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      Billie Jean King Supports Talks With Saudi Arabia on Women’s Tennis Events

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      The LatestBillie Jean King, the leading architect of women’s professional tennis who is widely regarded as the first female athlete-activist, said Friday that she supported talks between the women’s tour and Saudi Arabia on holding competitions in the kingdom, despite its abysmal record on human rights.“I’m a huge believer in engagement — I don’t think you change unless you engage,” King said Friday at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the WTA, the women’s professional tour. “I would probably go there and talk to them.”After King’s comments, Steve Simon, the chief executive of the WTA Tour, said women’s tennis was seriously evaluating partnerships with Saudi Arabia. He suggested that potentially holding events there would be a way to support “progress” for women, while the country is trying to become a destination for major sports.“Sometimes when you are in the position we are in, you need to support the change,” Simon said, referring to the tour’s commitment to gender pay equity and its loss of revenue during the pandemic and an 18-month suspension of operations in China over Peng Shuai.He said Saudi Arabia had “a long way to go,” especially in its laws banning homosexuality, but that change was underway in the country. “You want them to do what they are doing” and support that, he added.“I’m a huge believer in engagement — I don’t think you change unless you engage,” Billie Jean King said Friday.Kin Cheung/Associated PressWhy It Matters: Saudi Arabia continues to expand its footprint in sports.The comments from King and Simon were the strongest signal yet that Saudi Arabia is expanding and accelerating its efforts to become a part of not just men’s tennis but also women’s, among other sports like soccer, Formula 1 and golf. The Saudi wealth fund’s LIV Golf circuit recently agreed to a merger with golf’s PGA Tour after an acrimonious rivalry that included litigation and the loss of a handful of the tour’s biggest stars to the upstart league.Looking to avoid that scenario and always on the hunt for new investors, tennis executives have spoken openly of their ongoing discussions with Saudi officials about holding tournaments there as soon as this year. Saudi Arabia is bidding to become the host of the Next Gen Finals, a men’s event for 21-and-under players scheduled for December. Saudi Arabia’s bid includes the option of holding a women’s Next Gen event there as well.Simon traveled to Riyadh in February with other WTA executives and players for meetings with Saudi officials.Background: Players have expressed concern for their safety.The issue is especially complicated for the women’s tennis tour in part because there are a number of openly gay players, including Daria Kasatkina of Russia, who is ranked No. 11 in the world and often travels with her partner. The men’s tour does not have any players who are openly gay.Sloane Stephens, a member of the WTA Tour Players’ Council, said it was important for L.G.B.T.Q. players to feel safe while competing in Saudi Arabia.“That is part of the evaluation,” Stephens said. “We want to make sure everyone is safe and comfortable and feels supported.”King is openly gay as well, but she cited the WTA’s decision to play in Doha beginning in 2008 as a precedent for supporting countries who say they want to become more progressive. Simon said that, during his visit to Riyadh, he had noticed some of the same changes that Doha had said it wanted to make 15 years ago when women had “zero rights” and there were concerns about whether the players would be safe wearing short, sleeveless tennis outfits.“It’s about celebrating the betterment of women, that there is change coming,” Simon said. “I’m not Saying Saudi Arabia is a place we should be doing business with. They have a long way to go, but they are making changes.”What’s Next: The timetable is uncertain.Simon said there was no timetable for making a decision about the WTA going to Saudi Arabia. However, the tour has yet to announce a location for its season-ending Tour Finals. The tour and the Chinese government are currently negotiating the future of that event. The WTA suspended its operations in China for 18 months after player Peng Shuai was seemingly silenced after she appeared to accuse a former top government official of sexually assaulting her and the tour was unable to contact her. More

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      It’s Sunday at the U.S. Open, and the Leaders Are Tied

