Author: staff

Every so often, a Sunday round cuts through the slog of a long season and reminds you why you watch this game. TPC Twin Cities delivered one of those this week. A 21-year-old in just his third professional start, with the world’s best player right behind him, holding his nerve all the way to the clubhouse. Jackson Koivun’s victory at the 3M Open wasn’t just a feel-good story. It was a statement.

PGA Tour: Jackson Koivun Claims 3M Open Title

It takes something rare to beat Scottie Scheffler in a final-round duel. The World No. 1 has spent the better part of the last few years making competitors feel like they’re playing for second place the moment he gets within range. And yet, there was Koivun — twenty-one years old, barely broken in at the professional level — holding firm at 25-under par, refusing to flinch. Whatever that quality is, Koivun clearly has it.

The golf world had been watching his rise with cautious interest — the kind that builds when a player’s amateur credentials are exceptional but you don’t want to project too much, too soon. Third professional start. First Tour win. The math doesn’t add up in any conventional sense, and yet here we are. Golf.com described Koivun’s ability to stay composed down the stretch as a genuine “superpower” — and watching how he navigated those final holes, it’s hard to argue. There’s a stillness to the way he plays, a calmness that most players spend years chasing and never quite find.

Scheffler didn’t make it easy. He rarely does. But sometimes the week belongs to someone else entirely, and this week it belonged to a young man from Minnesota who looked entirely at home under pressure he’d never faced at this level before. That’s not luck. That’s temperament.

The Titleist setup Koivun carried to victory will get plenty of attention — every club in the bag dissected by the gear crowd — but what stood out most was the simplicity of his process. No drama between shots. No visible tension when the moment tightened. Just golf, played the way the best players play it when everything is on the line.

And then there was Lucas Glover. Because no Tour week is complete without something setting the internet off in entirely the wrong direction. Glover removed his shoes after making a birdie during the final round, and the golf world briefly convinced itself it was some kind of protest against AimPoint putting. It wasn’t. The actual explanation, as these things tend to be, was far more mundane — but the speed at which that story took hold says something about how hungry this game’s audience is for theatre, even when there isn’t any.

PGA Tour: Rocket Classic — Cameron Young Headlines the Field in Detroit

With the 3M Open wrapped up, the tour moves to Detroit and the Rocket Classic, where reigning Players champion Cameron Young arrives as the betting favourite. Young has been one of the more compelling players in the game since his near-miss runs at majors a few years back, and there’s a sense that his Players title opened a door for him rather than closing one. He plays with an aggression that suits certain courses more than others, and Detroit’s invitation to attack off the tee tends to bring the long hitters forward. Whether he can turn favouritism into hardware, we’ll see soon enough.

Around the Tours

Results from the DP World Tour, LIV Golf, LPGA Tour, and PGA Tour Champions were not available at time of writing. We’ll have full coverage as those leaderboards take shape across the coming days.

LIV Golf, meanwhile, continues to draw scrutiny — and not for the reasons the league would prefer. This week’s Tour Confidential touched on what continues to be a difficult stretch for the breakaway circuit, a conversation that feels increasingly familiar as the season wears on. The problems aren’t new — the financial picture has been darkening for a while — but every week that produces something like Koivun’s win at TPC Twin Cities is a week that reminds you what the traditional Tour still does better than anyone: genuine drama, genuine leaderboards, genuine rivalries. That’s hard to replicate.

Equipment & Gear: What’s Moving in the Market

Away from the course, the gear conversation this week centres on a couple of releases worth knowing about. Graphite Design has unveiled the Tour AD EK — the “Extra Kick” — a new wood shaft designed to deliver a higher launch and more energy transfer through impact. Graphite Design has long been one of the more trusted names in premium shaft fitting, and the EK looks aimed at players who want more feel without giving up trajectory control. Worth a session on the launch monitor if you’re due a driver refresh.

On the footwear side, SQAIRZ has introduced a spikeless version of its ProS2 performance shoe, bringing the brand’s wider toe-box design — built around maximising ground contact and stability through the swing — into a more versatile package. For golfers who move between the course and the clubhouse without wanting to change shoes, or who just prefer a spikeless sole, it’s a sensible next step from a brand that’s been doing things a bit differently for a while now.

The Game Growing: Scotland’s Junior Home of Golf

Some of the most important golf news never trends. Over in Scotland, more than 100 clubs have participated in the inaugural Junior Home of Golf competition — a real milestone for junior development in a country that takes its relationship with the game seriously. These stories don’t get viral moments, but they matter. Every future Jackson Koivun started somewhere, with someone pointing them in the right direction at a club that cared enough to open its doors. Scotland appears to be opening quite a few right now.

That’s maybe the thread that ties this week together. A 21-year-old from the amateur ranks walks into his third professional tournament and beats the best player in the world. Over a hundred junior golfers in Scotland tee it up in a competition that didn’t exist this time last year. The game keeps finding new people, and new people keep finding the game.

Koivun’s win will be replayed and picked apart for weeks. But what sticks, long after the scorecards are filed, is the image of a young player walking off eighteen with the tournament in his hands, looking like he’d done it a hundred times before. He hadn’t, of course. But something tells you he will.

Standing on the 18th tee at Royal Birkdale, Ryan Fox leaned toward his caddy and said something that most professional golfers spend their entire careers only imagining. They were going for the win, he told him—and whatever happened next, he would deal with the consequences.

That one moment pretty much sums up the 154th Open Championship—a week at Royal Birkdale that gave the golf world a champion worth remembering, a heartbreak that still stings, and the kind of theatre that reminds you why this tournament matters as much as it does.

Open Championship: Ryan Fox Claims the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale

Ryan Fox is a Major champion. Take a second with that. The New Zealand big-hitter—long praised for his ball-striking and long waiting for a breakthrough—walked off Birkdale’s closing hole having played a back nine that the r/golf community was quick to call outstanding. Because it was. Fox didn’t just play well on Sunday. He committed. He attacked. And when the moment on 18 called for something close to fearlessness, he didn’t hesitate.

