the Saudis somehow appear even less interested.Trump Turnberry in Scotland won’t be hosting the British Open anytime soon, according to the chief executive of the R&A.Mary Turner for The New York Times“Until we’re confident that any coverage at Turnberry would be about golf, about the golf course and about the championship, until we’re confident about that, we will not return any of our championships there,” Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the R&A, said on the same day last month when he signaled that the Open organizer might be willing to accept a Saudi investment.Seth Waugh, the P.G.A. of America’s chief executive, declined to comment this week, but the organization has given no signal that it is reconsidering its thinking about Trump courses. The U.S.G.A. said it did not have a comment.Some players, many of whom at least lean conservative, have suggested they would like to see Trump courses be in the mix for the majors.“There’s no reason you couldn’t host P.G.A.s, U.S. Opens out here,” said Patrick Reed, who won the Masters Tournament in 2018 and played with Trump on Thursday. “I mean, just look at it out here: The rough is brutal.”Even a sudden rapprochement, which would require executives setting aside the views of players like Reed that politics should not shape sports decisions, would almost certainly not lead to Trump’s strutting around a major tournament in the near future.The next U.S. Open in need of a venue is the one that will be played in 2036; Trump would turn 90 on the Saturday of that tournament. P.G.A. Championships are booked through 2030. Between last month’s announcement that the 2026 British Open will be held at Royal Birkdale and the R&A’s sustained public skepticism of Trump, the last major of the calendar year seems unlikely to head to a Trump property anytime soon. And the Masters, which is always played at Augusta National in Georgia, is not an option.Women’s golf offers a few more theoretical possibilities since its roster of venues is not as set, but Trump would face much of the same reluctance.Trump has mused about the financial wisdom of golf’s keeping its distance from him. A few months ago, he argued that avoiding his courses was “foolish because you make a lot of money with controversy.”He may be right.But it seems golf is reasoning that it is making plenty of money anyway. Its political bent, some figure, might be better managed outside the glare of its major tournaments — and, moreover, beyond the shadow of Trump.Trump has mused about the financial wisdom of golf’s keeping its distance from him. Doug Mills/The New York Times More

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      Tiger Woods Joins PGA Tour Board in Concession to Player Demands

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      With the addition of Woods, players will outnumber independent directors, giving them the final say in the tour’s plan to form a partnership with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.Infuriated after being blindsided by the PGA Tour’s pact with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, a band of leading golfers has won a series of concessions from the beleaguered circuit’s commissioner — including the elevation of Tiger Woods to the tour’s board — in a star-driven rebuke of the tour.The tour announced the changes on Tuesday, one day after dozens of top players wrote to Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, and insisted on significant overhauls.The players, including Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Rickie Fowler, Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler, said that the secret negotiations toward a tentative deal with the wealth fund had defied the principle that the tour should be committed to players and run by them. In turn, Monday’s letter detailed demands that amounted to a dramatic effort to reclaim power over a circuit that got its modern start after a player rebellion in the late 1960s.Woods, the golfers said, had to be installed on the tour’s board promptly, giving the players a sixth seat, and allowing them to outnumber the independent board members who come from the worlds of business and law. And the players insisted that one of their advisers, Colin Neville of the merchant bank Raine, have sweeping access to the tour’s files while executives try to reach a final deal with the wealth fund.A lasting agreement with the wealth fund, they signaled, would not clear the board unless Neville was able to review the terms with the players.“This is a critical point for the tour, and the players will do their best to make certain that any changes that are made in tour operations are in the best interest of all tour stakeholders, including fans, sponsors and players,” Woods said in a statement.