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      Los Angeles Country Club has sometimes seemed forgiving. But the final round could pose a formidable test for the contenders.The LatestThe U.S. Open, one of golf’s most fearsome tests, is headed into its final round at Los Angeles Country Club. Although the course has sometimes seemed more forgiving than past Open venues, any championship round has the potential to become excruciating — especially when the final round starts with a tie atop the leaderboard.Rickie Fowler, who shot an even-par 70 in the third round, left the course Saturday evening knotted with Wyndham Clark, who birdied the 18th hole to go to one under on the day. Both men are at 10 under for the week, leaving them with one-stroke advantages over Rory McIlroy.Golf is expecting its third major tournament champion of 2023, with Jon Rahm, who won the Masters Tournament, and Brooks Koepka, who won the P.G.A. Championship, far down the leaderboard.Wyndham Clark ended the third round of the U.S. Open tied for the lead.Etienne Laurent/EPA, via ShutterstockWhy It Matters: Someone will earn a(nother) place in sports history by sundown.Of the players in the top five, only McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler have won majors.McIlroy’s last major victory was in 2014, and a win on Sunday would be his fifth major title. Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player, won the Masters in 2022; he rocketed up the Los Angeles leaderboard when he holed out from 196 yards for an eagle on No. 17. He ended Saturday at seven under, putting him three strokes off the lead.But Fowler is a perpetually popular talent with a long history of close-but-not-quite major finishes. On Thursday, he, along with Xander Schauffele, shot a 62, an Open record. Fowler elicited gasps on Saturday when he sank a 69-foot birdie putt on the 13th hole. He provoked groans later when, at No. 18, he missed a par putt of less than five feet.Clark is playing his third U.S. Open, and this is the first time he has made the cut. His best showing in a major before this one? A tie for 75th at the 2021 P.G.A. Championship.Harris English, who trails Fowler and Clark by four strokes, came close in that year’s U.S. Open, finishing third.Rickie Fowler missed a putt for par of less than five feet on the 18th hole on Saturday.George Walker Iv/Associated PressBackground: The U.S. Open is taking place during a period of turmoil in golf.With the major tournaments offering some of the biggest prizes in golf and the surest paths to greatness — Koepka noted this past week that a golfer’s tally of major victories is what his career is “judged on” — players ordinarily like to focus on golf, and golf alone.That has not been so easy at this Open. On June 6, the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the force behind the LIV Golf circuit that divided the sport, announced a plan to form a partnership. The deal, if it closes, could end golf’s most bruising clash in generations, but it has already led to widespread uncertainty about the future of the game.In public and in private, players have spent much of the past two weeks mulling what that future might look like.For what it’s worth, the PGA Tour and LIV are knotted at one major victory each this season: Rahm plays for the tour, while Koepka is a headliner for LIV.What’s Next: 18 holes for everyone — and, perhaps, the first playoff since 2008.NBC will air final-round coverage beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern time. The tournament’s presence on the West Coast means the Open will not be settled until well into the evening in much of the United States, with the championship expected to be decided by about 10 p.m. Eastern time.All bets are off, though, if there is a tie at the top after everyone has finished 72 holes.The Open has not reached a playoff since 2008, when Tiger Woods won at Torrey Pines. The format has since changed: If the leaders are tied after regulation play, there will be a two-hole aggregate playoff, contested on the first and 18th holes. If the leaders are still knotted after those two holes, a sudden-death competition will commence. The idea is to have a winner on Sunday evening, not Monday, as has happened in past Opens. More

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      For PGA Tour Players, Betrayal and Confusion in Saudi Deal’s Wake

