Henrik Stenson completed a stunning fall from favor on the DP World Tour.
After having his European Ryder Cup captaincy rescinded when he signed with LIV Golf last summer, Stenson resigned his DP World Tour membership on Thursday. The news came shortly after the European tour announced that it would impose fines on members for each LIV Golf or Asian Tour event played without a tour release.
“It is sad that it has come to this,” Stenson told John Huggan for a report on GolfDigest.com. “But it is what it is, and it certainly wasn’t unexpected. They left me with no other choice, so I have resigned. That’s it. I don’t really feel like it will do any good to dig into this too deeply. I’m appreciative of what the tour has done for me over the years. But they have chosen how they want to view the future. And we have obviously done the same. Unfortunately, they don’t go together at this point.”
In a statement, the DP World Tour levied fines ranging from £12,500 (about $15,560) to £100,000 (about $124,500) on 26 players for each breach from June 22, 2022, to April 2, 2023. Last month, the DP World Tour won an arbitration hearing that upheld the tour’s ability to enforce its regulations and discipline members.
Stenson, 47, the 2016 Open champion, joined England’s Richard Bland, Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood and Spain’s Sergio García in resigning from their home tour. READ MORE
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Oak Hill lands 99 of top 100 for PGA Championship
The PGA Championship this week will feature 99 of the top 100-ranked golfers in the world, the PGA of America confirmed in updating the field.
Only No. 9 Will Zalatoris, the 2022 PGA runner-up to Justin Thomas, will not play at Oak Hill Country Club’s East Course in Pittsford, New York. Zalatoris is out for the rest of the season because of recent back surgery.
One month after LIV Golf claimed three of the top six finishers at the Masters, the Saudi-funded tour will place 17 of its members in the 156-man PGA field after the withdrawal of Martin Kaymer. Brooks Koepka, the recent Masters runner-up and a two-time PGA winner, will join past champion Phil Mickelson in the field. Mickelson, who won the Wanamaker Trophy in 2021 at age 50, skipped last year’s PGA because of fallout from his comments about LIV’s Saudi sponsors.
Fan favorite Rickie Fowler, who returned to the top 50 of the Official World Golf Ranking last week, will end a streak of missing three consecutive major championships by competing in this week’s PGA. Fowler, 34, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, had plummeted to No. 185 in September before a steady climb marked by top-20 finishes in eight of his past nine starts.
Jordan Spieth, who cited an injury to his left wrist upon withdrawing from last week’s AT&T Byron Nelson in his native Texas, remained listed among the competitors.
Notable absences will include Jason Dufner, who won the 2013 PGA at Oak Hill, and past champions Kaymer, Davis Love III and Vijay Singh, all of whom withdrew. LIV Golf’s Sergio García, the 2017 Masters champion, was not qualified for the PGA and will miss the first major championship for which he was eligible – he didn’t play in the 2020 Masters because of a positive COVID-19 test – since 1999. READ MORE
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The PGA Tour will play in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 2024 as part of a four-year agreement, the tour announced. The $3.9 million Myrtle Beach Classic will be played opposite a designated event at the Dunes Golf and Beach Club on a date to be determined. The Dunes Club, a 1948 Robert Trent Jones design, is a former host of the Senior Tour Championship (1994-99) and the 1973 PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament. READ MORE
The PGA Tour University program sweetened the prize for its winner: an extra year of PGA Tour membership. After announcing last fall that the No. 1-ranked player at the end of the NCAA Championship would be eligible for tour membership for the remainder of the year, the tour granted an extra year of membership to the winner. The Nos. 2-5 finishers also will gain additional access to the tour, as well. Sweden’s Ludvig Åberg, a senior at Texas Tech, led the PGA Tour University ranking entering last week. READ MORE
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan nixed a potential sponsorship deal with Raytheon Technologies because the U.S. aerospace and defense contractor sells missiles to Saudi Arabia, Golfweek’s Adam Schupak reported, citing multiple sources with knowledge of the negotiations. Telecommunications giant AT&T, which is headquartered in Dallas, wants to end its sponsorship of the Byron Nelson event in suburban Dallas, according to the report. AT&T also sponsors the tour’s annual event at Pebble Beach. READ MORE
A judge in the legal fight between Tiger Woods and a former live-in girlfriend/employee did not rule in a hearing on a disputed non-disclosure agreement, but the case appears headed to arbitration, which is Woods’ goal, according to a report by Sports Illustrated’s Alex Miceli. READ MORE
In separate announcements last week, captain Zach Johnson appointed two more assistants to his staff for this fall’s Ryder Cup. Jim Furyk and Fred Couples will assist Johnson when the U.S. team takes on the Europeans on September 28-October 1 at Marco Simone in Rome. They will join assistants Steve Stricker and Davis Love III, with one spot yet to be filled for the biennial match. READ MORE and MORE
Johnny Miller, who rose to the top of his profession as a touring pro and later as a network TV analyst, will receive the USGA’s highest honor on the 50th anniversary of his U.S. Open victory.