“The players thank Commissioner Monahan for agreeing to address our concerns, and we look forward to being at the table with him to make the right decisions for the future of the game that we all love,” Woods added. “He has my confidence moving forward with these changes.”Sustained support for Monahan was no certainty entering the week. In a striking show of force, more than 40 players, including Woods, the five sitting members of the board and the 16 members of an important advisory council, signed the letter to Monahan.Player outrage over the deal with the wealth fund began about as soon as it was announced in June. The tour hailed the agreement, which seeks to create a new for-profit entity combining the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league with the commercial operations of the tour and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, as a step forward for a divided sport.But players had, at most, hours of warning about the deal.Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, at the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Charlotte, N.C., last September.Peter Casey/USA Today Sports, via ReutersInstead, Monahan and two independent board members, James J. Dunne III and Edward D. Herlihy, handled the talks with the wealth fund on the tour’s behalf without informing other board members. A handful of players, including board members like McIlroy, were told of the agreement shortly before it was announced. Most of the rest of the tour’s players found out about it when it became public.Time did not diminish their misgivings.“We still don’t really have a lot of clarity as to what’s going on, and that’s a bit worrisome,” Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player and a golfer normally eager to stay out of the tour’s internal politics, said last month. “They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t really have the information that we need.”In recent weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations, players have spoken privately about the changes they would want to see from the tour to which they had remained loyal. Monday’s letter to Monahan reflected those conversations, and Monahan swiftly agreed.The commissioner and his tour have been the targets of ferocious criticism, in part because an agreement with the Saudis had seemed so improbable after a year marked by acrimony.In 2022, LIV began poaching top tour players, including Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, starting an all-out war for the future of golf. Players sued the PGA Tour, saying it had illegally discouraged players from joining LIV, and the tour countersued. The tour also highlighted Saudi Arabia’s human rights record at every turn, with Monahan memorably asking on national television, “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”The tentative agreement ended the litigation between the parties, but otherwise lacked many substantive binding commitments. That hasn’t halted the intense questioning about how the tour’s campaign against the Saudis so quickly morphed into an embrace that leaves the wealth fund poised to hold enormous sway over golf.Lawmakers in both the House and Senate are targeting the tour’s tax-exempt status, and tour leaders went before a congressional subcommittee last month to answer questions about the agreement. The Department of Justice is scrutinizing whether the tour violated antitrust law, scrutiny that has already scuttled one part of the deal.But the players have always been among the biggest roadblocks to a final agreement. When LIV offered exorbitant sums to players to defect — LIV’s chief executive Greg Norman has said that Woods turned down north of $700 million — many decided to stick with the tour. They spoke with disdain for LIV’s team golf concept, its weaker fields and even the length of its events, and joined the chorus accusing Saudi Arabia of using golf to burnish its image.Then came the agreement and, soon, the uprising.The tour said last week that Neville, the banker, would advise the players on a potential deal and that they would have a say in choosing a new independent board member to replace Randall Stephenson, the former AT&T chairman who resigned after being left out of the loop on negotiations with the Saudis. The tour also said it was devising a “financially significant” plan to compensate players who did not take LIV’s money, and it signaled again that LIV players who want to return to the tour were likely to face penalties.Monday brought a new set of demands and swift acquiescence from tour leaders.A board seat for Woods is no guarantee of player unanimity, however. What the richest and best known players in the world want out of a final agreement could differ from what the fringe tour professionals, who are far more numerous, desire.Woods, who won his 15th major championship in 2019 but has rarely played since because of major injuries, has declined to join LIV and bitterly criticized its style of play, but his views on a potential agreement with the investment fund are unknown. He has not said anything publicly about the tentative agreement, and his agent, Mark Steinberg, has not responded to multiple requests for comment.No current player, though, commands as much public influence as Woods — just as no current player has as much private power as he does. Even during his convalescence, Woods has remained in close touch with some tour golfers, many of whom attribute the circuit’s financial success and contemporary popularity almost entirely to Woods.“When Tiger speaks, his voice is very loud,” Gary Woodland, a U.S. Open winner who turned professional in 2007, said in an interview in June.The players believe that Woods’s arrival on the board, which also includes the P.G.A. of America’s president, will do much to reassure the particularly restive ones in their ranks, some of whom have lately considered potential paths to challenge the tentative agreement with the wealth fund.Players are expected to meet with Monahan next week, when the tour will hold an event in Memphis. More

