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Where the Scottie-Tiger comparisons make sense, plus Trump's threat
Where the Scottie-Tiger comparisons make sense, plus Trump's threat

New York Times

time3 days ago

  • Sport
  • New York Times

Where the Scottie-Tiger comparisons make sense, plus Trump's threat

The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic's daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! Win your trial today. Hours before Scottie Scheffler made his final putt yesterday, the Tiger comparisons were already cemented. Comparing numbers with Tiger Woods is a joke, but there's something to be said for feeling. And as someone who watched Tiger live in his prime, Scheffler's current run does feel like prime Tiger. Just a bit. Let's contextualize it: The thing that feels most Woods-ian to me? Scheffler has won 10 straight tournaments in which he's had a 54-hole lead. It's nowhere near Woods' longest streak — 36, just a hilarious number — but the feeling of inevitability is there. We haven't felt that way since Tiger's Sunday red meant something. Just take it from Jim 'Bones' Mackay, the former longtime caddie for Phil Mickelson, who said this on NBC after the tournament: 'I never thought I'd see a player as close to Tiger as this man currently is.' Me neither, Bones. For what it's worth, Scheffler laughed off the Tiger comparison afterward, calling it 'a bit silly.' Scheffler's mindset was a topic of conversation all week; Brendan Quinn wrote about how scary that should actually be for everyone else. Justin Ray also has plenty more fun stats from Scheffler's masterful day, including a look at next year's majors slate. Trump threatens Commanders President Donald Trump posted a lengthy screed to social media yesterday demanding the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians revert to their original nicknames. Trump even said he would stall Washington's new stadium deal until the team changed the nickname back. See more in our full story, which includes comments from Guardians officials. Advertisement Another NFLPA official resigns JC Tretter, the maligned former president and CSO of the NFL Players Association, announced his resignation from the union yesterday. It comes after a bad month for Tretter, as multiple reports have detailed troubling decisions by him while in power at the NFLPA. It also comes just three days after former NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell resigned, too. The full saga is worth a read if you've missed it so far. Tour de France enters home stretch Belgian rider Tim Wellens won stage 15 of the Tour de France yesterday, capping off a chaotic day that raised questions about sportsmanship after a number of the race favorites had to recover from a crash early on. Wellens' teammate Tadej Pogacar, a three-time Tour winner, still maintains a commanding lead heading into the race's second and final rest day today. We have plenty more on the laid-back Slovenian superstar. More news 📫 Love The Pulse? Check out our other newsletters. 📺 MLB: Royals at Cubs 8:05 p.m. ET on MLB Network It is hard to imagine, in a vacuum, a better season for the Cubbies. Nineteen games above .500, first place in the NL Central. This is what they envisioned when hiring Craig Counsell away from Milwaukee, right? It's funny then that the Brewers are also 19 games above .500, sporting an identical 59-40 record, tied for the NL Central lead. Pesky. Chicago is both elite and in a dire division race. Every game counts. Get tickets to games like these here. What is every NHL team's best and worst jersey? Some of these sweaters are art. NFL training camps really get underway this week. Our writers picked one player from all 32 teams to watch as summer becomes fall. Walking is so in right now. Just ask 90-year-old competitive racewalker Alan Poisner, who penned this story for us. He's my role model now. The real winner of WNBA All-Star weekend? The Stud Budz. Most-clicked in the newsletter yesterday: This absurd catch from football prospect Brysen Wright. Most-read on the website yesterday: The Trump-Commanders story.

Scottie Scheffler wins Open Championship, taking his place among golf's legends
Scottie Scheffler wins Open Championship, taking his place among golf's legends

