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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Agree to Merger

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      In a stunning announcement, the tour, along with the DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said the rivals had agreed to create a “new, collectively owned, for-profit entity.”Ending a bitter split in men’s professional golf, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the insurgent league bankrolled by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, said Tuesday that they had agreed to a merger.The announcement was at once stunning — the two sides had angrily clashed for months in litigation that will now draw to a close — and an end result that many in golf had believed was a distinct possibility from the time LIV burst into the sport last year.In a joint statement on Tuesday with the DP World Tour, which is also covered by the agreement, the wealth fund and the PGA Tour said the former rivals would “implement a plan to grow these combined commercial businesses, drive greater fan engagement and accelerate growth initiatives already underway.”“Going forward, fans can be confident that we will, collectively, deliver on the promise we’ve always made — to promote competition of the best in professional golf and that we are committed to securing and driving the game’s future,” Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said in a statement.Under the terms of the tentative agreement announced on Tuesday, the Saudi wealth fund, known as the Public Investment Fund, will at first be the exclusive investor in the blended operation, along with the established tours and LIV. Monahan is expected to be the new group’s chief executive, with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, installed as its chairman.LIV charged into professional golf last year, luring some of the world’s most prominent players, including Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson, with guaranteed contracts sometimes said to be worth $100 million or more and tournament prize funds that were the richest in golf history.The PGA Tour, long the dominant force in professional golf, furiously retaliated and argued that the Saudi-backed league was compromising the sport’s integrity and acting as little more than a front for Saudi ambitions to repair the kingdom’s reputation. More

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      LIV Golf Wants to Talk About Sports. Donald Trump Still Looms.

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      It was only on Sunday evening that LIV Golf, the men’s league awash in billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, met its greatest athletic triumph to date when one of its headliners, Brooks Koepka, emphatically won the P.G.A. Championship.By Thursday morning, though, LIV’s road show had been reinfused with the political bent that has trailed the second-year circuit as it has convulsed professional golf: the loquacious, limelight-seizing presence of former President Donald J. Trump, who is hosting one of the league’s tournaments this weekend at a course northwest of Washington.Whether LIV can outrun Trump’s shadow, and whether it even wants to, could do much to shape how the league is perceived in the years ahead, particularly in the United States, where it has struggled to gain a meaningful foothold against the PGA Tour.But for now, besides major tournament winners like Koepka and Phil Mickelson who have joined the circuit, there is probably no figure beyond golf more publicly linked to LIV than Trump, who has repeatedly and enthusiastically cheered Saudi Arabia’s thunderous, flashy entrance into sports. At its events, he often seems like an eager M.C. whose role is at once decidedly conspicuous and deeply mysterious — neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events — as the league looks to make inroads in a hidebound sport.The former President Donald J. Trump played with Patrick Reed during a pro-am event Thursday.Trump talked to the news media throughout his round of golf.“They want to use my properties because they’re the best properties,” Trump said on Thursday, when he spent five hours appearing in a pro-am event with the LIV players Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed (and staging what amounted to a rolling news conference about politics and an infomercial about his property over 18 holes along the Potomac River).The Trump portfolio does indeed feature some exceptional courses, including the Washington-area location, which once held a Senior P.G.A. Championship, and LIV executives have said in the past that they were drawn to them because many top-caliber properties in the United States were not willing to host a circuit intended to rival the PGA Tour. But Trump’s persistent, growing place in LIV’s orbit also invites sustained skepticism of the motives and intentions of the league, which some critics see as a glossy way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its image.The former president is unbothered by the league’s patron, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the kingdom’s budding place in professional golf, despite