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      The Joys of Links Golf Never Get Old

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      No matter which seaside, windswept course hosts the British Open, the final major tournament of the year puts a golfer’s imagination to work, and captures ours.Tired of the whole golf-gone-wild thing? The one that has turned the men’s professional game into a new toy for Saudi investors? The one that has U.S. senators dragging golf (minus the bag) to work? The one that has left the PGA Tour star Rory McIlroy saying he feels like a sacrificial lamb in the proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership?Rest easy. This week, links golf, the windswept and unadorned form of the game, takes its annual turn on golf’s main stage. It’s a chance for golf to tell its origin story all over again. The British Open, the fourth and last of the annual Grand Slam events, is upon us.The host course, this time around, is Royal Liverpool, also known as Hoylake to those who know the course and its bumpy fairways, which are rendered a pale khaki green by the summer sun and the brackish air.British Opens are always played, to borrow a phrase from the BBC commentator Peter Alliss, who died in 2020, “in sight and sound of the sea.” They are contested on links courses that are a century old — or much older. Royal Liverpool held its first Open in 1897 and is on Liverpool Bay, though you might think of it as the Irish Sea. The course is a mile from the train station in Hoylake — many fans will get there via Merseyrail — and about 15 miles from Penny Lane in Liverpool.The lifelong Texan Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2017 British Open, prepared for Royal Liverpool by entering last week’s Scottish Open, played on the links course at the Renaissance Club. One afternoon, Spieth slipped away and played North Berwick, an old and beloved links. Its 13th green is guarded by a stone wall because — well, why not? The wall was there first, and the course goes back to 1832.Jordan Spieth during the final round of his win at the British Open in 2017.Richard Heathcote/R&A, via Getty Images“In the British Isles,” the American golf course architect Rees Jones said recently, “they like quirky.”Promoting a course by way of its architect, a powerful marketing tool in American golf, is not much of a thing in Britain. Years ago, Jones was making a first visit to Western Gailes, a rugged course on Scotland’s rugged west coast. The club’s starchy club secretary — that is, the gatekeeper — told Jones he could play the course if he could name its architect.Jones offered a series of names.Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.“Who designed it then?” Jones asked.“God!” the secretary bellowed.Spieth’s plan was to play only a few holes at North Berwick, but he found he couldn’t quit. He played the entire course. While on it, he talked about the joys of links golf.“There’s nothing like links golf,” he said. “The turf plays totally different. The shots go shorter or farther than shots go anywhere else, depending on wind. It’s exciting. It’s fun. You use your imagination. There’s never a driving-range shot when you’re playing links golf.”In the background, somebody in Spieth’s group offered, “Good shot,” to another player. But you have to be careful with that phrase, when playing on links land.Nobody could know that better than Tom Watson, the winner of five British Opens in the 1970s and ’80s.“In 1975, I went to Carnoustie to play in my first Open,” Watson said in a recent phone interview. Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, is famously difficult, bleak and tricky. Watson arrived at the course on the Sunday before the start of the tournament, but the overlords turned him away. He was too early. Good thing there are 240 traditional links courses across Britain.“So Hubert Green and John Mahaffey and I went down the road to Monifieth,” Watson said. “I hit my first shot right down the middle. Everybody says, ‘Good shot.’ We walk down the fairway. Can’t find my ball. It’s gone. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know about this links golf.’”Watson won that 1975 British Open at Carnoustie. And he might have won in 2009 at Turnberry, but his second shot, with an 8-iron, on the 72nd hole, landed short of the green, took a wicked bounce and finished in fluffy grass. He need one simple closing par to win. Instead, his bogey meant a playoff, and Watson, 59 and spent, was doomed. Stewart Cink won.Watson came into the press tent and said, “This ain’t no funeral.” A links golfer, over time, learns to accept the good bounces and bad ones in any golfing life.Phil Mickelson with his caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay after making his birdie putt on No. 18 to win in 2013.Toby Melville/ReutersAfter Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982 with the dream of becoming a golf course architect, he became a summer caddie at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Doak, now a prominent architect (and the designer of the Renaissance course), has been making a study of links golf ever since. In a recent interview, he noted that older golfers often do well in the British Open. Greg Norman was 53 when he finished in a tie for third in 2008. Darren Clarke was 42 when he won in 2011, and Phil Mickelson was 43 when he won in 2013.Links golf, Doak said, is not about smashing the driver with youthful abandon. When Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, he hit driver only once over four days. Greens on British Open courses are typically flat and slow, notably so, compared with, say, the greens at Augusta National. There’s less stress over putting and the game within the game that favors young eyes and young nerves. What links golf rewards most is the ability to read the wind, the bounce and how to flight your ball with an iron.“In links golf, you have to curve the ball both ways, depending on what the wind is doing and where the pin is,” Doak said. “You have to figure out what the ball is going to do after it lands.”That takes guile and skill and earned golfing wisdom — all helpful whether you’re playing in a British Open or a casual match with a friend in the long dusk light of the British summer. Open fans will sometimes finish their golf day with a suppertime nine (or more) on a nearby seaside links. Greater Liverpool has a bunch of them. Every British Open venue does.Playing night golf on those courses, you might also see golf officials, equipment reps, sportswriters and caddies, Jim Mackay among them. Mackay, who is known as Bones and who caddies for Justin Thomas, was Mickelson’s caddie when Mickelson won at Muirfield a decade ago.Mackay, like millions of other golf nuts around the world, can’t get enough of the game. That is, the actual game, not its politics, not its business opportunities. Mackay knows, as a golfer and caddie, that success in links golf requires a certain kind of golfing magic, the ability to make the golf ball do as you wish.Playing links golf, he said recently, “is like standing 50 yards in front of a hotel and having to decide which window on which floor you want your ball to go through.”The caddie as poet. A golfer with options.Links golf, John Updike once wrote, represents “freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” On some level, the winner at Royal Liverpool will understand that. The winners of all those suppertime matches will, too. Yes, the Open champion will get $3 million this year. But he will also get one-year custody of the winner’s trophy, the claret jug, his name etched on it forever.Tiger Woods with his caddie Steve Williams after his win at Royal Liverpool in 2006.Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesDo you know how much Woods earned for winning at Hoylake in the summer of 2006? Not likely.But many of us remember Woods sobbing in his caddie’s arms. We remember Woods cradling the jug in victory. We remember the clouds of brown dirt that announced his shots, his ball soaring, his club head twirling.“Hit it, wind,” Woods would say, now and again, to his airborne ball, as if the wind could hear him, and maybe it could. More

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      British Open Won’t Rule Out Saudi Deal

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      The Open is not looking for a title sponsor for one of the world’s most celebrated tournaments, but other options could be on the table.The leader of the R&A, who only a year ago was among the fiercest critics of LIV Golf, did not rule out the possibility on Wednesday that the group, the British Open’s organizer, could someday accept money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.“The world of sport has changed dramatically in the last 12 months, and it is not feasible for the R&A or golf to just ignore what is a societal change on a global basis,” Martin Slumbers, the R&A chief executive, said at Royal Liverpool, where the Open will begin on Thursday. “We will be considering within all the parameters that we look at all the options that we have.”The wealth fund has lately surged to become one of the most prominent benefactors in sports, cumulatively spreading billions of dollars through golf and soccer and stirring speculation about where it might put its money next. Britain has been central to the wealth fund’s ambitions: In 2021, it purchased the Premier League soccer team Newcastle United.The fund and its allies have insisted that the investments are intended to broaden the Saudi economy, but they have faced skepticism and fears that Saudi leaders are partly looking to use sports to rehabilitate their kingdom’s reputation for human rights violations.Although Slumbers said last year that he was “very comfortable in