The final round played out the way links golf usually does – firm, fast and unforgiving, rewarding the brave and punishing the cautious. Fox was brave. His back nine separated him from the field: he kept the ball where he wanted it, his putter held up, and his head stayed clear when the pressure was at its worst.

There’ll be time in the coming weeks to properly trace how this win unfolded, where the tournament shifted, which hole opened it up, what Fox’s game looks like now that the weight of “almost” is gone. But what sticks most, right now, isn’t a stat. It’s that conversation on the 18th tee. Going for the win. Dealing with the consequences. That’s someone who knew exactly what he wanted.

Cameron Young’s Two Hours of Belief — and One Moment That Changed Everything

For Cameron Young, this Open Championship will live somewhere painful in his memory. Young sat in the clubhouse and watched the tournament drift toward him. For two hours, winning wasn’t a fantasy, it was a genuine, present possibility. The Claret Jug felt close.

And then it didn’t.

There’s a particular kind of hurt in that situation. It’s not a round that falls apart early, not a slow fade off the leaderboard. It’s the opposite. Sitting still, watching others play, knowing you’ve done your part and the game itself now has to decide. Young did everything he could. The tournament went another way.

He has the game to win Majors. That’s not an overstatement – his win at THE PLAYERS Championship earlier this season already made that clear. Birkdale will hurt, but it also fits a pattern: Young keeps putting himself in contention when the stage gets biggest, and he keeps getting closer. The question isn’t whether he can win a Major. It’s just a matter of when.

Scottie Scheffler’s Wild Rules Break and What Comes Next

Scottie Scheffler didn’t leave Royal Birkdale with the Claret Jug, but he didn’t leave without making the week interesting. During the final round, Scheffler ran into a rules situation nobody saw coming—a moment that turned on the instruction “don’t look for the ball” and became one of the stranger subplots of the week. The world number one handled it, as he tends to handle most things.

A near-miss at a Major would derail a lot of players’ seasons. For Scheffler, it barely registers as a blip. He heads to the 3M Open this week as the heavy betting favorite—the market’s acknowledgment that even when Scheffler doesn’t win, he reminds everyone why he’s the benchmark. Whether he turns that into another Tour win is something TPC Twin Cities will sort out by Sunday.

Tommy Fleetwood and the Meaning of a Home Open

Tommy Fleetwood’s week at Royal Birkdale didn’t end how he’d have wanted. A home Open—playing the championship practically in his own backyard—didn’t deliver the ending he’d surely let himself imagine. The Claret Jug went to someone else. And yet, from what everyone saw, the closing scene carried a weight that a trophy might not have captured any better.

That’s golf being golf. The game sometimes offers something real even when it takes away the thing you most want. Fleetwood at Birkdale, whatever the final number on his card, was a player in a place where he belongs—where the crowd wants him to do it and the wind feels familiar. That’s worth something, even without a winner’s speech.

The Subplot That Won’t Quiet Down: Bryson vs. Rory

Underneath the main storylines at the Open, another thread kept surfacing: the apparently growing tension between Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy. The Tour Confidential breakdown of Birkdale flags the rivalry heating up, and it’s worth following—not because golf needs manufactured drama, but because when two players of this level develop a genuine competitive edge toward each other, the golf that follows tends to be worth watching. The details are still playing out, but something is building here.

Around the Game

Away from Birkdale, the week has a few things worth noting. The First Tee Game Changers Academy returns to Minneapolis, bringing 72 teens from around the country together for a program built around inclusive leadership, with a keynote from Olympic medalist Kellie Wells Brinkley. It won’t show up on any leaderboard, but programs like this tend to shape where the game goes.

El Macero Country Club in California hosts the 60th Annual California Women’s Amateur Championship—a milestone edition of a competition with deep roots in West Coast amateur golf.

Looking Ahead

The post-Major break doesn’t last long. The 3M Open tees up at TPC Twin Cities with Scheffler as the favorite and a field that’ll be watching to see whether he can turn a near-miss at Birkdale into something. The rest of the Tour rolls on—rankings, Ryder Cup chatter, the usual—while somewhere Cameron Young is sitting with a week that almost went his way, and Ryan Fox has a Claret Jug that, after Sunday at Royal Birkdale, is entirely his.

He said he’d deal with the consequences. Turns out the consequence was a Major.

Mid-July in professional golf has its own particular feeling. The links are calling, the weather (usually) turns properly miserable in the way only the British Isles can manage, and everyone’s attention starts drifting toward The Open Championship. This week delivered on that promise — Tom Kim won in Scotland, Haeran Ryu won in France, and Royal Birkdale is now just days away.

DP World Tour: Genesis Scottish Open — Tom Kim Claims Fourth PGA Tour Title

Tom Kim won the 2026 Genesis Scottish Open at -17 under par, his fourth PGA Tour victory and a result that sends him into next week’s Open Championship with real momentum. The win was convincing enough that it’s hard to argue he isn’t one of the players to watch at Birkdale.

One detail worth noting: Kim’s winning bag included a rare blade putter, which most modern players have moved away from in favor of mallets. It’s an old-school choice that requires genuine feel to pull off, and Kim holed the putts that mattered. Whether that translates to links golf next week is an interesting question, but he clearly trusts it.

The Scottish Open has always worked well as an Open warm-up, and Kim leaves it in better shape than just about anyone else in the field heading to Birkdale.

LPGA Tour: Evian Championship — Haeran Ryu Wins as TaylorMade’s Major Driver Streak Continues

Over in Évian-les-Bains, Haeran Ryu won the Evian Championship — one of five major championships on the women’s calendar. It was a controlled, patient performance, the type that doesn’t always generate big highlights but tends to hold up under pressure.