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      Members of America’s most famous golf tour thought they had a voice. Then came a surprise pact that could reshape the sport for years to come.The U.S. Open winner Gary Woodland had lately sensed something different in professional golf.Players were empowered and emboldened. Executives were listening. The PGA Tour was changing. With the circuit’s dominance challenged by LIV Golf, an upstart built with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the tour felt closer to a cooperative than a dispassionate titan of professional sports.Then came the tour’s surprise announcement on June 6 that, after it had lobbied players to forsake the Saudi money it had associated with human rights abuses, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund would join forces. None of the five players who sit on the tour’s board learned of the deal more than a few hours before it became public.“It was turning toward players being heard over the last year,” Woodland, who became a professional golfer in 2007, said at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the U.S. Open will conclude on Sunday. June 6, he said, showed that the voices of tour players had suddenly been “thrown out the door a little bit.”Woodland is not an outlier. In interviews and during news conferences at the Open, top players described a shaken faith in a PGA Tour they believed had recently offered them more meaningful agency and greater influence. The tour’s ability to ease the restive atmosphere could influence whether the deal, which is facing significant skepticism inside the tour and in Washington, advances in the coming months.Compared to other prominent professional sports leagues in the United States, the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit, has an unusual structure.Unlike in, say, the N.B.A. or the N.F.L., there are no team owners, and there is no labor union. Instead, players are independent contractors who earn eligibility for PGA Tour membership. Tour members do not generally have financial guarantees — they may, however, earn money through assorted sponsorships — but receive tour paychecks tied to their on-course performances. (When Viktor Hovland won the Memorial Tournament this month, he earned $3.6 million of the event’s $20 million prize fund. Golfers who did not play well enough to secure places in the final two rounds collected nothing.)In return for access to tour events and purses, players allow the circuit to negotiate television rights deals on their behalf, among other conditions. Even without a labor union, players theoretically have a say in tour operations: The 11-member board includes five seats for players, and there is a 16-player council that “advises and consults” with board members and the tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan.But when tour leaders negotiated a framework agreement to reshape the sport in the most consequential ways since the modern tour’s founding in the 1960s, players were not in the room. Rory McIlroy, the world’s third-ranked golfer and a member of the tour’s board, learned of the deal a week after it was signed behind closed doors at a Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.Deepening the turmoil, the tentative deal makes little about the future clear, mostly because lawyers and executives are still haggling over the fine print that stands to determine much about how the sport will be organized, funded and operated.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” Jon Rahm said.Marcio J. Sanchez/Associated Press“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management,” said Jon Rahm, the winner of this year’s Masters Tournament.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” he added. “That’s why we’re all in a bit of a state of limbo because we don’t know what’s going on and how much is finalized and how much they can talk about, either.”The sense of duplicity, some players suggested, might not be so severe had they not grown confident in the notion that they were increasingly central to developing the tour’s path for the years ahead.As Tiger Woods receded from golf’s spotlight, Woodland observed, players found their sport searching for figures to help set its tone and direction.“When I first started, you just went out and played and who knows what was going on,” said Woodland, who remains close to Woods. “It was pretty much everyone jumped on Tiger’s coattails and we just went.” More recently, Woodland said, “guys are starting to get a little more of their own voice, and you’re starting to see different opinions.”Faced with the rise of LIV Golf, players had helped devise changes to the tour’s format and schedule. During a private meeting in Delaware last summer they tried to hash out adjustments that could help curb an exodus to LIV. Afterward, Monahan declared that the Delaware meeting “represents a remarkable moment for the PGA Tour and showcases the essence of what being a membership organization is all about.”By the middle of last month, though, Monahan was in Venice for secret talks with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund. Two board members, neither of them players, were on the trip to Italy. The men later gathered in San Francisco over Memorial Day to finish up the framework deal. Afterward, the circle of people who knew about the planned partnership expanded, but did not include any players until June 6, when tour and Saudi officials announced the pact. Some players learned about it on Twitter.The mood inside the tour only worsened as it became apparent that the deal had been constructed in extraordinary secrecy, with players’ representatives on the board shut out of the talks.Joel Dahmen said he recognized that voices of midlevel players like him would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberationsEtienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock“We were given the impression that we were being heard,” said Joel Dahmen, a professional player since 2010 whose public profile soared this year when he appeared in the Netflix documentary series “Full Swing.”Dahmen, a self-described “midlevel” guy, said he recognized that voices like his would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberations. But many golfers were flabbergasted that even its greatest headliners were kept away from the negotiations, even as some of their colleagues said they understood that it was impractical to expect tour officials to confer with the entire membership in advance.“If you have to consult every player, then probably nothing’s ever going to happen, and that’s the balance for any organization,” said Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner and former world No. 1 player who chairs the tour’s Player Advisory Council. “It’s like the golf club at home: They’ve got the members’ committee, and a few on that committee get to influence decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Scott added, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”PGA Tour officials have rushed to quell the outrage, mindful that frustrations with the organization helped prepare the ground for LIV to entice players away from what is America’s flagship men’s golf circuit. Senior executives have been at the U.S. Open, and Monahan, who began a leave of absence this past week after what the tour described only as “a medical situation,” held a contentious meeting with players hours after the deal’s announcement.Players with some of the closest ties to Monahan and other executives said they had received a barrage of feedback unlike any they recalled. Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 U.S. Open, said, perhaps with a dose of hyperbole, that he had probably heard more from players since June 6 than he had in his 15 years as a tour golfer.“We want to have unity, but we also want to trust our leaders,” said Simpson, who added that he had been calling players to hear out their misgivings and aggravations. “I think as a whole they are struggling with these decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Adam Scott said, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesAlthough McIlroy has signaled his support for the deal, other players with board seats have been publicly noncommittal.“I told myself I’m not going to be for it or against it until I know everything, and I still don’t know everything,” Simpson said.He sounded much like Patrick Cantlay, another board member, who said that “it seems like it’s still too early to have enough information to have a good handle on the situation.”The board is scheduled to meet later this month, but it is not clear whether the pact will be ready for a vote by then. At the very least, board members are expecting a briefing that might allow them to answer more detailed questions about the tour’s future.All players can do for now, many said, is to try to imagine what the tour might look like and where they might fit into a changed ecosystem.“Where I think I am — and a lot of other players are — is we’re going to show up at the biggest and best events that we have tee times at, the ones that pay the most money, and we’re going to go play until someone tells us we can’t play in those events anymore, and then we’ll go find other events,” Dahmen said.They are also settling in for a protracted period of uncertainty, grappling with the possibility that the tour could be in turmoil for another year or more. It is an unfamiliar road for many of them, after all of these years in which the tour was the unquestioned destination of choice for many of the world’s top golfers, its business model familiar.“As members or as players,” Scott said, “we haven’t had to deal with anything like this before.” More