golf globally growing,” he complained then that LIV’s Saudi-bankrolled model was “not in the best long-term interests of the sport” and “entirely driven by money.” Human rights abuses, he declared then, were “abhorrent and unacceptable.”He appeared far less fearsome on Wednesday, even as he placed a limit on a potential arrangement with the wealth fund, or anyone else, and insisted that he was uninterested in a so-called presenting sponsor for the Open, which will be played in the coming days for the 151st time. (Rolex is the principal sponsor for next week’s Senior Open at Royal Porthcawl in Wales. Next month, the AIG Women’s Open will be contested at Walton Heath, near London.)But asked directly during a news conference about the possibility of the wealth fund becoming “a partner,” Slumbers replied, “If I’m very open, we are and do and continue to do, talk to various potential sponsors.”Slumbers’s receptiveness reflects the swelling fears among golf executives about the financial sustainability of the sport, whose prize funds have recently soared. The purse for this year’s Open is $16.5 million, more than double that of a decade ago. On Wednesday, Slumbers said prize money was increasing far faster than he and other executives had expected.Some of the pressure swamping men’s golf could ease if the PGA Tour and LIV end what has amounted to an arms race for the world’s top players. The tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour took a step toward that last month, when they announced a plan to bring their golf business ventures into a new, for-profit company. The agreement, which the R&A is not a part of, may not close for months.Slumbers said that the R&A, which, along with the U.S. Golf Association, writes the sport’s rule book, would “absolutely welcome an end to the disruption in the men’s professional game.”He was much less eager for a partnership with former President Donald J. Trump, who has been one of LIV’s biggest boosters and has repeatedly asserted that the R&A is looking to return the Open to Turnberry, one of Scotland’s most spectacular courses. Trump purchased the property in 2014, five years after its most recent Open.“We will not return until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself, and we do not believe that is achievable in the current circumstances,” Slumbers said in the days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.Trump has nevertheless claimed since then that the R&A is looking to host another Open at Turnberry. Instead of acquiescing on Wednesday, Slumbers instead came close to repeating his 2021 statement.“We’ve been very clear,” he said. More

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      Cameron Smith Will Try To Defend His British Open Championship

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      Smith, defending a major tournament title for the first time this week, is happy not to get too worked up about much of anything.It is possible that one of last July’s customers at the Dunvegan Hotel, which fancies itself only a 9-iron away from the Old Course, remembers more of Cameron Smith’s British Open than he does.It would not take much, because Smith recently recalled roughly this about the Sunday that left him a major tournament champion: teeing off, missing a putt on the ninth hole, learning he had seized the lead, then finishing to “the feeling of not really joy, but the feeling of relief.”He considers this, a memory mostly unburdened by brilliance or blunder, a strength.“That’s one of my greatest assets: hitting a golf shot and forgetting about it,” Smith said in an interview. He has friends, as every professional golfer does, who can “remember every single shot from every single tournament they’ve played in.”“But that’s something,” he continued, “I’ve never been able to do.”He is the one who has spent the last year filling the Open winner’s claret jug with beer — Australia’s XXXX Gold, he concluded, tastes best — and passing it around.Now comes his first major title defense, which will begin on Thursday at Royal Liverpool, the English course that is the site of the 151st Open.Assessing Smith’s year so far is an exercise in choose-your-own-adventure analysis. The Masters Tournament, where he had finished in the top 10 for three consecutive years, yielded a letdown in April, when he tied for 34th at the only major tournament where he has never failed to make the weekend.But Smith’s May outing at Oak Hill was his best P.G.A. Championship performance of his career (a tie for ninth), and after missing three U.S. Open cuts in five years, he left Los Angeles with a fourth-place finish. Less than two weeks ago, he won a LIV Golf tournament near London, his second individual victory since he joined the Saudi-backed circuit last summer. The event was, perhaps, exceptional preparation for the taunts and terrors of Royal Liverpool, even for a past Open champion.