On the equipment side, TaylorMade’s run of driver wins at majors kept going with Ryu’s victory. At this point the streak is long enough that it’s worth paying attention to — whether it’s down to their ongoing engineering refinements, fitting, or simply the best players in the world choosing the same equipment, they keep showing up at the top of leaderboards when it matters most.

For Ryu, though, the equipment story is a footnote. She won a major championship at one of the more scenic venues in women’s golf, with the Alps in the background. That’s what she’ll remember.

Golf News: The Open Championship Is Here — Scheffler and McIlroy Lead the Conversation

The Open Championship begins at Royal Birkdale on July 16, and the betting markets have Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy as co-favorites. That feels about right.

Scheffler has been the most consistent player in the world for the better part of two seasons — it’s not that he plays robotically, it’s that he manages his game with a clarity that most players can’t sustain over 72 holes. McIlroy comes with a different kind of weight. A links course, a British crowd, a major title on the line — he thrives on that setting, and the people who turn out to watch him know it.

For the full Open Championship TV schedule, streaming details, and tee times, coverage starts Thursday. Worth planning ahead.

The Human Side: Aaron Wise and Golf’s Ongoing Conversation About Mental Health

While Charles Barkley was getting plenty of attention on social media for a very memorable reaction to a wayward shot, Aaron Wise was the more quietly significant story of the week. Not the scorecard version — the person behind it.

Golf tends to demand a certain stoicism from its players. You miss a short putt in front of thousands and the expectation is that you just walk to the next tee and keep going. Wise’s story this week looks honestly at what that costs, and what it takes to actually examine it rather than push through. His comeback is worth following — not for the birdies, but for the fuller picture of what a professional career in this sport actually looks like.

Around the Game: Bears, Birkdale, and the Business of Golf

The viral moment of the week went to a bear — more than one, actually. Reddit’s r/golf community called them the “bag bears,” and the videos spread fast. They helped themselves to golf bags with remarkable confidence and zero concern for the situation. Honestly, good for them.

On the facility side, The Kingdom at The Grove opened in Hertfordshire, UK — a TaylorMade-partnered fitting and performance center that’s positioning itself as the most advanced of its kind outside the United States. Worth knowing about if you’re a serious player on this side of the Atlantic looking to get properly fitted.

And the 43rd Annual Play Golf Myrtle Beach World Amateur Championship has hit its full 3,000-player field, with an alternate list now open. Three thousand amateurs playing golf with no world rankings or prize money on the line — just the game itself. That number says something about where the sport actually lives.

Royal Birkdale is ready. Thursday isn’t far off.

Some weeks in golf hand you everything you need in a single Sunday afternoon. This was one of them. Across three different tours, the game produced a 72nd-hole collapse that will be replayed for years, a veteran proving that experience can still cut through the noise, and a 39-year-old rookie reminding everyone that some stories simply refuse to follow the expected timeline. There was joy and heartbreak in roughly equal measure — which is to say, it was a perfectly normal week of golf.

PGA Tour: John Deere Classic

There’s a particular cruelty to losing a golf tournament you already had. Ben Kohles knows that now in a way he probably never wanted to. Standing on the 72nd hole of the John Deere Classic with the title within reach, Kohles found a way to give it back — a 72nd-hole disaster that changed everything in about thirty seconds. The collapse handed Chris Gotterup the trophy, and while no one wants to win quite like that, a win is a win.

Gotterup played well enough all week to deserve what came to him. This is his fifth PGA Tour title, and there’s a quiet steadiness to the way he competes — he doesn’t impose himself on a tournament so much as outlast it. When the door opened at TPC Deere Run, he walked through it without flinching. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.

The equipment world has already taken notice. A full breakdown of Gotterup’s winning bag is making the rounds this week — the kind of detail golf fans consume with the same appetite they bring to the leaderboard. For those who believe the clubs matter as much as the swing, there’s plenty to dig into.

As for Kohles — there’s nothing to say that he doesn’t already know. The game asks hard questions sometimes, and the only honest answer is to come back and ask one of your own.

DP World Tour

If you need a reason to keep believing in the longer arc of things, look at what happened on the DP World Tour this week. Michael Hollick is 39 years old. He once walked away from professional golf entirely to coach. And on Sunday, he rolled in a 19-foot eagle putt to win his first DP World Tour title.

Let that sit for a moment.

Hollick’s story is the kind the game occasionally produces — not often enough, but when it does, you stop whatever you’re doing. He left the tour. He found meaning in teaching. And then something pulled him back, the way golf tends to with people who genuinely love it. A rookie at 39. A first professional win via one of the most dramatic putts of the season. No careful branding, no tidy arc engineered for social media. Just a man who kept at it until the game finally said yes.

That one’s going to stay with people.

PGA Tour Champions: U.S. Senior Open

Padraig Harrington has never been easy to categorize. He’s too analytical for the romantics, too heartfelt for the purely technical. He thinks about the game in layers, processes it out loud, teaches it with a generosity that feels almost at odds with the competitive engine running underneath. And now, after winning his third U.S. Senior Open, he’s become only the second player in history to do so.

The question being asked in golf circles this week is whether Harrington is the most under-appreciated player of his generation. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is probably yes. Three major championships. A Ryder Cup captaincy. A post-competitive career that has somehow produced a record-tying win on the Champions Tour. He’s done more than almost anyone, and yet the conversation always seems to settle on others first.

His lesson from the week, characteristically Harrington, involves what he calls “a saturation point” — the idea that at some stage, more information stops helping and starts hindering. It’s the kind of insight that takes decades to earn and about thirty seconds to understand once you hear it. That’s Padraig: the clearest thinker in a sport that often mistakes complexity for depth.

Around the Game

Beyond the scoreboards, the week had a few threads worth following. Jordan Spieth’s return to Royal Birkdale is generating real anticipation — Birkdale, where he won the 2017 Open Championship in that electric, nerve-shredding way only Spieth seems capable of producing. The venue alone adds something the week wouldn’t otherwise have.