New York Times

time3 days ago

  • Sport
  • New York Times

Scottie Scheffler wins Open Championship, taking his place among golf's legends

PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — There is a universal truth in this game: Golf can never be fully mastered. Rarified excellence can be achieved, but to see all the pillars of the game firing at once, coupled with the glue that is the golfer's mind, is the exception, not the norm. A player can feel complete. But that state is fleeting, even for the best. Advertisement On Sunday at Royal Portrush, Scottie Scheffler won the Open Championship by four shots to capture his fourth major overall and second of 2025. What the Texan did in County Antrim, and what he has done consistently over his four-year run of dominance, represents the type of golf that can begin to cause slivers of doubt about that universal belief. Only Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player have won the Open, Masters and PGA Championship before age 30. On Sunday, Scheffler joined them. 'I never thought I'd see a player as close to Tiger as this man currently is,' Jim 'Bones' Mackay, who caddied for Phil Mickelson for 25 years, said on NBC's broadcast of the Open on Saturday. It was 1,197 days between Woods' first and fourth major wins. It was 1,197 for Scheffler as well. As Scheffler stormed to his four-shot 54-hole lead by making almost every putt within 10 feet and salvaging pars from places others would consider jail, he made the championship feel like it was already over. It was. Few players have had that effect on a leaderboard in the history of this sport. Scheffler, now three-quarters of the way to his career Grand Slam, is one of them. Scheffler began the championship by hitting just three fairways and still posting a 3-under 68. He followed it up with a links golf masterclass: a 7-under 64 on Friday in intermittent rain, complete with eight birdies, to take a one-shot lead over Matt Fitzpatrick. But it was Saturday's round, an unusually calm day at the seaside Royal Portrush, that Scheffler's otherworldly play made the outcome of the championship all too predictable. Scheffler shot a third-round 67 to lead the tournament by four shots over China's Hoatong Li. It gave Scheffler a 81.1 percent win probability, according to A jarring statistic began to circulate: Scheffler had converted his last nine consecutive 54-hole leads to victory. On Sunday, he came out of the gates exactly how he was supposed to, with a birdie on the opening par 4. Another one came at the short par-4 5th. When Scheffler got to the eighth, he showed himself to be human, failing to escape a pot bunker and walking away with a double bogey. Of course, he picked himself back up with an immediate birdie at No. 9 to post a front-nine 34, reaching 16 under for the tournament. At the turn, he led by five. Scheffler's chasers did what they could to make up ground. The entire course and country pulled for Rory McIlroy, their hometown hero, one pairing ahead. Chants for McIlroy echoed throughout the Royal Portrush property, several directed at Scheffler himself, but they did not propel the Northern Irishman as he would have liked. McIlroy shot 69, and finished seven strokes behind Scheffler. American Ryder Cup hopeful Harris English, for the second time this year, finished second to Scheffler in a major, behind by six strokes at the PGA and four here. Advertisement Scheffler's back nine was just as steady as his front, so much so that his two-putt pars almost felt like bogeys. After a birdie on No. 12, Scheffler finished six pars for a round of 68. He shot in the 60s for all four rounds at a major for the first time. Coming into the 2025 season, Scheffler, 29, was expected to continue his crusade, which is why the opening months of the calendar year posed a new challenge. In 2024, he won seven PGA Tour tournaments, including the Masters, Players Championship, Tour Championship and four signature events. Scheffler also claimed the Olympic gold medal in Paris. The predictions rolled in. Could Scheffler win eight this year, even nine? Perhaps that's why Scheffler's restless and defensive edge revealed itself this winter, when a hand injury stalled his return to the PGA Tour and his intended results weren't transpiring. He missed all of January and went without a win in February, March or April. His frustrations boiled over at the Players, and when asked about those emotions becoming visible, Scheffler retorted: 'You've played golf before, right?' 'It's just one of those things,' Scheffler said. 'I'm a competitive guy.' If the rest of us were antsy about Scheffler's early-season performance, imagine how he felt. It didn't take very long for the tone in Scheffler's voice to subside with three victories in four starts in May and June, including Scheffler's third major victory at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow and a hometown win at the Byron Nelson by eight shots. The intensity of Scheffler's competitive fire is one of his more underreported attributes. Watch the 6-foot-3 Dallas native walk the fairways at any tournament, and you'll notice that unless he's hitting a golf shot or conversing with his caddie, his gaze is consistently directed downward. He commits to his task by maintaining an elite level of focus, but he uses his surroundings as fuel — even though it might not look like it. Advertisement 'The bigger the moment, the more it really means something, the more his juices get flowing,' his coach Randy Smith said in a conversation with The Athletic ahead of the Masters. 'A lot of people will sit there and get nervous and skittish. But Scottie doesn't get that way. He looks forward to it. He embraces it. It's like he runs to it.' That's the piece that makes Scheffler a constant threat. If Scheffler isn't hitting the ball how he wants to, he figures out a way to get it into the hole. If he's missing putts, his ball-striking makes up for it. He always finds a way, and his competitors know that. 'Look, Scottie Scheffler is inevitable,' said Rory McIlroy. 'Even when he doesn't have his best stuff, he's become a complete player.' The truth is, we already knew all of this about Scheffler. This is not the first time Scheffler's peers have spoken about his baffling ability to never go away. It is not the first time he has blown away the field, strolling into the clubhouse with a lead that was never going to be sniffed. Scheffler's trendline has made itself apparent for quite some time. Royal Portrush just provided the stage for him to continue rising.

