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    How a Deal to Shape Golf’s Future Went Cold

    Despite interventions by President Trump, talks to combine the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have come to a standstill.Just months ago, professional golf seemed to be on the brink of resolving a bitter conflict that had torn the sport apart. The PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, rival leagues that had been feuding over stars and audience share for several years, finally submitted a proposal for a deal to the Justice Department.Golf executives hoped President Trump would help move things along — and the president was confident he could.“I could probably get it done,” Trump said on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray in November. “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”But it is taking a lot longer.As the Masters Tournament teed off this week at Augusta National, the negotiation has essentially come to a standstill, three people familiar with the talks said.Despite Trump’s personal interventions — in February, for example, he hosted Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the chairman of LIV and the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, at the White House — the two sides appear at their greatest extremes since June 2023, when they stunned the sports world by announcing a thinly sketched deal that would bring an end to acrimonious litigation.“I don’t think it’s ever felt that close,” Rory McIlroy, the golfer from Northern Ireland, told reporters last week of those February meetings. “But it doesn’t feel like it’s any closer.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Masters Helped Turn Ely Callaway Into a Golf Club Maker

    He invented the Big Bertha driver, which changed the game of golf. Bobby Jones, a creator of the tournament, was a Callaway cousin.Ely Callaway, founder of the namesake golf club company, did something few golf enthusiasts could imagine doing. He declined an invitation from Bobby Jones to join the Augusta National Golf Club in 1957.Jones, a revered amateur golfer who won the Grand Slam in 1930 and was a co-founder of Augusta National with Clifford Roberts, was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero. Over the family’s mantel, long before the Masters achieved the major status it has today, hung a lithograph of Jones winning the Amateur Championship, also known as the British Amateur, and completing the Grand Slam. Across it was a personal handwritten inscription from Jones to Callaway and his first wife, Jeanne.Bobby Jones teeing off at St. Andrews in Scotland in 1928. Jones was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero.Getty ImagesNicholas Callaway said his father had practical reasons to turn down Jones.“Ely’s rationale later in life when he became the Callaway of Callaway Golf was that since Augusta was only open for a portion of the year, most of the year he would spend fielding calls from friends angling to get an invitation to play,” he said. His father’s posthumous memoir, “The Unconquerable Game: My Life in Golf & Business,” is being released this month.It worked out fine for him. “In the 1990s, he attended the Masters for many years and would get invited to play often in the days following the tournament,” his son said.The decision had to have been difficult. Something that comes across in Callaway’s memoir was the impact Jones had on him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Family’s Cash Registers Ring as Financial Meltdown Plays Out

    The party was on at a Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament at the president’s Doral resort in Florida and a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago, even as markets tumbled.The financial market meltdown was underway when President Trump boarded Air Force One on his way to Florida on Thursday for a doubleheader of sorts: a Saudi-backed golf tournament at his family’s Miami resort and a weekend of fund-raisers attracting hundreds of donors to his Palm Beach club.It was a fresh reminder that in his second term, Mr. Trump has continued to find ways to drive business to his family-owned real-estate ventures, a practice he has sustained even when his work in Washington has caused worldwide financial turmoil.The Trump family monetization weekend started Thursday night, as crowds began to form at both the Trump National Doral resort near Miami International Airport, and separately at his Mar-a-Lago resort 70 miles up the coast.Mr. Trump landed on the edge of one of the golf courses in a military helicopter — just in time for a dinner at Doral. The next day, LIV Golf, the breakaway professional league backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, was scheduled to hold a tournament at the course for the fourth time.On Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, hundreds of guests gathered for the American Patriots Gala, a conservative fund-raiser that featured Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and President Javier Milei of Argentina, who told his supporters back home that he was hoping to catch up with Mr. Trump while there, seemingly unaware that Mr. Trump was double-booked at two of his family properties that night.And that was just the weekend’s lead-up.Mr. Trump ordered a new set of global tariffs on Wednesday from the White House using his trademark Sharpie pen, a version of which is on sale at Mar-a-Lago for $3.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Dave Pelz, Scientist Turned Golf Instructor, Is Dead at 85