On the technology side, the game keeps moving. Players 1st has launched an AI assistant built on what it’s calling the world’s largest collection of golf intelligence — a tool aimed at giving club operators faster, smarter access to their own data. Separately, the NGCOA is hosting a webinar around AI-informed tee time strategy, a phrase that would have sounded like science fiction not long ago and now feels entirely routine. The industry is moving, whether the traditionalists are comfortable with it or not.

Nashville will host the inaugural World Series of Competitive Putting — more than $65,000 on the line and the first-ever world champion to be crowned. Putting has always been the part of the game that levels the playing field, the place where a weekend amateur can beat a tour player on any given green. An event built entirely around that skill makes sense.

And somewhere on the back nine of Payne’s Valley in Missouri, a golf cart went off a cliff at the 19th hole. No one appeared to be seriously hurt, but the video is circulating online with the kind of speed reserved for moments that are equal parts terrifying and unavoidably funny. Golf contains everything.

Looking Ahead

The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale is coming up fast, and most of the golf world’s attention is already drifting that way. Gotterup arrives with momentum from Sunday. Harrington arrives having just tied a record. And somewhere on a DP World Tour range, a 39-year-old first-time winner is figuring out what comes next — which, if the last few days are any indication, is probably something none of us would predict. For those keeping score on the 2026 major season so far, the game has already handed us more than its share of memorable finishes, and Birkdale has every reason to add to that list.

There’s a particular kind of tension that settles over a golf course on Sunday afternoon when the scoreboard stops feeling like a curiosity and starts feeling like a verdict. At TPC River Highlights this past weekend, that tension had a name: Scottie Scheffler. And standing across from him, ready to carry the fight into Monday morning, was Viktor Hovland.

It was a good week for the sport.

PGA Tour: Travelers Championship

The 2026 Travelers Championship didn’t end Sunday the way most of us expected. With the sun going down behind the Connecticut treeline, Scottie Scheffler—the world’s best player, a man who has spent the better part of two years making impossibly difficult golf look almost routine—was facing the kind of pressure that actually makes you lean forward. Par putts. Late pressure. The sort that separate champions from almost-champions.

He made them both.

Two clutch par saves as the light died behind the grandstands. The PGA Tour leaderboard stayed knotted, and suddenly TPC River Highlands had something it hadn’t felt all week—genuine drama. A Monday playoff. Scheffler versus Hovland. Nine o’clock Eastern.

What makes this matchup interesting isn’t just the names, though both are clearly among the best players in the world right now. Scheffler is operating in a realm of quiet dominance that even his peers struggle to explain. Hovland, meanwhile, has spent chunks of the last year searching for something—a swing, a feeling, some version of himself that matches the brilliance he showed when he first broke through. When he finds it, he’s a handful. And at TPC River Highlands this week, he clearly found something.

A Monday morning playoff between these two is not a bad consolation prize for a week without a clean Sunday finish.

PGA Tour Champions: Michael Block’s Debut Ends in Heartbreak

Every Michael Block story has the same basic shape. There’s the improbable setup, the moment where you genuinely think it might happen, and then—usually in the worst possible way—the unraveling. His Champions Tour debut this week fit that mold, except it managed to compress all of it into one devastating sequence.

Block had a real chance to win. The club pro from Southern California, the guy who holed out on 15 at Oak Hill and made an entire country actually feel something about professional golf again, was right there. And then, as has been described, all hell broke loose.

The specific details almost don’t matter. What matters is that Michael Block isn’t compelling because he wins. He’s compelling because he makes you care—makes the gallery lean in, makes the casual fan stop scrolling, makes every putt feel like it means something. His Champions Tour debut had all the elements of a typical Block experience, including the part where it ends with your stomach somewhere near your shoes. The PGA Tour Champions leaderboard won’t show his name at the top this week, but people will be talking about his round long after they’ve forgotten who won.

DP World Tour, LPGA Tour, and LIV Golf

Full results from this week’s DP World Tour, LPGA Tour, and LIV Golf events were still being compiled at time of writing. Full recaps and analysis coming once those results are confirmed.

Around the Game: The PGA Tour Schedule Conversation

The conversation that keeps coming back up this week is the future PGA Tour schedule—who it works for, who it doesn’t, and what the complaints say about where professional golf is headed. Any restructuring creates winners and losers, and some players and tournaments are quietly ending up on the wrong side of it. The schedule matters more than people give it credit for. Get it right and you have a season with real shape and meaning. Get it wrong and even the best players in the world end up competing in events that feel like they don’t quite count.

The discussion also touched on the end of Nelly Korda’s major streak—a run that showed just how rare it is to sustain that kind of excellence at the highest level. Major windows don’t stay open forever, and what Korda did during hers deserves acknowledgment, even as that particular chapter winds down.

Equipment Corner: Graphite, Wedges, and the Numbers That Matter

On the gear side, a fitting story going around this week will resonate with a certain kind of golfer—the skeptic. One Club Champion follower decided to let the numbers decide whether graphite shafts in irons were actually worth switching to. Worth reading if you’ve spent years dismissing the idea, because the data has a way of quietly dismantling assumptions you didn’t realize you were holding.

Orlimar also showed up this week with the Spin Tech FF Pro Wedge in Chrome PVD Finish—a USGA-conforming, tour-inspired design aimed at players who want better spin and control around the greens without the price tag that usually comes with it. Worth a look if you’ve been struggling inside 100 yards.

Growing the Game: First Tee and the Next Round Initiative

Something worth paying attention to at the edges of the professional game: this week, Next Round became First Tee’s national trade-in partner, creating a way to turn unused clubs sitting in garages into real funding for youth golf programs. It’s a simple idea, and it works—the kind of thing that doesn’t make headlines the way a Monday playoff does, but actually builds something lasting.