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      PGA Championship: Who Grew Oak Hill’s Namesake Trees?

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      Rob Galbraith remembers, as a child in the early 1960s, regularly going to the Rochester, N.Y., home of his great-grandfather, John R. Williams, who had been a pioneering physician in the area.Most memorable about those visits was seeing the byproduct of Williams’s amateur avocation: botany. In the backyard, there were several hundred nascent oak, elm and maple seedlings. Inside the house, acorns by the dozens were planted in dirt-filled coffee cans propped on window sills and shelves. Scores of embryonic trees germinated within a nursery on the property.“They were growing everywhere,” Galbraith, now 63, recalled in a recent interview. “All over the place.”Dr. Williams had been nurturing trees in this manner since the 1920s with one singular goal: transforming the grounds of the nearby Oak Hill Country Club from a barren parcel of overworked farmland into a lush golf course landscaped with towering hardwoods, shrubs and other verdant plants.Dr. John R. Williams University of Rochester Medical Center Miner LibraryDr. Williams, with other club members who offered assistance, did not stop the forestation crusade until tens of thousands of trees were planted over four decades. He once quipped that he had stopped counting how many new seedlings he had relocated to the club after the first 40,000.The colossal Oak Hill face-lift worked. By the late 1940s, the club, whose 36 holes were designed by the noted course architect Donald J. Ross, had been acclaimed nationally and hosted its first major golf tournament. As the course’s reputation grew in ensuing decades, three U.S. Opens, the Ryder Cup and multiple other distinguished events came to the flourishing site in western New York. This week, the fourth P.G.A. Championship at Oak Hill is underway.Dr. Williams’s abiding devotion to the club’s arboriculture is also a blossoming story line this week because a recent renovation of the grounds removed hundreds of aging trees for agronomic, competitive and aesthetic reasons. It has altered the look of some holes and sparked debate, but Dr. Williams’s influence on a landmark 20th century golf course endures in the thousands of magnificent trees that remain — not just adjacent to fairways but adorning the perimeter and social areas of the 355-acre site.Commonly called the club’s patron saint, Dr. Williams, who frequented the club in work overalls and muddy boots while planting, is the man who put the oak in Oak Hill.The trees along the course played a factor in the first round of the P.G.A. Championship this year, with players like Scottie Scheffler and Keegan Bradley having to hit around trees to keep their spots near the top of the leaderboard.Dr. Williams died in 1965 at the age of 91. Shortly thereafter, during a service at the club in his honor, his granddaughter, Susan R. Williams, listened as a chorus sang a verse of Joyce Kilmer’s renowned poem put to music: “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree …”Susan R. Williams conjured that remembrance for the foreword of a book prepared for the Williams family many years ago and added another fascinating anecdote to her grandfather’s lore. He zealously scoured the world for acorns from renowned oak trees to plant at Oak Hill.“Our family vacations frequently included side trips to specific trees in search of acorns for Grandpa,” she wrote. It included getting acorns from England at Sherwood Forest and the Shakespeare oak at Stratford-on-Avon, and from the oaks planted by George Washington’s estate in Mount Vernon, Va. And it was not just family members who were recruited for the international harvest.