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The golfer’s father, who is his lifelong coach, was an Olympic hopeful for Germany in decathlon 40 years ago, before he lost an eye in a car crash.Xander Schauffele always watched the Summer Olympics growing up. He had no choice. His father, Stefan, is a former Olympic hopeful for Germany in the decathlon. More
They have learned to stay fit and play smarter. And the British Open seems to be their fountain of youth.From the 18th fairway in the final group of the British Open in 2009, Tom Watson, the five-time Open champion, hit a shot that flew right at the pin. For a moment, it looked like Watson, then age 59, would win the tournament for a record sixth time and become the oldest player to win a major championship. More
Ahead of the British Open, Koepka said the two were “not going to be high-fiving” each other as Ryder Cup teammates and traced the reason back to 2019.The feud between Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau survived the trip across the Atlantic to the British Open with barbs intact, erupting and entertaining anew on Tuesday. Among the highlights:At a news conference ahead of the tournament at Royal St. George’s in southeast England, a reporter began his question to DeChambeau with a cheery “Hi, Brooks.” More
The golf tournament serves as a tuneup to the British Open, which is a week later.This week’s Scottish Open features an excellent field of players, and it is easy to understand why.The tournament serves as a tuneup for next week’s British Open, giving players an opportunity to get acclimated with the challenges of links golf, played on courses on sandy soil near a coastline. Among those who will be in Scotland: the world No. 1 Jon Rahm, the winner of last month’s United States Open; No. 3 Justin Thomas; and No. 4 Collin Morikawa. More
Golf is one of the world’s oldest sports, with treasured traditions honed across several centuries. But increasingly over the last decade, many people have come to see golf as just plain old. And not in a good way. More
The 2008 championship would be the last major tournament victory for Woods until the 2019 Masters. Rocco Mediate, the golfer he beat in an epic 19-hole playoff, remembers every putt.SAN DIEGO — Arms folded across his chest, Rocco Mediate stared at a small, square television to see if his life was about to change forevermore.Mediate stood in a low-slung nondescript area behind the 18th hole grandstand at the Torrey Pines Golf Course, a space so cramped he ducked his head to avoid wires hanging from the ceiling. He could not see the 18th green, where minutes earlier, he had made par to take a one-stroke lead in the fourth round of the 2008 United States Open.Mediate, ranked 158th in the world at the time, was trying to become the oldest man, at 45, to win the event. He paced nervously, cleats crackling on the bare concrete floor as the image of Tiger Woods appeared on TV.Woods, playing without an anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and with stress fractures in his left tibia, had a 12-foot birdie putt to tie Mediate and send the championship to an 18-hole playoff the next day.Usually garrulous, Mediate was silent as Woods stroked his putt, the ball taking hops across the bumpy surface, traveling at a hopscotch cadence that seemed certain to send the putt offline. But the golf ball tickled the edge of the hole and toppled in.“Of course he made it,” Mediate said with a chortle, turning to two nearby reporters. “He’s Tiger Woods.”Half grinning and half sighing, he looked away adding: “He’s Tiger Woods. Of course.”Mediate on the 10th tee in his playoff against Woods.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesExcept it would not be that simple. What felt like the end of Mediate’s time in the spotlight turned out to be the beginning. And what felt like a renewal of triumphs for Woods instead was the high-water mark of his 11-year sprint to 14 major titles. Soon enough, for Woods, nothing would be the same again.As the U.S. Open returns to Torrey Pines for the first time since that tournament, when Woods eventually vanquished Mediate after 19 extra holes in a last-of-its-kind Monday playoff, the 2008 championship is a revered golf keepsake — when Woods was a shimmering Goliath at the peak of his powers and a rumpled David whose nickname was “Rock” almost overcame his fearsome rival.The memory, the last major title for Woods until he won the 2019 Masters, is particularly poignant this year because Woods can’t play in the event after sustaining severe leg injuries in a February car crash. Still in rehabilitation, Woods recently said his chief goal was to walk on his own.But 13 years ago Woods was at his best, and so was Mediate, and the two are eternally linked.“Great fight,” Woods, who looked exhausted, said to Mediate as the two hugged on the final green. “The best of my major championships.”Mediate, who was disappointed but happy, answered: “It was the most fun I’ve ever had playing golf with somebody, let alone against the greatest golfer in the world.”Five days earlier, the tournament had begun with Woods’s caddie, Steve Williams, imploring him to withdraw.Fourteen holes into his first round, Woods, whose shattered knee had prevented him from walking or playing golf for the previous six weeks, was one over par and spraying shots far and wide. “You’ve got many more years to win majors,” Williams said to Woods, who was 32. Woods cursed and said: “I’m winning the tournament.”Woods on the 18th hole during the final round where he made his legendary putt.Charles Baus/Icon Sportswire, via Getty ImagesAdam Scott and Phil Mickelson played the first two rounds of the 2008 championship with Woods and suspected there was more wrong with his knee than the “soreness” that Woods had blamed for his layoff.