The 2026 First Tee National Championship also wrapped this week, with Ashley Shaw of First Tee–Phoenix and Nakul Shrivastava of First Tee–Tri-Valley taking the titles. Both earned exemptions into the 2026 PURE Insurance Championship—proof that the path from junior programs to professional competition is real and producing players.

But Monday morning is where the focus is right now. Somewhere in Connecticut, as the dew settles on TPC River Highlands and the grounds crew makes one more pass at the course, Scheffler and Hovland are each doing whatever great players do the night before something that matters. Whatever happens when that first tee shot goes up, the week gave us something worth watching—and after a long stretch of golf, that’s not nothing.

Shinnecock Hills has a way of laying bare everything you’d rather keep hidden. The wind finds you. The greens turn against you. And on a final Sunday at one of the game’s most demanding stages, the person you’ve been all week—the one who said the wrong things, made the wrong moves, or simply doubted themselves at the worst possible moment—stands fully exposed. This past week, Wyndham Clark walked into that exposure and came out the other side holding the U.S. Open trophy.

2026 U.S. Open: Wyndham Clark Claims the Title at Shinnecock Hills

For Clark, the 2026 U.S. Open was a reckoning of sorts. Coming into the week at Shinnecock Hills, he carried something heavier than a bag—a public image that had taken its knocks, the kind of scrutiny that follows a player when the narrative around him turns unflattering. The fans made sure he felt it. One spectator was ejected from the grounds for shouting “Don’t choke, Wyndham” as Clark made his way through the final round—a moment that captured the strange, fractious energy surrounding his week.

And yet Clark endured. He fought his swing through the week, navigated Shinnecock’s notoriously punishing greens, and held his composure when the pressure crested on Sunday. That he did it on a course this unforgiving, in front of a gallery that wasn’t always in his corner, says something real about the man. Whatever complicated feelings the public carried into the week, Clark earned something genuine on those fairways. He battled for far more than a trophy—he battled for the right to be seen differently.

Part of that story ran through his bag. Clark made a quiet but telling decision this season, working through four different driver configurations before landing on the setup that carried him through Shinnecock. It’s the kind of detail that tends to get buried beneath the Sunday scorecards, but it matters. A player willing to keep refining, to keep listening to what the data and feel are telling him rather than stubbornly staying the course—that’s someone building something real. The driver in Clark’s hands at Shinnecock wasn’t accidental. It was earned.

Scottie Scheffler Leaves Shinnecock with One Unresolved Question

For Scottie Scheffler, the week ended in the particular silence that follows a near-miss at something you’ve been quietly chasing. The career grand slam. It’s the kind of ambition that doesn’t announce itself loudly—Scheffler is not that kind of player—but it was there, and Shinnecock was the stage for it, and it didn’t happen.

What makes Scheffler’s reflection on the week worth sitting with is where he places the problem. Not on Sunday. Not on the closing holes. He says the issue arrived long before the final round—a conundrum that took root earlier in the week and couldn’t quite be untangled in time. That kind of honest self-assessment is both admirable and a little sobering. The best player in the world walked off Shinnecock Hills not defeated exactly, but recalibrating. Carrying a question he’ll need to answer the next time a major presents itself.

The grand slam conversation will continue. It should. Scheffler is young enough and good enough that Shinnecock is a chapter, not a conclusion. But those questions he’s sitting with—that’s where the real work happens, in the quiet between tournaments.

LPGA Tour: Meijer Classic at Blythefield Country Club

While the men’s game was absorbing the aftermath of Shinnecock, the 2026 Meijer LPGA Classic for Simply Give was underway at Blythefield Country Club in Belmont, Michigan. With a $3.25 million purse and 500 CME Globe points on the line, the event carries real weight in the season-long picture, and Blythefield—a classic, tree-lined course that demands patience and precision—is the kind of venue that tends to produce meaningful stories. Full results were still coming in as this piece was put together, but the week’s play at Blythefield deserves its own attention, separate from the shadow of Shinnecock.

Looking Ahead: Travelers Championship with Scheffler as the Favorite Again

The caravan moves on, as it always does. Next stop: TPC River Highlands and the 2026 Travelers Championship, where Scheffler enters once again as the betting favorite. There’s a rhythm to this—the world’s best player, week after week, carrying the weight of expectation with an ease that still feels slightly unreal. After Shinnecock, though, there’s a sharper edge to watching him tee it up. He has something to work through. TPC River Highlands is a birdie-fest by nature, a long way temperamentally from the grinding punishment of a U.S. Open layout. But Scheffler’s conundrum doesn’t live in the course conditions. It lives in him, and those tend to travel.

The Moment That Stayed: Miles Russell and His Father on the 18th

Amid everything Shinnecock Hills produced this week—the drama, the controversy, the weight of grand slams and public narratives—one moment cut through all of it. Miles Russell, playing in his first U.S. Open, had his father take over as caddie to walk up the 18th hole with him. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

And it’s enough. More than enough. In a week full of storylines about image and equipment tinkering and narrowly missed legacies, a young player choosing to share the most significant walk of his early career with his father puts everything else in perspective. The scorecard matters less than the person you choose beside you when it counts. That image will outlast the specifics of who finished where.

That’s what the U.S. Open tends to do. It gives you the sharp, difficult moments—the chipped reputations, the near-misses, the greens that take more than they give. But it also gives you the quiet ones, if you’re watching for them. This week offered both.

There’s a particular kind of anticipation that settles over the golf world in mid-June. The Masters is a memory. The PGA Championship has been decided. And now, with Father’s Day weekend arriving on cue, the game turns its full attention to the most demanding examination in professional golf. The U.S. Open is here. And this year, it returns to a place that has a long, complicated, and utterly compelling history of breaking hearts and reshaping legacies — Shinnecock Hills.