its record of human rights abuses. He is still casting aside objections from family members of Sept. 11 victims, some of whom believe Saudi Arabia played a role in the 2001 attacks, because, as he said Thursday, LIV tournaments are “great economic development.” He is openly admiring the millions and millions of dollars that the Saudis are raining down onto players and, of course, properties like his, even though he asserted Thursday that hosting tournaments amounts to “peanuts for me.” This year, LIV will travel to three of his properties, up from two in its inaugural season.He has remained steadfast in his loyalty even though a special counsel from the Justice Department, Jack Smith, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to LIV.In an interview as he walked between holes on Thursday, Trump described Smith’s aggressive approach as “retribution” because the Biden administration wants “to do something to take the spotlight off what’s taken place.” He said he did not know why his ties to LIV had drawn the special counsel’s scrutiny.Trump’s affection for LIV can be traced, at least in part, to years of friction with golf’s establishment.Graeme McDowell, right, who played with Trump Thursday is among the past major champions to have left the PGA Tour for LIV.Neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events on his courses.In 2016, the PGA Tour ended a longstanding relationship with Trump’s course in Doral, Fla., near Miami, because of what its then-commissioner described as “fundamentally a sponsorship issue.” And in 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the P.G.A. of America — which is separate from the PGA Tour — abandoned its plan to host its flagship men’s championship at a Trump property in New Jersey in 2022.Trump has not fared much better abroad. The R&A, which organizes the British Open, has signaled it does not intend to take the tournament back to Trump-controlled Turnberry, where LIV’s commissioner, Greg Norman, won one of his two Opens.LIV has embraced Trump, though, and in return gotten a former president’s imprimatur, along with bursts of news coverage for events that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. He brings prestige and power, diluted as both might be by the divisiveness in which he revels.“They have unlimited money and they love it,” he said Thursday, “and it’s been great publicity for Saudi Arabia.”But for every day Trump appears at a LIV event, it is a day that LIV might as well write off as one in which it will not escape the pointed questions that it has spent a year trying to move past, or at least saying it wants to move past.It has been hard enough for the league, even on a day when Trump is not playing a round, not to have its players confronting questions about the morality of accepting millions in Saudi money.“We’re contracted to play golf,” Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner who finished in a tie for fourth at the P.G.A. Championship last weekend, said on Wednesday. “I think the most important part is to provide great entertainment wherever possible on whatever platform that is, whatever platform that provides it. When you can talk about ethics, that’s people’s perception. I completely disagree with it, but everybody has the right to their own opinion, and I’d say, was it worth it? Absolutely.”Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But DeChambeau hardly has the same megaphone or presence as a former occupant of the Oval Office. When Trump appears at a LIV event, even winners of the Masters Tournament or the U.S. Open are relegated to supporting actors.LIV executives have generally brushed aside questions about whether the former president is good for business, or merely essential for it, given their troubles landing quality venues. They seem convinced that, at some point, sports will overtake politics, which might be wishful thinking since Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But LIV’s strategy still involves a gamble that the presence of one of the nation’s most polarizing figures will not scare off even more of the sponsorship contracts and television rights that are already proving hard to come by for the operation. And Trump can just as easily alienate prospective fans as he can entice them.Trump himself insists that LIV craves him at its events and that he is not a distraction from the league’s proclaimed goal of growing the sport and giving it doses of needed energy.“They wanted me to be here, and I said sure,” said Trump, who said that LIV’s contracts with his properties did not require his appearances in events like the pro-am.Perhaps all of that is true. But as long as it is, LIV will linger in the political thicket, no matter how well Koepka plays on the game’s biggest stages. More

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      Brooks Koepka Wins P.G.A. Championship, Boosting LIV Golf