Former major champion left bewildered by the bizarre new rule change that left Tommy Fleetwood SEETHING at The Open
Former major champion left bewildered by the bizarre new rule change that left Tommy Fleetwood SEETHING at The Open

Daily Mail​

time6 days ago

  • Sport
  • Daily Mail​

Former major champion left bewildered by the bizarre new rule change that left Tommy Fleetwood SEETHING at The Open

Tommy Fleetwood found himself on the receiving end of a tough break during his first round at The Open Championship on Thursday afternoon, after his ball landed in a bunker that hadn't been raked. The Englishman, who was a favourite coming into the week, wrapped up his opening round at two-over-par, carding five bogeys. The 34-year-old, who came so agonisingly close to winning his first PGA Tour event at the Travelers Championship in June, began his round well, making par on his first three holes. He'd hit a bogey on the fourth, before teeing up a drive on the par-four fifth hole, sending a high cut 290 yards down the fairway, into a pot bunker just 30 yards from the green. Upon arriving at the hole, a caddie from the player who had last landed in the bunker, hadn't raked the sand. As he walked up to the sand trap, Fleetwood was not pleased with the lie. 'For f***s sake, man,' he was overheard saying on the World Feed broadcast. On commentary, legendary caddie Jim 'Bones' Mackay explained how the lie looked. 'Tommy now has an awful lie, lucky to avoid the footprints that were made by the previous player,' he said. Fleetwood would chip out, but admitted that he was unable to get a solid contact on the golf ball as he tried to dig his shot out over the arching lip of the sand trap. His ball travelled six yards into the rough on the right, with the Englishman going down for a bogey. In the past, the R&A has traditionally deployed greenkeepers to rake bunkers, in a bid to both speed up play and let caddies work with players. But this week, that has all changed. The responsibility now lies with the caddies, which R&A chief Mark Darbon explained on Wednesday was a 'good change'. While Fleetwood took ownership himself for landing in the bunker, and didn't want to pass blame on anyone else, he was frank about his thoughts about how the bunker had been left. 'It wasn't a great rake job. I probably could have managed it - first thing is I was not very happy to be in there,' the 2017 Race to Dubai winner said. 'That was the first thing, so that's my fault. 'Things weren't going well. It was like in somebody's hitting mark that hadn't really been raked great. 'I probably could have managed it better. I still felt like I could hit - I tried to hit what I thought was the right shot, like kind of duff something because I knew I couldn't get any sort of strike perched on the ball so I tried to duff it, but then you've got to get the height as well. So that was a bit harsh.' After the incident, Fleetwood admitted that he thinks bunker rakers should return, adding that there had been some lack of communication between the R&A and players about whose responsibility it belonged to. 'Yeah, I don't remember when it changed actually. Was it really? They've always had bunker rakers until this week? I thought so. I thought that was odd. 'I mean, still, you just rake the bunkers, right? It's part of the game. 'You don't know what's gone on before. I'm not going to hold it against anyone too much. You don't know what was going on, you don't know what was happening in that moment. I'm not going to get angry about anyone where you don't know what's happening, but it wasn't great, and yeah, bunker rakers would have been nice.' Speaking on the rule change on Thursday afternoon, former PGA Championship winner Rich Beem was perplexed as to why the R&A chose to make the decision. 'It was a luxury that we had for many, many years,' Beem who will feature on The Open exclusively live on Sky Sports as a golf analyst, said. 'And it was great because we knew that they were all greenskeepers somewhere around just volunteering their time. After his round, Fleetwood explained that the R&A might not have been clear when announcing the rule change to players 'Listen, these guys rake the bunkers after they clean up after themselves or their players every single other week of the year, why is this one any different?' The matter is particularly topical considering some players, including Rory McIlroy, Fleetwood and Justin Thomas spent over six hours on the golf course yesterday, due to slow play. 'Again, I don't know the [R&A's] rationale. But I'm like, why is this a big deal? You know, these guys do it all the time. And here's the thing, is that it's not like the caddy is being left on his own. The caddies have teamwork.' Beem then suggested an innovative way caddies can work together to keep the pace of play going. 'So if a guy hits it into a fairway bunker say that said I hit a fairway bunker on three you hit a right man on the fairway you hit first I have to dump mine out your caddy will come over rake the bunker while we go down the fairway it's teamwork because the caddies are still, I mean, they're still a little brotherhood out there as well. 'They're kind of looking after each other as well, because they're trying to make sure the pace of play keeps moving on.' 'I thought that was always one of the cool and unique things about this championship, because it had that own unique little vibe. 'And, you know, caddies, I know my caddy was always like: 'Are you sure I can rake this?' ''No, no, it's my job',' his caddie would say back.

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