2026 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills: What to Expect

Shinnecock Hills doesn’t ask politely. It doesn’t ease you in or offer a warm-up hole where you can find your feet. The course sits exposed on the Southampton landscape, wind cutting across those rolling, ancient fairways with something close to indifference. Links-style demands on an American canvas — it rewards patience, precision, and a quiet refusal to panic when things unravel, as they inevitably will.

According to the latest 2026 U.S. Open odds from Golf.com, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy sit atop the betting market as clear co-favorites heading into the week. Neither is particularly surprising. Scheffler has spent the better part of two years dismantling the notion that anyone else is playing the same game — a dynamic that’s been reflected in the betting markets all season long. McIlroy carries a U.S. Open title on his résumé and a relationship with major championship pressure that most players spend careers trying to understand. Shinnecock’s wide, wind-battered fairways and firm, fast putting surfaces suit both men — but the margins here are impossibly thin, and the USGA tends to have other ideas about who gets to win.

For those still working out how to watch, Golf.com has a complete U.S. Open TV schedule, streaming guide, and tee times covering every broadcast window from Thursday’s opening round through Sunday’s final pairing. Clear your calendar accordingly.

U.S. Open Sleeper Picks: Who Might Emerge at Shinnecock

Every U.S. Open has one. A name that wasn’t top of mind on Monday morning but somehow finds the right combination of ball-striking, course management, and nerve to hang around when the field begins to fracture. Last year, J.J. Spaun claimed the title and earned his place in the conversation permanently.

The Golf.com staff has compiled its sleeper picks for Shinnecock Hills, and it’s worth spending a few minutes with. The names they’ve identified share something: ball-strikers who can thread shots through difficult windows, players unbothered by leaderboard noise, and a couple of veterans who understand that a U.S. Open isn’t won by attacking — it’s won by surviving the moments when everyone else is unraveling. Keep an eye on the tee times Thursday morning. Sometimes the eventual winner is right there in front of you, and you just don’t know it yet.

Tournament Results: Across the Tours

With the golf world’s attention fixed on Shinnecock this week, the PGA Tour leaderboard, DP World Tour results, LIV Golf standings, LPGA Tour leaderboard, and PGA Tour Champions scores are still being finalized as results come in across the weekend. Check back at those sources for the latest standings as the dust settles.

Rick Shiels Becomes the First Golf Creator to Reach One Billion Views

Elsewhere this week, a quieter but genuinely significant milestone arrived. Rick Shiels, the PGA professional from Manchester who turned a camera, a driving range, and an honest approach to teaching into something nobody quite predicted, became the first creator-led golf media platform to surpass one billion views. Not a network. Not a tour broadcaster. A golf teacher with a gift for making the complicated feel manageable, and for treating his audience like golfers rather than consumers.

It’s worth pausing on that. Golf instruction has always had a gatekeeping quality — the right pro, the right club, the right lesson tee. Shiels helped dissolve some of that. A billion views is a number so large it resists comprehension, but what it actually represents is a billion moments of someone picking up their phone and wanting to understand the game a little better. That’s not nothing. That’s rather a lot.

From the Community: Tiger’s Bunker Shot and the Course Management Debate

This week’s Reddit thread that stopped people mid-scroll was a reminder of the 2000 Canadian Open — specifically, the 72nd hole, where Tiger Woods pulled a 6-iron from a wet fairway bunker, 218 yards out, with a one-shot lead on the line. He flushed it. Made birdie. Won. The thread gathered thousands of people who simply wanted to watch that moment again — which is, perhaps, all you need to know about the enduring pull of that particular era of golf.

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the same community, a mid-handicapper aired their grievances about course management and target golf in a thread that sparked the kind of lively, occasionally heated discussion golf forums do particularly well. The argument — that demanding courses punish honest ball-strikers who just want to play — surfaces regularly, and it always reveals something honest about how golfers relate to the game’s difficulty. It’s a conversation worth taking seriously. Courses should challenge without humiliating. But the replies this week, gently and sometimes bluntly, made the case that learning to manage a golf course is part of the game — not an obstacle to it.

And then there was the update from the golfer who was given 50 strokes across three rounds — and won. Shot 91 on a par-57, 124 in the rain on a par-72, and still took the thing home. Golf contains multitudes.

Father’s Day on the Fairway

It wouldn’t be a mid-June week without the annual Father’s Day gift guidance, and the golf media delivered accordingly. A smartwatch that tracks distances, monitors health, and does rather more than a scorecard ever managed has emerged as one of the more thoughtful options making the rounds — the kind of gift a golfer wouldn’t quite justify buying for himself, which is exactly the point. If you’re still searching for something to give the golfer in your life this weekend, our Father’s Day golf gift guide covers a range of options worth considering. Over at BooYaa Golf, the message was simpler: celebrate the dads who show up, share the game, and make the rounds worth remembering. Which is, when it comes down to it, the best reason any of us are out there.

Looking Ahead

The week ahead belongs entirely to Shinnecock Hills. To the wind coming off Peconic Bay, to the fescue swaying along the ridgelines, to the long walk up the 18th on a Sunday afternoon with everything still undecided. Scheffler and McIlroy will carry the weight of expectation. Someone else, somewhere in that field, is already quietly deciding they’re ready to carry something heavier.

That’s what the U.S. Open does. It finds out who you are.

There are wins that announce themselves—the kind where a player seizes a tournament by the throat from Thursday morning and never lets go. And then there are the ones that feel earned in a quieter, more deliberate way. Russell Henley’s victory at the 2026 Charles Schwab Challenge felt like the latter. A sixth PGA Tour title, claimed at Colonial Country Club, from a player who has spent the better part of a decade proving that patience and precision are weapons as sharp as any driver in the bag.

PGA Tour: Russell Henley Claims the 2026 Charles Schwab Challenge

Henley has always been the kind of player who rewards close attention. He doesn’t manufacture theater—he manufactures good swings, one after another, until the scorecard tells the story for him. His win at Colonial was no different, a performance built on ball-striking consistency that Ben Hogan himself might have quietly approved of, given how much the Texan legend still haunts those grounds.