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      PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Six weeks ago on Sunday, Brooks Koepka did not sleep. He had brooding to do and demons to chase. After everything — the ghastly knee injury, the agony of unfulfilled ambition, the taunts and the splenetic rift in professional golf that he helped personify — he had rallied to a Masters Tournament lead, and then he had fizzled. Collapsed, really.He ultimately vowed, he recalled over the weekend at Oak Hill Country Club, never to “think the way I thought going into the final round.” On Sunday evening, Koepka found his vindication: a two-stroke win at the P.G.A. Championship, earning him his first major tournament trophy since 2019. It was Koepka’s fifth career major victory, tying him with figures like Seve Ballesteros and Byron Nelson.“I think this one is probably the most meaningful of them all with everything that’s gone on, all the crazy stuff over the last few years,” said Koepka, who said that he had received about 600 text messages by the time he held a news conference. “But it feels good to be back and to get No. 5.”The victory made him the first member of LIV Golf, the year-old breakaway league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, to win a major title since joining the circuit. And while Koepka’s triumph at Oak Hill may do little to stanch some of the criticisms of LIV — its ties to a repressive government, its disputed intentions, its gleeful instigation of a financial arms race in an ancient sport — it definitively ended the wrangling over whether men who play a smattering of 54-hole tournaments can prevail on golf’s grandest, 72-hole stages.“I definitely think it helps LIV,” Koepka said, “but I’m more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you.”Fair enough, for he silenced the notion, one that seemed a little more off-the-mark after the Masters, that his contending days were done by carding a three-under-par 67 on Sunday, taking him to nine under for the tournament. But this is a 33-year-old player whose results in 2022’s major season looked like this: missed cut, tie for 55th, solo 55th, missed cut. It had been easy to forget that in 2021, the sequence went like this: missed cut, tie for second, tie for fourth, tie for sixth.Koepka rebounded after shooting a two-over-par 72 during Thursday’s first round.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBy the end of last year, he had a mounting hunch that his recovery was nearly done and that he could, finally, be relevant again. Around January, he has said, he was certain of it.“He is back to being healthy,” said Cameron Smith, who won the British Open last summer and then joined LIV later in the year. “I think that brings a little bit of internal confidence as well being out there and just being able to do your stuff.”It did not look that way as recently as Thursday, when the prospect that Koepka would outlast a swarm of stars seemed closer to impossible than even improbable. He had opened this tournament with a two-over-par 72 and, by his own account, was out of sorts and struggling to strike the ball as he wished. He could not remember, he said, the last time he had hit so poorly.But he was not that far behind because the tournament, the first major played at Oak Hill since a sweeping effort to restore some of the daunting tests that characterize Donald J. Ross-designed courses, emerged as one of the most fearsome P.G.A. Championships in recent decades, often evoking the rigors of the 2008 competition at Oakland Hills in Michigan. Of the 156 players who competed this past week, only 11 finished below par — a departure from 2013, when 21 players finished in the red at the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill.The stinginess came even with the course, with its perilous rough and humbling bunkers, being more accommodating on Sunday than it had been earlier. Smith, Cam Davis, Kurt Kitayama and Sepp Straka all shot 65s on Sunday, running them high up the leaderboard. Patrick Cantlay, who made one of the tournament’s scarce eagles, signed for a 66. Michael Block, whose day job is being the head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club southeast of Los Angeles, had a hole in one at No. 15, the first P.G.A. Championship ace by a club professional since 1996.But much of the focus on Sunday was on Koepka; Viktor Hovland, the budding Norwegian talent; and Scottie Scheffler, the No. 2 player in the Official World Golf Ranking. Koepka, his standing shriveled because of his lucrative ties to LIV, whose tournaments are not accredited in the ranking system, entered Sunday at No. 44. (The P.G.A. of America, which organized this tournament, is distinct from the PGA Tour, LIV’s rival.)Viktor Hovland came close tying to Koepka during the fourth round but ultimately matched Scottie Scheffler, right, for second place.