“When people in the armed services left Rochester and went to various parts of the world, they knew to send back acorns to Dr. Williams,” Galbraith said. “Schoolchildren on vacations did the same thing and brought some back home with them.”He added: “The community was a lot smaller then, and while I don’t know how he did it, my great-grandfather was very proficient at getting the word out that he was collecting acorns.”It did not hurt that Dr. Williams was one of Rochester’s most prominent citizens — and with good reason.A tree planted in honor of Dr. John R. Williams at the Rochester Regional Health building near downtown Rochester.Raised in Canada, Dr. Williams’s family arrived in Rochester when he was a teenager. Galbraith, who is the first linear descendant of Dr. Williams to join Oak Hill Country Club, said his great-grandfather became a teacher and later graduated from the University of Michigan’s medical school. As the chief of medicine at a Rochester hospital, Dr. Williams became nationally recognized for his research on blood analysis, and in 1916, he established a laboratory that became a leader in the study of metabolic disorders, chiefly diabetes.Six years later, Dr. Williams was recognized as the first physician in the United States to administer insulin to a diabetic patient. He also surveyed 7,000 Rochester homes to study the safety of the city’s milk supplies and found dangerous, unsatisfactory refrigeration conditions that would lead to illness. He rewrote refrigeration standards, including those that applied to milk delivery trucks. Some of his guidelines were instituted nationwide.Coming to the aid of his community seemed to come naturally to Dr. Williams, who was active in many civic endeavors, especially within the city’s museum community. After Oak Hill moved from its original downtown location to the Rochester suburb of Pittsford in 1926, he began to extensively study the botany of trees in hopes of improving the vast but cheerless property where the golf courses would be situated.Dr. Williams took on the project altruistically, not necessarily for personal benefit.“What’s most interesting about Dr. Williams is that he wasn’t really a golfer,” said Sal Maiorana, a longtime Rochester sportswriter whose 2013 book painstakingly chronicled Oak Hill’s history. “He joined the club specifically as a social thing. But he became fascinated with trees, put in a tremendous amount of time understanding everything about them and consulted arborists around the world. He knew he could help the club, and the Oak Hill board of directors realized that he was the man for the job.”Groundskeepers at Oak Hill preserve Dr. Williams’s tree-planting legacy, sometimes having to shave off a few branches.But 40,000 trees planted? From a practical standpoint, how?“It is a lot of trees, but actually I’d always heard it was 50,000,” Galbraith said with a chuckle. “But he lived to be 91 so he did it consistently over a long period of time. And he had people help plant the trees.”He added: “If you look at everything he accomplished throughout this entire life, he was one of those individuals who would set his mind to things and then just do it.”Dr. Williams’s affinity for trees led to another permanent contribution to the club’s grounds: a living tribute to noteworthy contributors to golf called the Hill of Fame. Beginning in 1956, Dr. Williams began selecting trees on a rise adjacent to the 13th hole on the club’s East Course that would be affixed with bronze plaques commemorating such golfing luminaries as Ben Hogan, Annika Sorenstam, Lee Trevino and Nancy Lopez. The unveiling of each plaque has included a ceremony. To date, 45 people, including amateur golfers and administrators, have been recognized. A tree, Dr. Williams liked to say, was a surviving legacy far superior to a gravestone in a cemetery.In the early 1990s, a northern red oak seedling grown inside Oak Hill’s nursery was transplanted onto manicured grass between the former Genesee Hospital in Rochester (now a medical facility) and an adjacent parking garage. The tree has since sprouted more than 25 feet, giving shade to a walkway used by health workers and visitors.The choice of site for the planting of this particular seedling was not accidental. It was once the property of Dr. Williams, where he lived and operated his medical practice and wandered into his backyard with fledgling trees.Over and over, and over, again.The practice range is kept clear of foliage but the tree line is not far. More