“And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good,” Smith said.Paul Childs/Reuters“The wind is very different, I feel like, in England and Scotland,” Marc Leishman, one of Smith’s LIV teammates, observed this month. “It’s a lot heavier. Getting used to that is pretty important, taking spin off the ball. Cam is very good at that time, and throw his wedges and putting on top of that, and he’s a pretty formidable opponent.”Smith’s slump — a relative term — at the year’s start probably had its origins in a holiday break that was the longest of the 29-year-old’s career. He had won the Australian P.G.A. Championship, missed the cut at the Australian Open and was desperately in need of a reboot after years of pandemic tumult and a rush into the global spotlight. Even now, he says, he is a professional athlete who would “prefer that people don’t know me.” If he had his way, he’d probably be out fishing.And so though the hiatus was a fine, vital salve for his mind, it was, at least in the interim, a hex on his golf game. Once he returned to competition, the shortcomings of his preparation were clear. He had middling finishes in two of the first three LIV events of the year, and he missed the cut at a tournament in Saudi Arabia.He still preferred to practice putting off a mirror in his Florida office (there, instead of on a green, “because I’m lazy”) but accepted, however begrudgingly, that his driver was in need of greater work. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles for the U.S. Open in June, he was eagerly embracing an old-school approach: Don’t worry too much about distance, try to land the ball in the fairway, have a chance for birdie.He finished 50th in driving distance but had 19 birdies, tied for second in the field and equal to the winner, Wyndham Clark. At Augusta, he had been 31st in driving distance and tied for 37th in birdies, with 13.“I feel like I worked on that quite hard, and the golf has been really good, and then it was just a case of letting go and letting stuff happen,” he said of his resurgence. “And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good.”But Smith’s at-ease sorcery, so plain to anyone who goes online and spends a minute watching him conquer the Road Hole on the Sunday he won the claret jug, flows in large part from his equilibrium. He draws it from his mother, he thinks, perhaps not surprising for a player whose early PGA Tour years were marked by homesickness.The pandemic did not help. When he won the tour’s Players Championship in March 2022, his mother and sister were at T.P.C. Sawgrass, having just reunited with Smith after more than two years of border restrictions. Six months later, he was ranked second in the world and was one of LIV’s most hyped signings.But he has so far managed to avoid being viewed like quite so much of a villain, even before last month’s surprise announcement of a potential détente between the warring circuits. He has spent only so much time airing grievances in public. He has acknowledged shortcomings in LIV’s fields compared to the PGA Tour’s. When his world ranking tumbled, which was inevitable since LIV tournaments have not been accredited, he did not lash out because his shot at reaching No. 1 was fading.“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” he said in an interview in March. Now, with a tentative peace perhaps taking hold in professional golf, he is wondering whether he will have a shot, after all.“Don’t get me wrong: I want to beat everyone else,” he said. “But there’s no reason why you can’t do it with a smile on your face.”He will face 155 other men this week, all of them clamoring to deny him another year with the claret jug. Now ranked seventh in the world, and preparing for a field that includes more than a dozen fellow Open winners, he has a backup plan for his beverages.“The Aussie P.G.A. Trophy is pretty cool,” he said. “You can definitely fit a lot more beer in that one.”Still, he said this week, his eyes welled with tears when he returned the claret jug to the Open’s organizers.“I wasn’t, like, not letting it go,” he said at a news conference on Monday. “But it was just a bit of a moment that I guess you guess you don’t think about, and then all of a sudden it’s there, and, yeah, you want it back.” More

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      Pressured by U.S., PGA Tour and Saudi Fund Drop Key Part of Golf Deal

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      The two parties had promised not to poach each other’s players. Their decision to abandon that clause removes one of the few binding provisions of the agreement that has rocked golf.The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, facing pressure from the Justice Department about their ambitions for a new company to shape global golf, have in recent days abandoned a crucial provision of their tentative deal: a promise not to recruit each other’s players.The decision — and the Justice Department’s choice to raise concerns so early in a review that could lead to a government attempt to block the transaction — reflected the fragility, uncertainty and turbulence surrounding the deal.The framework agreement between the tour and the wealth fund included few binding provisions. But one of them was a nonsolicitation clause, which said the tour and wealth fund-backed LIV Golf league would not “enter into any contract, agreement or understanding with” any “players who are members of the other’s tour or organization.”The agreement also said the tour and LIV would not “solicit” or “recruit” players away from each other.Before the deal, LIV used norm-shattering prize funds and guaranteed contracts — some deals promised golfers at least $100 million — to entice some of the world’s top players away from the PGA Tour, which had spent decades as the premier, and largely unchallenged, circuit in men’s professional golf.Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith were among the players who ultimately joined LIV, depriving the PGA Tour of some of the star power on which it had relied to draw fans and sponsors.The nonsolicitation clause was a short-term way to stop the exodus while the tour and the wealth fund negotiated the final terms for their new company, which would bring the golf business ventures of the PGA Tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, into a single entity.“My fear is if we don’t get to an agreement, they were already putting billions of dollars into golf,” James J. Dunne, a PGA Tour board member, said of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAfter the text of the agreement emerged late last month, though, antitrust experts warned that the clause could run afoul of federal law because it threatened the integrity of the labor market and promised to stifle competition for players, who have long been independent contractors.In recent days, people familiar with the change said, the tour and the wealth fund decided to abandon the provision in hopes of staving off an extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department. Golf officials disagreed with the department’s misgivings but acquiesced nevertheless.The original language appeared “to be right in the field of vision that the Department of Justice has staked out for its no-poaching enforcement program,” said William E. Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chairman.“They haven’t had a great deal of success in their criminal cases yet,” he said. “But they have said, as a matter of policy, we regard no-poaching agreements as being as being a serious offense worthy of criminal prosecution.”The Justice Department and the wealth fund declined to comment on Thursday. In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the tour said it “chose to remove specific language” from the initial pact after it engaged with the Justice Department.“While we believe the language is lawful, we also consider it unnecessary in the spirit of cooperation and because all parties are negotiating in good faith,” the tour said.The tour formally notified its board of the decision on Thursday, after The New York Times asked the tour to comment on its reporting. A person familiar with the tour’s internal deliberations said the circuit’s leaders had already planned to inform the board on Thursday.Turmoil has enveloped the deal, which has not closed, since it was announced on June 6. On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee questioned a pair of PGA Tour leaders during a lengthy hearing, part of at least two unfolding congressional inquiries. Tour executives have depicted the framework deal, and the final accord they hope to strike eventually, as necessary.Without some kind of truce, they have said, the wealth fund would assuredly pour more resources into the fight, diminishing the tour one year after another.“My fear is if we don’t get to an agreement, they were already putting billions of dollars into golf,” James J. Dunne III, a tour board member, said of the wealth fund when he addressed lawmakers on Tuesday. “They have a management team wanting to destroy the tour. Even though you can say take five or six players a year, they have an unlimited horizon and an unlimited amount of money.”The reviews on Capitol Hill could lead to damaging public revelations. But Justice Department scrutiny is seen as the more likely path for the government to try to derail the deal, if it chooses to try.Regulators and antitrust scholars have been watching the tour’s public statements with interest, such as when Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, said on June 6 that the deal would let the circuit “take the competitor off of the board.”“Those are sound bites that the Department of Justice would look at and say, ‘Is what occurred promoting competition, or is what occurred stifling competition insofar as an entity with a monopoly grip on the market has eliminated a competitor and solidified their grip on the market?’” said Gerald Maatman Jr., who chairs the workplace class-action group at the law firm Duane Morris.Not every binding provision of the framework agreement has caused such substantial alarm among antitrust regulators. The wealth fund and the tour, for instance, agreed to dismiss acrimonious litigation over their golf pursuits. And although Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who is leading one of the Senate inquiries into the deal, expressed concern this week about a nondisparagement pledge included in the agreement, experts said that kind of restriction was unlikely to draw concern inside the Justice Department. More