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesDesiree Rios/The New York TimesKoepka stepped into the first tee box with a one-stroke lead and doubled his margin in short order when he made a birdie at the second hole. He had played the hole to par the first three days, always reaching the green in two shots but leaving himself with long putts. On Sunday, with the pin at the front-right of the green, he needed less than 5 feet.His birdie putt at the third hole required even less, after his longest tee shot of the tournament at the hole known as Vista, moving his advantage to three stokes.The sixth hole, a threat to so many players throughout the tournament, loomed. Koepka had survived the hole, a par-4 challenge that the field finished in an average of 4.52 strokes, well enough on Thursday, Friday and Saturday: par in each of the first three rounds. On Sunday, though, his tee shot rocketed rightward into a thick grass in the so-called native area. He took a drop and then, about 191 yards from the hole, struck it onto the green and eventually escaped with a bogey. Although Koepka followed with another bogey, Hovland also stumbled at No. 7.At the turn, Koepka led Hovland by a lone stroke. Scheffler, a steady-voiced sensation since he won last year’s Masters, and Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, were three off the lead.Koepka answered with a tantalizing streak: birdie, bogey, birdie. Hovland had a chance for birdie at the 12th hole, but his tap from nearly 15 feet edged just left of the cup. With six holes to play, Koepka’s advantage was back to two strokes. Two holes later, it was down to one.Koepka received rousing applause as he walked the steep incline to the 18th green, where he finished the tournament with a par.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesBut at nearly every major, there comes a moment when one man’s victory appears inevitable. It may not be mathematically buttoned-up yet, but almost everyone knows that the tournament is finished before it actually ends.On Sunday, the scene for that moment was the 16th hole. It had not been the most hellish at Oak Hill, not by far. Hovland will remember it, though.His ball in a bunker after his tee shot, he wielded his 9-iron. With less than 175 yards to the hole, he swung and blasted his ball — not onto the green, but into the bunker’s lip. His fourth shot reached the green. A bogey putt missed, leaving him with a double bogey. Koepka, in the twilight of his pursuit for his third P.G.A. Championship victory, made a birdie to lay claim to a four-stroke lead.“It’s not easy going toe-to-toe with a guy like that,” Hovland, who finished in the top seven for his third consecutive major, said of his duel with Koepka. “He is not going to give you anything, and I didn’t really feel like I gave him anything either until 16.”Scheffler made a birdie putt at the 18th green soon after to narrow Koepka’s path. Koepka himself narrowed it further with a bogey at No. 17.He arrived at the 18th hole, which was playing 497 yards on Sunday, with two shots to spare. He tee shot soared and then thumped into the fairway, stopping at 318 yards. The towering grandstands waited in the distance, filled with spectators, as the fairway-lined galleries were, looking to see whether, after everything, Koepka was indeed back.His next swing lifted the ball onto the green. The applause was rising, seemingly with every step in his march up the steep incline, the kind of incline that would have felt Everest-like to Koepka in the recent past. He knelt — there had been times, he said, when he could not so much as bend his knee — and then approached the ball. He steadied himself and tapped the ball forward.It stopped, according to tournament officials, about 3 inches short.He flashed a tight smile, as if to say that, of course, there would be one last hiccup.He tried again. The ball fell into the cup. He pumped his fist and then embraced his caddie for nearly nine seconds.Indeed, after everything, Koepka was back.Desiree Rios/The New York Times 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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      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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      Jack Nicklaus on the PGA Championship

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      In 1950, when the P.G.A. Championship came to Scioto Golf Club, a 10-year-old boy wandered the grounds near Columbus, Ohio, searching for autographs. He had just started playing golf that year, and the likes of Sam Snead and Lloyd Mangrum were populating his home course.The boy was Jack Nicklaus.The spectacle, he recalled this spring, was among the earliest inspirations for a golfing career whose brilliance became abundantly clear 60 years ago. Nicklaus had won his first major title by then, but 1963 brought the 23-year-old player his first Masters Tournament victory and his inaugural triumph at a P.G.A. Championship.Nicklaus’s fifth and final P.G.A. Championship win came in 1980 at Oak Hill Country Club in Pittsford, N.Y., where the tournament will be played beginning on Thursday.Over two interviews last month — one at Augusta National Golf Club and another by telephone — Nicklaus considered Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm, the new LIV Golf league backed by Saudi Arabia, the future of the golf ball and whether anyone might win at Oak Hill by seven strokes, as he did in 1980.