“Tiger looked more uncomfortable than I had ever seen him,” Scott said in an interview this month. “But I don’t know that the crowd noticed. They were going crazy with Tiger and Phil, two California kids, playing on a public golf course in their home state. It was pretty much mayhem out there.”After nine holes in the second round, Woods had slumped to three over par and was in danger of missing the cut, but he rallied to birdie five of the next nine holes, shooting a spectacular 30 on the second nine.“He flipped the switch and I remember thinking, ‘Here goes Tiger doing something special — something Tiger-esque — again,’” Scott said.Paired with Robert Karlsson in the third round, Woods often bent over in pain after tee shots and kept tumbling down the leaderboard. On the tee at the par-5 13th, his drive was so far right it came to rest near portable toilets that were far from the fairway.“Tiger was aiming way left off every tee and hitting big slices, because that’s how he kept from putting too much weight on his injured left knee on the downswing,” Karlsson said in an interview this month.Woods’s recovery flew to the back of the green, 65 feet from the hole atop a steep pitch. On the same devilish green that day, Mickelson had three-putted and spun three consecutive wedge shots off the green for a quadruple-bogey 9.Woods sank the 65-footer for an eagle. “Tiger-mania was full on at that point,” Karlsson said. “That was an impossible putt. Impossible.”The 15th hole was a dogleg left, and required a right-to-left draw off the tee, not the purposeful slice Woods had been hitting. Woods would have to put considerable weight on his damaged left knee. He told Karlsson and their caddies that after he swung they should just walk off the tee without him.“Tiger then hit this fantastic, piercing draw in the middle of the fairway, but he doubled over after it, leaning on his club to stay upright,” Karlsson said. “He was hyperventilating. He knew that swing was going to hurt like mad, but he committed to it anyway.”Woods played without an anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee and with stress fractures in his left tibia.Charlie Riedel/Associated Press“We all walked off the tee quickly like he asked and when we got to the fairway, we looked back and he was still on the tee.”Consecutive pars and a lucky chip-in at the 17th hole for birdie — the ball clanged off the flagstick about a foot off the ground and fell into the hole — led to a 30-foot eagle putt on the 18th green that Woods converted for a round of 70. The surge gave him the tournament lead at three under par, two strokes ahead of Mediate, who was in third place.Walking the 18th hole, Karlsson asked Williams if he thought Woods would be able to play in Sunday’s final round. “Stevie said he thought it was 50-50,” Karlsson said.Woods made it to Sunday but was three over par for the first two holes. Mediate shot 71 to take the lead by one stroke. Woods steadily rescued par after par to stay in contention and at the par-5 final hole hit a magnificent third shot from the rough to set up the birdie attempt that would send the championship to a playoff after 72 holes.In the last 13 years, Mediate has watched a replay of the putt hundreds of times. “No one else makes that putt,” he said. “No one.”Scott has often been asked by young golfers what it was like to play with Woods in his prime. He cites the last putt of the fourth round at Torrey Pines in 2008.“The young guys can’t quite understand why we all say he was so much better than everybody else,” Scott said. “That putt, while it’s not the longest he ever made, pretty much sums what had happened for 10 years.”The following day, in the 18-hole playoff, it was Mediate who fell behind by three strokes after 10 holes, but he was buoyed by a crowd drawn to his everyman status.The massive crowd looking on during the playoff round.Chris WIlliams/Icon Sportswire, via Getty Images“Go get ’em, Rock,” fans called out after his tee shots.Mediate, a good but not great PGA Tour player for more than two decades, fought back with three consecutive birdies to take a one-stroke lead. As he did the previous day, Woods birdied the 18th hole, while Mediate made par to send the playoff to sudden death extra holes.At that moment, the PGA Tour pro Kevin Streelman was on a plane taking golfers and their families to Connecticut, where the Travelers Championship would be played that week. In the air, everyone watched the playoff on television, and the jet landed as Woods and Mediate were headed to a 19th hole. There were courtesy cars on the tarmac waiting to drive the players to their hotels. No one got off the aircraft.Every Cinderella story has a midnight and Mediate’s tee shot on par-4 No. 7 found a bunker. His approach shot missed the green, and a pitch from the rough was well short of the hole. Woods made a routine par, and Mediate missed a lengthy par putt.Woods walked toward Mediate to shake his hand, and Mediate embraced Woods in a hug.Mediate hugged Woods after he lost. “Great fight,” Woods said to Mediate.Chris WIlliams/Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesTwo days later, Woods announced he would have season-ending surgery on his left leg. He returned in 2009 and stormed to six tour event victories but failed to win a major championship for the first year since 2004. And his year would worsen. The day after Thanksgiving, Woods had a car accident that led to revelations about his serial marital infidelities. For the next nine years, Woods, who won 14 of the 50 majors he played from 1997 to 2009, entered 24 majors and won none.Mediate, who watched the last putt of Woods’s fourth round in 2008 wondering if he was about to get a life-altering victory, was himself changed by his defeat at the U.S. Open.