Miller was named winner of the Bob Jones Award, which recognizes character, respect and sportsmanship in honor of the late Grand Slam winner and co-founder of Augusta National Golf Club.
Miller, 76, won the 1973 U.S. Open with a final-round 63 at brutish Oakmont before racking up eight victories in the 1974 PGA Tour season. He would go on to win 25 times on tour, including a runaway six-stroke triumph in the 1976 Open Championship, before a sudden fall from stardom in the late 1970s.
He joined NBC Sports in 1989 as a part-time analyst and became one of the most authoritative voices in golf.
Miller will be honored June 13 in Los Angeles, site of the U.S. Open. READ MORE
Bryson DeChambeau and Matt Jones removed their names as plaintiffs from LIV Golf’s federal antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, Golfweek’s Adam Schupak confirmed.
The action leaves LIV as the sole litigant against the tour.
On August 3, 2022, Phil Mickelson and 10 other LIV players sued the PGA Tour, alleging that their indefinite suspensions for having signed with the rival tour violated federal law. Less than two months later, the PGA Tour countersued, claiming that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which bankrolls the rival tour, induced golfers to breach existing contracts by offering “astronomical sums of money.”
In the ensuing months, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have squabbled about evidentiary rules of discovery, with the PGA Tour winning a series of procedural victories along the way, notably against the Saudis’ claim of sovereign immunity. A trial is set for May 17, 2024. READ MORE
A vocal minority of members of Grange Golf Club in Adelaide, Australia, reported “excessive” damage to their course after LIV Golf’s recent tournament and have demanded that the tour not return to what had been billed as a wildly successful debut Down Under, according to Australian news reports. One longtime member told The Advertiser newspaper of Adelaide, “A profit-making circus has come to town, and the people paying the price are the members.” However, a post-tournament survey indicated that 86 percent of members were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the event, The Advertiser reported. READ MORE
A record number of Americans are playing golf in some form, the American Golf Industry Coalition reported for National Golf Day on May 9.
Some 41.1 million Americans played some form of the game – traditional on-course golf or via simulators or other off-course entertainment – in 2022, resulting in $101.7 billion in direct economic impact, a 20-percent increase from the previous study, in 2016, according to the report. READ MORE
The number of golf rounds played in March in the U.S. slipped 2.3 percent compared with the same month last year, the National Golf Foundation reported, citing Golf Datatech’s monthly report. The slide was attributed largely to storms on the West Coast. However, the national numbers for the first three months of years 2021-23 rose 17 percent compared with the first quarter of years 2017-19, the pre-COVID period against which the industry benchmarks golf’s post-pandemic numbers. First-quarter stats in the industry tend to fluctuate from year to year because of seasonal weather conditions. READ MORE
Topgolf Callaway Brands, boosted by continued growth in its tech-enabled golf entertainment sector, reported first-quarter net revenue growth of 12.2 percent, according to a company news release. The results exceeded analysts’ projections. READ MORE
TAP-INS
Pine Valley (New Jersey) Golf Club agreed to a settlement in a gender-based discrimination complaint that includes a $100,000 payment to the state Division on Civil Rights and the endowment of two new scholarships worth a combined $100,000 to support women’s participation in golf, state Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin announced. READ MORE
So Yeon Ryu has accepted a special exemption to play in the U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble Beach (California) Golf Links, the USGA announced. Ryu, 32, of South Korea, won the 2011 Women’s Open. She will join Annika Sörenstam as special invitees in the USWO field on July 6-9. READ MORE
In advance of the LPGA’s annual Founders Cup tournament last week in New Jersey, the LPGA Foundation honored 34-time winner Betsy King and renowned coach Pia Nilsson as its 2023 pioneers of women’s golf. READ MORE
Northwestern’s David Nyfjäll won the 2023 Byron Nelson Award, the Salesmanship Club of Dallas and the Golf Coaches Association of America announced. Nyfjäll, a graduating senior with a 3.776 GPA in statistics from Uppsala, Sweden, won the 2022 Big Ten Conference title and is a four-time all-Big Ten first-team honoree. He was recognized for his achievement in the classroom, on the course and in his community, in honor of the late Nelson. READ MORE
The 156-player field – 30 teams and six individuals from non-qualifying teams – was finalized last week for the NCAA Division I Women’s Golf Championship, to be played May 19-24 at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona. READ MORE
Jennifer Morton was named CEO of the Association of Golf Merchandisers. READ MORE
Compiled by Steve Harmon