President-elect Donald Trump won’t take the formal oath of office for another two months, but he already is making a visible effort to initiate change with one of his favorite topics: golf.
Over the weekend, Trump took a break from making his Cabinet nominations to meet with the two leaders in professional golf’s high-profile standoff: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, according to a report by the Washington Post’s Rick Maese. Trump played golf with Monahan on Friday at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, then sat ringside the next night with Al-Rumayyan, whose PIF bankrolls LIV Golf, at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
No details of the meetings were disclosed, but a PGA Tour spokesman confirmed the golf outing, telling the Post: “The president-elect and the commissioner share a love for the game, and the commissioner enjoyed their time together.”
The PGA Tour and the Saudis announced a “framework agreement” for PIF investment on June 6, 2023, ending an escalating legal fight as they vowed to finalize the details by the end of the year. That deadline came and went, and another year is about to pass with no deal announced.
Trump, who made his fortune in Manhattan real estate and authored the 1987 bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” said earlier this month about the golf standoff that “it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.” He added: “I think we have much bigger problems than that, but I do think we should have one tour, and they should have the best players in that tour.”
Trump, an avid golfer, holds business interests that include ownership and/or management of 18 golf courses worldwide. READ MORE
Paul Azinger will return to the broadcast booth in 2025, replacing the recently retired Lanny Wadkins for 10-12 Golf Channel telecasts of PGA Tour Champions tournaments, Golfweek’s Adam Schupak reported.
Azinger, 64, a 12-time PGA Tour winner who captained the Americans’ victorious 2008 Ryder Cup team, was out of a job in late 2023 when NBC Sports opted not to renew his contract after five years of PGA Tour telecasts.
“It’s not like a full-time gig or anything, which I don’t want, but to be able to go in there and part-time some golf, some really great golf, it’ll be kind of fun,” Azinger said. “I’ll just be as candid as I can and enjoy it.” READ MORE
ANDREW REDINGTON, GETTY IMAGES
Brothers George and Wesley Bryan, paired together for the first two rounds of the Butterfield Bermuda Championship, went their separate ways on the weekend.
George, at age 36 the older sibling by two years, missed the cut after rounds of 75 and 73 at Port Royal Golf Course in Southampton, Bermuda, but Wesley surged up the leaderboard with a third-round 61 before fading to a T17 finish. He nonetheless improved three spots in the FedEx Cup Fall standings, to No. 125, entering this week’s season-ending RSM Classic at Sea Island Resort on St. Simons Island, Georgia.
Wesley called the Bermuda pairing “pretty dadgum special.”
The brothers competed together in college at South Carolina, host the popular YouTube channel Bryan Bros Golf and co-own Solina Golf Club in West Columbia, South Carolina. READ MORE
The DP World Tour will play at least 42 tournaments in 26 countries next year in a schedule that features a record $153 million in prize money outside of the four major championships, officials announced.
The schedule also includes the return of the Turkish Open after a five-year absence and the restoration of the Austrian Alpine Open, which was last played in 2021. One notable omission, which the tour did not mention: the former Scandinavian Masters, which since 2020 has been a mixed male-female cooperation with the Ladies European Tour in a former European Tour event that dates to 1991, is not on the schedule.
Meanwhile, tour CEO Guy Kinnings told BBC Sport that he hopes to have “a different schedule in 2026,” alluding to the anticipated resolution of negotiations with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. READ MORE and MORE
Italy’s Edoardo Molinari, a 43-year-old three-time winner on the DP World Tour, shot 29-under-par 399 for six rounds at Infinitum Golf in Tarragona, Spain, to regain his tour card and lead 21 Q-School qualifiers for the 2025 season. READ MORE and RESULTS
TAP-INS
LIV Golf revealed six more stops in its 2025 season, including the tour’s debut in Indianapolis and in South Korea. LIV also will return to suburban Chicago and Dallas, plus Spain and England, bringing to nine the number of tournaments on the 2025 schedule. The full schedule is not released. READ MORE
The LPGA will borrow a page from the PGA Tour and create a pathway by which top collegians and amateurs can advance to the women’s tour, Golf Channel’s Brentley Romine reported. The initiative is expected to be disclosed this week at the LPGA’s season-ending CME Group Tour Championship. READ MORE
Matt McCarty, a three-time winner on the Korn Ferry Tour this year, was named the developmental tour’s player of the year in a unanimous vote by members. McCarty, 26, of Scottsdale, Arizona, earned an automatic promotion to the PGA Tour, and in his third start continued his winning ways, claiming the inaugural Black Desert Championship last month. Karl Vilips, a 23-year-old rookie touring pro out of Stanford who won in his fourth Korn Ferry Tour start, was named the tour’s rookie of the year. READ MORE and MORE
Compiled by Steve Harmon