What makes this win particularly interesting is what Henley brought to the range—and eventually the course—in the form of a new piece of equipment. According to Golf.com, Henley swapped out an older TSi2 hybrid in favor of the new Titleist GTS3 7-wood, notable as the first Titleist “3” model ever offered in a 7-wood configuration. It’s the kind of detail most casual viewers would miss entirely, but for anyone who understands the margins at this level, swapping a club mid-season and winning a tournament with it says something real about a player’s trust in his own process. His full winning bag breakdown is worth a read for the gear-inclined.

Six Tour wins. No major yet, but a résumé that keeps getting harder to ignore. Henley’s is a career worth following closely.

PGA Tour: Eyes Turn to Muirfield Village and the 2026 Memorial Tournament

The ink is barely dry on Henley’s victory before the conversation shifts north to Ohio. Muirfield Village Golf Club hosts the 2026 Memorial Tournament this week, and the oddsmakers have already weighed in. Scottie Scheffler tops the Memorial betting board, with Rory McIlroy positioned just behind him as the field’s most compelling chaser.

It feels almost redundant, at this point, to note that Scheffler is favored for something. And yet there’s nothing mechanical about the way he plays—there’s a groundedness to his game that makes the favorites tag feel less like expectation and more like simple observation. Muirfield Village rewards ball-strikers who can manage their emotions around a course that Jack Nicklaus designed to test everything a player thinks they know about themselves. Scheffler tends to know himself rather well. McIlroy, for his part, remains one of the few players on earth who can summon a level that makes everyone else look ordinary. These two at the top of any leaderboard is exactly what the Tour needs heading into a summer already full of major championship conversation.

LPGA Tour: The U.S. Women’s Open Heads to Riviera

Riviera Country Club is one of those venues that just feels like it matters—the kind of place where the setting and the occasion seem to find each other. The 2026 U.S. Women’s Open will be contested there, and the full TV schedule, streaming information, and tee times are now available for those planning their viewing accordingly.

Riviera demands a particular kind of intelligence—positional thinking, patience off the tee, the ability to see angles that don’t immediately reveal themselves. It will ask serious questions of the world’s best women players, and those questions tend to produce the most memorable major championship moments. Keep this one on your radar.

Around the Game: Women’s Golf Continues Its Record Rise

Beyond the scoreboards and the betting markets, something real has been shifting in golf over the past several years. The National Golf Foundation’s latest data confirms what many have been watching with growing excitement: women and girls have outpaced their male counterparts in post-pandemic participation gains, accounting for a remarkable share of the sport’s overall growth.

This isn’t a small footnote. It’s a reshaping of who golf belongs to—which, of course, is everyone who wants it. The Women’s Golf Day partnership with the PGA of America at Omni PGA Frisco Resort has become one of the calendar’s signature events, and this year’s edition looks to be no different. Meanwhile, Fore All, the women’s golf brand built around the idea that the course belongs to everyone, is taking over Los Angeles this June with a series of pop-up events designed to make the game feel as open and welcoming as it should always have been.

The momentum here feels different from the kind of enthusiasm golf periodically whips up and then quietly loses. This feels structural. Generational. Worth paying attention to not just as a market trend but as a genuinely good thing happening to a sport that needed it.

Presidents Cup: Forvis Mazars Joins as Global Partner

On the partnership front, Forvis Mazars has been announced as a Global Partner of the 2026 Presidents Cup. The public accounting and consulting firm adds another sponsorship anchor to what promises to be one of the major team events of the year.

From the Community: One Round That Will Never Be Forgotten

Sometimes the most resonant story of a week doesn’t come from a tour event. It comes from someone who grabbed their bag, walked out onto a public course on an ordinary morning, and played the round of their life.

This week, a post on Reddit’s r/golf community stopped the scroll cold. A 14.5 handicap player—someone who had never broken 80 in their life—went out for what was supposed to be a casual nine holes before work. They made an eagle on the second hole, a 270-yard par four, finished the front nine at three under, and then did what any of us would do: cancelled the meeting, played the back, and shot a 70.

There’s no analysis required here. No tactical breakdown. Just the recognition that this is why we play—for the round that arrives without warning and makes you rethink what you’re actually capable of. Somewhere out there, that golfer is still smiling. They’ll be smiling for a long time.

Golf has a way of doing that. Showing up quietly and leaving a mark that nothing else quite replicates. We’ll see you out there next week.

Wyndham Clark has had a rough 2025. He’d be the first to tell you that. But he closed it out — at least this chapter of it — with a win at TPC Craig Ranch on Sunday, his fourth PGA Tour victory.

PGA Tour: CJ Cup Byron Nelson

Wyndham Clark won the 2026 CJ Cup Byron Nelson, and the first thing he brought up wasn’t the trophy or the FedEx Cup points. It was Oakmont — his “downfall,” as he put it — a moment from the 2025 US Open that clearly stuck with him. You don’t hear that kind of candor often in a winner’s press conference. Most guys bury the bad chapters. Clark acknowledged his, worked through it, and eventually played his way out the other side.

The final round had plenty of drama, most of it centered on Si Woo Kim. Kim started Sunday with the lead and went out and shot 65. A 65, on Sunday, with a Tour title on the line. Still not enough. The r/golf thread about it was pretty much wall-to-wall sympathy, which felt right. Playing some of your best golf of the week on Sunday and still finishing second is a brutal way to lose. The paycheck helps, but probably not much in those first few hours.

Clark’s setup at the Byron Nelson is worth a look, too. What was in his bag shows a player who has done real homework on his own game — where he needs to be conservative, where he can be aggressive. Nothing in there looks like an accident.

But the most remarkable story from TPC Craig Ranch this week didn’t come from Clark.