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.In 2013, when the P.G.A. Championship was last at Oak Hill, there were 21 players below par. There had only been four across the previous two P.G.A. Championships there, in 1980 and 2003. Had Oak Hill gotten too easy?I won there in 1980, and I think 280 was par. Oak Hill played pretty darn tough. I didn’t really play all that well that week, hit it all over the place, but every time I got it on the green, I holed it. I remember in the last round, I was in the lead and I was nervous because I wasn’t hitting it that great. I hit in the rough and got it on the green, so I shot 35 feet on the first hole. I said, “Well, here we go,” and started feeling a little more comfortable.With the P.G.A. Championship trophy after his seven-stroke victory in 1980 at Oak Hill Country Club in Pittsford, N.Y.PGA of America, via Getty ImagesIf a designer is looking to challenge today’s players, how much of a challenge can he create by, as Andrew Green has now done at Oak Hill, rolling back the clock and looking back at the original Donald Ross designs?You can’t. The only thing you’re going to roll back and add to is distance. Oak Hill, I thought was very different: Most Ross golf courses are relatively small greens, and Oak Hill had very large greens. And then, of course, Fazio came in there and did three or four holes in the middle part of the front nine, as I recall, and they didn’t really look a lot like the other holes on the golf course that I saw in ’68. I like Oak Hill; I think it’s a great golf course. But you can tweak something right out of its tradition.What should happen to the golf ball?They say the golf ball has “only” increased 0.82 yards a year, which means in the last 10 years, it’s increased 8.2 yards. You’ve got to put a line in the sand somewhere.And I don’t think that the U.S. Golf Association and R&A have really rolled the ball back much. What they’ve done is say, “We really don’t want it to go any farther than this.” And that’s really only for the elite players. They left the golf ball alone for the average golfer. It was a really good move to try to put a line in the sand. I mean, not everybody’s got the ability to go buy the golf course next door, like you do at Augusta. You can’t just keep buying land and adding. We used to have in this country probably a couple of thousand golf courses that could be tournament golf courses. Today, we maybe have 100.A lot of the players say: “Why would you want to change something that’s really good?”Well, it’s not because it’s really good; it’s because it’s really good for a small percentage of people, and it needs to be better for a larger percentage of people. It’s a game we hope that can be enjoyed by a lot of people.Part of that enjoyment comes from the pros being able to play with the amateurs. I used to be able to play an exhibition with a club champion. We’d play the back tees, and I’d maybe hit it 15, 20 yards by him, but we had a game because he knew the golf course.Today, could you imagine Tiger Woods or Jon Rahm going to play an exhibition with a club champion? They’d hit it 100 yards by him. I mean, that’s not a game.“Oak Hill played pretty darn tough,” Nicklaus said of his win in 1980. “I didn’t really play all that well that week, hit it all over the place, but every time I got it on the green, I holed it.”Phil Sandlin/Associated PressThere’s also debate about the world ranking system. Who is the best player in the world right now?It’s very debatable. I think Rory McIlroy is the one who I would have said probably is the best player in the world, but then Rory doesn’t even make the cut at the first major. How does the best player in the world miss the cut at the first major?Jon Rahm is pretty darn good. And you’ve got Brooks Koepka, who has come back and he’s leading the tournament.I guess that’s the beauty of golf. It’s not like tennis, where you knew you were going to get Nadal and Djokovic.Gary Player doesn’t think golf has an era-defining figure at this moment — that there’s not a Tiger, there’s not someone like you.No, there’s not.Is there a player who could become that person?Rahm would be the closest.Is it better for golf to have one megawatt superstar everyone knows, or is it better to have a bunch of guys with big followings but who don’t command all of the attention?I think most sports are probably more healthy with more stars — more diversity in what’s going on and more people to look at. When Arnold Palmer and Gary and I played, if one of the three of us didn’t play in a tournament, they felt the tournament was a failure.But if you’ve got 10 or 12 guys who are really at the top, you don’t have to get more than two or three of them to create a tournament and you’ve got a really good field. If there’s only one guy, it’s all on his back, and I don’t think that’s real good.Since you mentioned Rory, what’s holding him back?I’m a big Rory fan, and he’s a good friend of mine, and I talk a lot with him. But I really don’t know.His usual is to go par, par, birdie, birdie, birdie, eight, and that’s what he’s not been doing. He and I have talked about it. I said, “Rory, it’s got to be 100 percent concentration, and you can’t let yourself get into a position where you can make a quad or whatever.” I think he understands that very well. He’s certainly very smart.Justin Thomas just missed the cut, and I root for Justin a lot, too. I spend a lot of time with him. Great kid. He’s struggling, and he’s missing just a little something right now.And Rahm looks like he’s just loaded with confidence. He sort of beams with it.When you size up Rahm, what kind of scouting report do you come away with?I’ve known him since he received a college award, the Nicklaus Award. I liked him then, and I followed his play from when he first started. I’ve always thought that he plays very smart golf. He played much the way I did: left to right, and played much for the power game. I like what he does. I like the way he goes about it. He’s got a little bit of fire in him. He can get mad, which is OK because it usually helps him. Some guys get mad and it destroys them, but it seems to help him.