“I still get questions about it every single day,” Mediate said. “And my wife will go, ‘What?’ And I say that’s the way it is — they’re asking me a question about something they saw that meant something to them. It wasn’t like Joe’s Open, it was the United States Open. And it was a hell of a battle.” More
The golfers continued their playful war of words at this week’s U.S. Open, insisting it is good for the sport. One wily pro suggested that it might mostly be good for Koepka and DeChambeau themselves.SAN DIEGO — The latest episode of the Brooks Koepka-Bryson DeChambeau feud did not stray from its amusing course on Tuesday, continuing to be golf’s most entertaining sideshow in years.Koepka, with his usual grumpiness, said of his relationship with DeChambeau: “We don’t like each other.” He added, “I don’t know if I’d call it a conflict,” then suggested that some of the reporters standing next to him probably did not like each other either.About an hour later, a cheerful, almost giddy, DeChambeau was all smiles talking about the topic of Koepka at Torrey Pines Golf Course, where the 2021 U.S. Open will begin Thursday. It was a stark contrast to two weeks ago when DeChambeau seemed perturbed with Koepka and somberly said the PGA Tour should consider whether Koepka’s snarky videos and tweets trolling DeChambeau were, “how a tour player should behave.”On Tuesday, DeChambeau instead called the public back-and-forth “fun” and “great for the game of golf.”“There’s a point where it’s great banter,” he said, with a joyful grin. “I personally love it.”So, nothing has changed. The quarrel between two, brawny, 20-something professional golfers paid to wear natty golf attire and perfectly buffed shoes continued without a script — a pillow fight that stands out in a world dominated by the use of courtly pleasantries.There was, however, one bona fide disappointment revealed Tuesday: This year’s U.S. Open, where DeChambeau is the defending champion, will not give golf fans what they wanted most, which was Koepka and DeChambeau going head-to-head in the same playing group in the first and second rounds on Thursday and Friday.The duo will instead tee off many hours apart with other playing companions, which means they might not even see each other at Torrey Pines unless they happen to card similar scores early and are paired in the final rounds on the weekend. Golf fans should pray for that outcome. Shortly after the tee times for the opening rounds were announced on Tuesday morning, a report surfaced that DeChambeau, or his representatives, had contacted the United States Golf Association, which conducts the event, and requested that Koepka not be part of DeChambeau’s group.Within an hour, representatives for DeChambeau and the U.S.G.A. denied that DeChambeau had made such an appeal, something DeChambeau later confirmed.Bryson DeChambeau hit from the green bunker on No. 18 during a U.S. Open practice round on Tuesday.Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press“I would be OK with that,” he said of playing with Koepka, “but there was never really anything that went through me.”Koepka said no one approached him about playing with DeChambeau, nor did he care who his partners were. With a straight face, he then dropped this heavy thought: “I’m not concerned about what other people think. If I was concerned about what everybody else thought, I’d have been in a world of pain.”Whoa.On a lighter note, there was much discussion about whether the spat between Koepka and DeChambeau is good for golf. DeChambeau and Koepka, curiously with the same thought, insisted that it was, and Koepka offered evidence.“It’s bringing new eyeballs,” Koepka said. “It’s pretty much been on every news channel. Pretty much everything you look at online, it’s got this in the headline or it’s up there as a big news story. To me, that’s growing the game.“You’re putting it in front of eyeballs, you’re putting it in front of people who probably don’t normally look at golf, don’t play it, and it might get them involved.”Not long afterward, Webb Simpson, the 2012 U.S. Open champion who has one of the most sunny personalities in golf, agreed wholeheartedly, although he also dropped a bomb of a sort-of accusation.“I think they’ve got a rivalry now, and I think it’s good,” Simpson said. “There used to be more golf rivalries that became well-known.”Simpson then lobbed this notion: What if the whole so-called Koepka-DeChambeau grudge was a ruse, a conspiracy between the two to raise their social media profiles to improve their chances of getting some of the moolah in the PGA Tour’s new $40 million Player Impact Program?The initiative will pay end-of-season bonus money to 10 players based on an amalgam of metrics, with a top measure being a golfer’s Google search popularity.“I don’t know if they texted each other on the side and possibly went in agreement,” Simpson said, with a grin. “You know, let’s play this thing up for the Player Impact Program. That was kind of one of my thoughts.”Wow. No wonder DeChambeau was smiling Tuesday. We already know Koepka has the practiced poker face. More