The Kid Who Earned His Seat

Nineteen years old. Eighteen under par. Sit with those two numbers for a second. Blades Brown finished the CJ Cup Byron Nelson with a performance that earned him Special Temporary Membership on the PGA Tour, and Reddit’s golf community went appropriately nuts about it.

What happens next is genuinely uncertain. There’s a real decision in front of him — how to handle this new status, which events to play, how to pace himself on a Tour that has chewed up more than a few talented kids who got there too early. There’s no obvious right call. But the way he played at Byron Nelson, without seeming rattled by any of it, is a decent sign.

The Distance Debate Returns — And It Isn’t Leaving

Back to the ongoing argument professional golf can’t seem to resolve: the Tour Confidential roundtable at Golf.com took another run at the distance debate this week, framing it as the sport’s next big fight. The equipment rollback conversations have been dragging on for years, and between that, course design pressures, and the general arms race, something is going to have to give eventually. Nobody seems sure what. The piece also mentions Scottie Scheffler and another near-win, which is a good reminder that you can be dominant and still have a frustrating season.

Olympia Fields: A Historic Course Finds Its Future

Olympia Fields Country Club has approved a full restoration of its North Course, with architect Andrew Green leading the project. For anyone who pays attention to course architecture, this is good news. The North Course has hosted majors and has a lot of history worth preserving carefully. Green has done solid work on historically sensitive restorations before, so this one is worth keeping an eye on.

Equipment: Tour Edge Enters the Mini Driver Conversation

Tour Edge has introduced the Exotics Mini Driver, a 280cc club built around the brand’s Combo Brazing technology. The mini driver has found a real niche — players who want more control than a driver but more distance than a three-wood. Whether Tour Edge can get traction in a space where TaylorMade and Callaway have most of the attention is an open question, but the specs are worth checking out if you’ve been hunting for something in that range.

Srixon is also running a buy two, get one free promotion on golf balls. Good timing for peak season if you play Z-Stars or Q-Stars.

A Florida Course Chasing Something Rare

This one didn’t get much attention, but it’s worth noting: Collier’s Reserve in Florida is going after what would be a world-first Platinum Audubon Status, and a Syngenta docuseries called The Green Report is following the process. Golf courses and environmental stewardship don’t always go together, so when a club is actively working to shelter endangered species rather than crowd them out, it’s at least worth paying attention to.

Closing Thoughts

Clark gets his win after a hard year. A 19-year-old finishes 18 under and lands Tour membership. Si Woo Kim shoots 65 on Sunday and loses anyway. Sometimes the most interesting golf isn’t at the top of the leaderboard — it’s in the circumstances around it. Clark and Brown both know something about that now, just from very different directions.

More golf next week. The distance argument will probably come up again.

Watching a player find their rhythm at exactly the right moment never gets old. This week in professional golf, we saw that sweet spot where preparation meets opportunity across tours, with multiple winners Cameron Young and Nelly Korda putting on shows (again) worth remembering.

PGA Tour

Cameron Young’s victory at the Cadillac Championship was a clinic in modern professional golf—with the kind of twist that only this game can deliver. Young’s Sunday started with the Secret Service and ended with a meeting with President Trump, which he called “unique,” and honestly, what else do you call that?

What made Young’s win stand out was the quiet precision he showed all week. His all-Titleist setup needed just one small tweak before delivering his second win of the season. Championship golf really does come down to the smallest things—a minor equipment adjustment, a moment of clarity, trusting what you’ve worked on.

The most impressive moment came during the second round, when Young called a penalty on himself after his ball moved during setup. Making par after taking that one-shot penalty? That’s the mental game that separates tour winners from everyone else. When every stroke matters this much, Young’s honesty and recovery showed the character behind the talent.

LPGA Tour

Nelly Korda kept rolling at the Riviera Maya Open, but even in victory, golf found a way to humble the world’s best player. As she reached for the trophy in Mexico, the game reminded her—and all of us—that no matter how well we play, golf always keeps the final say.

Korda’s win was the complete package. Every part of her game clicked at El Camaleon Golf Club, but that moment of humbling during the celebration? That’s golf in a nutshell. The game gives, and it takes away, sometimes in the same breath.

The $2.5 million purse event at El Camaleon was the perfect stage for Korda’s latest masterpiece, with the Mexican coast adding some extra drama to an already compelling weekend.

DP World Tour and LIV Golf

I don’t have specific results from the DP World Tour and LIV Golf events this week, but the big story in alternative tour golf was LIV Golf’s future following the PIF’s funding announcement. The whole professional golf landscape keeps shifting in ways that go way beyond any single tournament.

The questions about LIV’s direction really get to bigger issues about professional golf’s future. How do tradition and innovation work together? Where will the best players end up competing? What do fans actually want to watch?

Golf News

This week gave us one of professional golf’s stranger moments with a retroactive rules penalty that knocked a player out of a playoff spot at an Asian Tour and Korean Tour event. These moments remind us that golf’s rules, however old-fashioned they might seem, stay ruthlessly consistent no matter who’s playing.

The Fitzpatrick brothers had one of the week’s best storylines, with Alex Fitzpatrick’s 297-yard approach to within five feet capping off his final-round 67. Just one week after earning his PGA Tour card by winning the Zurich Classic with his brother Matt, Alex’s performance showed the kind of momentum that family success can create.

Away from tournaments, the business side keeps evolving with Toptracer’s partnership with the ANNIKA Women’s All Pro Tour, bringing high-tech tracking to women’s professional golf development. These partnerships show golf’s ongoing effort to embrace new technology while staying true to what makes it special.

Looking back on this week’s events—from Young’s unusual championship celebration to Korda’s moment of triumph and humility—I’m reminded why this game hooks us. Golf doesn’t just test your swing, it reveals who you are, creates stories nobody saw coming, and manages to surprise us even when we think we’ve got it figured out. That’s what keeps us coming back: every week brings new stories, and every story teaches us something about this game we can’t quit.