“Oak Hill is a golf course that fits right down his alley,” Nicklaus said of Jon Rahm, the world’s No. 1 ranked golfer.Doug Mills/The New York TimesHow do you see Rahm’s approach to the game working at Oak Hill?Oak Hill is a golf course that fits right down his alley. I was a left to right player, hit the ball long. When I won in 1980, I was the only person to break par. He’s a good putter. I putted very well at Oak Hill. I didn’t particularly play that great, but my putter was a deciding factor. Because my game was a strong game, I stayed in the tournament, and my putter won it for me, and I would think he’d fall into much the same category: If he was playing well or semi-well, he’ll be there. If he doesn’t putt well, he won’t win.But he’s a pretty darn good putter.Some of your colleagues have said they think there is a universe in which LIV, the new Saudi-backed league, could be good for golf. Do you buy that?Competition is good anywhere. My own view is that I was a part of the start of the PGA Tour. [LIV Golf officials] talked to me about wanting me to do it, and I just told them, “I can’t do it guys. I started my legacy on the PGA Tour, and I have to stay there.”I don’t have a big problem with it. I think there’s a big place for a lot of those guys who are near the end of their career. I think it’s all right from that standpoint.But for me, it was not. And for any of the young guys who really love playing the game of golf and love competition, I don’t think that 48 players and three rounds of golf and shotgun starts are what you really make a living of. They’ll set their families up for a long time, and I have no problem with any of the guys who have left. But it was not my cup of tea. And is there a universe for both of them? Probably so. I don’t know.You host the Memorial Tournament in June. What do you make of this no-cut plan that is going to take effect sometimes on the PGA Tour next year?I’m not fond of it. Some of it is coming from trying to not make the tournaments that aren’t elevated too secondary. If you’ve got 120 guys playing in a cut and they’re suddenly getting into the elevated tournaments, what kind of field are you going to have in the other tournaments? And if you have 70 players playing in one, the 71st player is a pretty darn good player on the PGA Tour.I think what they’re trying — and what it will do — is to get some guys you have not heard a lot of, and they’re going to be your stars who come along. They’re trying to build more names within the PGA Tour, and we’ll have to see it and see how it works out.At the Memorial Tournament, I’m not fond of a 70-player field for a couple of reasons. One is that we’ve got a lot of people who come out and see golf, and I want to see them golf all day, particularly on Thursday and Friday.Nicklaus with Rahm after he won the Memorial Tournament in 2020.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIf Oak Hill doesn’t play tougher this time around, should it stay in the mix for the majors?Oak Hill will play plenty tough. Oak Hill is not going to bend; it’s too good of a golf course to yield. I would imagine the P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill in May will have a pretty tough crop of rough. Now, the tour, on a weekly basis, has been cutting the rough down shorter, and driving distance has been emphasized and accuracy has not.I don’t think golf should be played that way, personally. The Memorial Tournament rough will not be short.I think that the game of golf is a combination of power, accuracy, intelligence and skill in how you play your shots. You try to make the golf course so that it doesn’t favor a 320-yard hitter, and you don’t want it to favor a 270-yard hitter, either. You want to give some diversity in there — some holes will favor some, and others will favor another — and their skill will allow that to happen.I feel like the fellow who is playing the best golf in the full round is the guy who should win. The tour has been more on the entertainment factor and the guy shooting low scores. Well, during most of my career, I avoided the courses that everybody shot low scores on. I felt like they didn’t really bring my talent out, I suppose. When I got a good, tough golf course, that’s where the better players shined, and Oak Hill will shine.What are the chances anyone could win, as you did, by seven strokes?If you get some rough and you get a bit of a dry period — you’re going to have probably some wind and some odd weather — then your scores could be up. But one guy may catch lightning in a bottle, a little bit like I did, and win by several. You just don’t know. More