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      Michael Block Gets a Hole In One At PGA Championship

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      Block, a club pro from Arroyo Trabuco, shot par in each of the first three rounds and on Sunday was paired with Rory McIlroy. He thought it couldn’t get better. Then he got a hole in one.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — On Saturday evening, Michael Block, the 46-year-old Everyman golf pro from a public course in California, learned that he would continue his enchanting run at this year’s P.G.A. Championship by playing the final round with Rory McIlroy, the four-time major champion. Block rolled his eyes at the news and spun around.“Are you serious?” he asked.He began to backpedal, as if reeling.Eventually, he walked away, smiling but muttering: “Oh, boy.”Block added: “That should be fun.”And, oh, boy, was it ever.In retrospect, perhaps McIlroy, 34, one of his generation’s greatest golfers, should have been the one grinning and eagerly awaiting the chance to play with Block, who finished the tournament tied for 15th but was treated like a visiting rock star throughout the weekend. And he lived up to the billing.Block proved what’s possible in a game like golf, where the competition is more about the player against the course than it is golfer against golfer.For this one tournament, Block, who had never even made the cut at a major championship, was able to keep up with the best in the game for 72 tense, demanding holes. He proved what’s possible, which may be the central reason people watch sports. And he won $288,333.33.At the end of their pairing Sunday, McIlroy grabbed Block for a long bear hug on the final green. They may be 12 years apart in age and separated by hundreds of millions of dollars in golf earnings, but it was not evident in their heartfelt embrace.In more than four hours of golf on Sunday afternoon, it was just one of the highlights of their pairing — and there were many.It was good golf, and more important, it was good for golf.But no part will likely be more memorable than Block’s shot at the 151-yard, par-3 15th hole on Sunday.First, by way of background, the P.G.A. Championship is the rare major tournament that reserves 20 spots in the field for members of the P.G.A. of America, the organization that conducts the tournament and represents the 28,000 certified club pros in the United States.Block, whose full-time job is to teach golf lessons and serve the recreational players at the Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Mission Viejo, Calif., southeast of Los Angeles, qualified for one of the 20 spots. It was a shock when he was even par through two rounds and in a tie for 10th, which made him only the second club pro to be in the top 10 after two rounds in the tournament in the last 40 years.Block had never made the cut at a major before the P.G.A.It turns out Block, who spent his time at this year’s P.G.A. Championship signing virtually every autograph request from fans and entertaining reporters with winsome, self-deprecating answers to countless questions, was just getting started.He shot a third even par 70 on Saturday to stay relatively close to the top of the leaderboard.Just before 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon at Oak Hill Country Club, a Block party erupted alongside the first tee. It was entirely unlike any other celebration at the event since fans began lining the holes of the nearly century-old course for practice rounds early last week.A packed grandstand and a crowd 15 deep that enveloped the arena-like first tee box erupted in rambunctious, clamorous cheering as Block appeared. The greeting for McIlroy was muted by comparison.Chants of “Let’s go, Block,” followed him as he walked up the first fairway, where, apparently free of any jitters, he rifled his opening shot.Block bogeyed the opening hole but he seemed unbothered by it, chatting amiably with McIlroy for two or three minutes as the two sauntered up the fairway. As Block reached the green, a fan shouted: “You’re one of us, Michael; we’re with you!”When he made the second of six steadying pars, Block walked through a narrow corridor of fans. One yelled: “Working man coming through!”Block continued to play with composure, even as some of the crowd’s enthusiasm had begun to wane. But at the 15th hole, Block again showed his sense of drama by knocking his tee shot into the hole on the fly.The ovation for Block’s hole in one could be heard roughly 600 yards away near the clubhouse.By the 18th hole, Block had hooked his second shot well left of the green and nearly 100 feet from the flagstick. His recovery was fitting: a pitch to 7 feet. His par putt slowly crept to the edge of the hole, paused, and then fell out of view.Making par on the closing hole also ensured that Block will be invited to the 2024 P.G.A. Championship at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky.Interviewed minutes later, Block said: “I’m living a dream. It’s not going to get any better than this.”Dedicating his performance to the club pros nationwide, he added, with tears in his eyes: “This is for you.”“I’m living a dream. It’s not going to get any better than this,” Block said after his round. More

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

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

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

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