No, the winner of this week’s Open Championship and its $US3 million first-place check won’t be a hardship case who will have to hitchhike home. However, competing in a UK tournament as an American-based player can be shockingly expensive—and not just because of the cost of flying private across the Atlantic.
It has happened before, but not since 1985 when Manuel Ballesteros joined his wee brother, Seve, in the Open Championship field at Royal St George’s alongside another pair of siblings, Tateo and Naomichi Ozaki from Japan. So the sight of Matt and Alex Fitzpatrick and Rasmus and Nicolai Hojgaard in the starting line-up this week is unusual rather than unique.
Golf’s civil war is over. Well, it might be over. Depends who you ask. The professional game has at least reached detente, and though no one knows for certain where the sport is going and who will be guiding it and what it all means, there is one incontrovertible takeaway from two years of drama, conflict, instability, and struggle:
Norrman, a 25-year-old Swede made an up-and-down par on the first extra hole at Keene Trace Golf Club in Kentucky, to defeat England’s Nathan Kimsey, who was on the verge of becoming the first player to win in his PGA Tour debut since Jim Benepe won the Western Open in 1988.
It’s one thing to have confidence in your teenage son’s abilities as a golfer. It’s another thing entirely to plant your flag when he’s just 15 years old and bet on him winning a major championship some day.
A key provision that neither the PGA Tour nor LIV Golf would recruit players from the other circuit as officials from the tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund attempted to create a new for-profit entity has been scrapped, according to a report yesterday in the New York Times.
Australian Golf Digest