The golfer, who was forced to withdraw from the Memorial Tournament with a six-stroke lead after a positive coronavirus test, said Tuesday, “It happened, that’s life.”SAN DIEGO — Jon Rahm was thunderstruck by the positive coronavirus test result that forced his June 5 withdrawal from the Memorial Tournament, a competition Rahm led by an almost insurmountable six strokes with only one round remaining. But afterward, he recognized the emotions that his exit, which included a nationally televised broadcast of Rahm receiving the news and leaving the 18th green in tears, elicited.“I was aware of what was going on,” Rahm said in his first public remarks about the situation on Tuesday as he prepared for the 2021 U.S. Open, which begins Thursday at the Torrey Pines Golf Course. “And to all the people criticizing the PGA Tour, they shouldn’t. We are in a pandemic, and even though this virus has very different forms of attacking people, you never know what reaction you’re going to get. So the PGA Tour did what they had to do.”He added: “I’ve heard a lot of different theories — that I should have played alone. But I shouldn’t have, that’s nonsense. The rules are there, and it’s clear. I was fully aware when I was in tracing protocol that that was a possibility. I knew that could happen. I was hoping it wouldn’t, but I support what the PGA Tour did.”Speaking at a news conference, Rahm, 26, revealed that he had been vaccinated before he tested positive.“The truth is I was vaccinated, I just wasn’t out of that 14-day period,” Rahm said, referring to the two-week period it typically takes for the body to build a strong immune response to the virus after receiving the final dose of the vaccine. “I had started the process, and unfortunately, that’s how the timing ended up being.”Rahm continued, “Looking back on it, I guess I wish I would have done it earlier, but thinking on scheduling purposes and having the P.G.A. and defending the Memorial, to be honest, it wasn’t in my mind. If I had done it in a few days earlier, probably we wouldn’t be having these conversations right now.”The amiable Rahm, alternately smiling and serious, did not ask for sympathy, but he had a message for his professional golf colleagues, who a tour official said earlier this month had been vaccinated at a rate “north of 50 percent.”“We live in a free country, so do as you please,” Rahm said. “I can tell you from experience that if something happens, you’re going to have to live with the consequences golf wise.”Had Rahm been able to complete the final round of the Memorial, which he had won in 2020, he almost certainly would have been handed the winner’s check worth roughly $1.7 million. In Rahm’s absence, Patrick Cantlay claimed it instead.“I know if you’re younger, you run less of a risk of having big problems from Covid,” Rahm said. “But truthfully we don’t know the long-term effects of this virus, so I would encourage people to actually get it done.”Since some of the public outcry about what happened to Rahm centered around the way he was informed of his positive test — he was stopped as he came off the green with TV cameras close by and thousands of spectators watching — he was asked on Tuesday if he was upset by the way tour officials gave him the news.“It could have been handled better,” he conceded with a wide grin. “I’m not going to lie, that’s the second time I get put on the spot on national TV on the same golf course on the same hole.”At the 2020 Memorial, Rahm celebrated his victory on the 18th green of the Ohio course. Then, as he was conducting a television interview, he was informed that he had been penalized two strokes for causing his ball to move slightly near the 16th green. Rahm still won by three strokes.One of the mysteries of Rahm’s sorrowful scene alongside the 18th hole this year was when he said, “Not again,” after he received the news. It turns out that it was a reference to last year’s ending.“For all those people wondering when I said, ‘Not again,’ that’s exactly what I mean — not again,” Rahm said on Tuesday. “Last year I put my heart out talking about one of my family members passing, and I get told, ‘Well, go sign your scorecard with a penalty stroke — with no warning.’“Then this year I put arguably the best performance of my life, and I get told again on live TV, ‘Hey, you’re not playing tomorrow.’ So it could have been handled a little bit better, yeah, but it still doesn’t change the fact of what really happened. Because it was the second time I got put on the spot on the same course. I was a little bit more hurt, but yeah, again, it’s tough.”At the same time, Rahm admitted there were probably other considerations being weighed by PGA Tour leaders as they decided how and when to tell him of the positive coronavirus test.“They don’t want me to go by and start shaking all the patrons’ hands and high-fiving and all that, so I understand that as well,” Rahm said.One of the more popular men’s golfers — a player who shows his emotions and competes with zesty flair — Rahm was already looking ahead to this week’s competition. He said repeatedly that he had moved on from the withdrawal.“It happened, that’s life,” Rahm said. “Luckily, everybody in my family and myself are OK. Luckily, I didn’t really have any symptoms, and within what happened, this is the best-case scenario.” More