    After working at NASA, he became a renowned expert on putting and shots close to the green through his coaching, books, television appearances and training aids.Dave Pelz, who left his job as a scientist at NASA to study the short game of golf, a detour that would make him a celebrated guru of putts and wedge shots, died on March 23 at his home in Dripping Springs, Texas, near Austin. He was 85.David Pelly, Pelz’s stepson and the chief executive of his company, Dave Pelz Golf, said the cause was prostate cancer.While most golfers focus more on how to drive long distances, Pelz concentrated on the short game — shots from within 100 yards, including putting and chipping and blasting out of bunkers with a wedge. In his early statistical research, he found that 80 percent of shots lost to par occur within that distance, and that putting makes up 43 percent of the game.“Golfers think that their first two shots are the game,” he said on the PBS talk show “Charlie Rose” in 2010. “They drive almost every hole. They hit to the green almost every hole. But what they don’t think about is that after you hit those first two shots, and you don’t hit the green, there are two, three or four more shots.”As a golf instructor, Pelz demonstrated putting techniques in 1999. He found that putting makes up 43 percent of the game.Bill Kennedy/The New York TimesPelz, recognizable in his trademark broad-brimmed sun hat, became a major influence on the short game. He developed training aids and created clubs (he had about 20 patents); wrote instruction books; had his own Golf Channel show; opened schools for amateurs at golf resorts; and coached professional golfers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    While Trump slashes jobs, his golf trips are costing taxpayers millions | Mohamad Bazzi

    It’s no secret that Donald Trump loves to golf, especially at his own resorts. But Trump’s habit is costing US taxpayers tens of millions of dollars – even as he decries fraud and claims to slash waste in federal spending.Since he took office, Trump has fired tens of thousands of federal workers and tried to shut down agencies, part of his effort to unilaterally dismantle the government. He has also made seven trips to Florida and the golf courses he owns there.This weekend, Trump made his seventh visit to Florida and his sixth to his waterfront mansion and private club at Mar-a-Lago since his inauguration on 20 January. As Richard Luscombe noted in the Guardian last week, Trump’s frequent trips to his own properties not only cost taxpayer funds, but they benefit him directly – his businesses have charged the US government to house Secret Service agents and other White House staff. In other words, American taxpayers pay the Trump Organization for the right to protect Trump and his family.During Trump’s first term, his properties had a history of overcharging the Secret Service, by as much as 300% beyond the authorized government hotel rates, according to a report issued by Democrats in Congress last year. The report found that the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service as much as $1,815 a room per night to stay at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC – billing the US government significantly more than the hotel did for “rooms rented by the Qatari royal family and Chinese business interests”.It’s difficult to gauge exactly how much the Secret Service and other agencies spent at Trump properties, since various reports and audits focus on specific time periods instead of his full four years in office. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) estimated that the Secret Service paid nearly $2m to Trump-owned properties. Trump visited his properties an astounding 547 times during his first term, according to an analysis by Crew. That included 145 trips to Mar-a-Lago, 328 visits to Trump’s various golf courses and 33 visits to the Trump hotel in Washington, which his company sold in 2022 but is now negotiating to buy back.The cost to US taxpayers for Trump’s jaunts to Mar-a-Lago, which he calls his “winter White House”, far exceeds renting rooms for the president’s security entourage. A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which examined four trips that Trump took to his Palm Beach resort during his first term, put the total cost at $13.6m, or about $3.4m for each visit. That includes flying Air Force One, along with a separate cargo plane that carries the presidential motorcade, between Washington and the Palm Beach international airport. With seven trips so far into his current term, the US government has likely already spent more than $23m on Trump’s golf outings.And that estimate doesn’t capture the full costs to taxpayers. The GAO report does not account for additional federal funds to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for protecting Trump while he’s in Florida. The Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, has said that his department spends $240,000 a day to help the Secret Service protect Trump. Bradshaw recently asked county commissioners for $45m in additional funds to provide security for Trump’s visits through the rest of this year – and the county is asking Congress to reimburse those costs.Trump often conducted official business and brought other senior US officials on his golf-focused trips to his properties – and he is repeating this pattern early in his second term, when he has visited Mar-a-Lago nearly every weekend. Trump’s frequent trips to his golf clubs send the message to foreign leaders, business executives, lobbyists, Republicans in Congress, and others who want to curry favor with the Trump administration that his properties are open for business. Throughout his first term, Trump dodged accusations that he was violating the US constitution’s emoluments clause as his businesses accepted money from foreign governments or lobbyists connected to them. Trump’s businesses received $7.8m from at least 20 foreign governments during his first administration, according to a report issued by congressional Democrats last year, although a later analysis by Crew estimated that payments from foreign governments reached $13.6m.At Mar-a-Lago, business leaders were recently offered one-on-one meetings with Trump for $5m, while others paid $1m a seat for a small-group candlelight dinner with the president. Those funds seem to be going to Make America Great Again Inc, a Super Pac that spent more than $450m on Trump’s presidential campaign last year, and is now expected to raise funds for a presidential library that would be built after Trump leaves office.Previous US presidents enjoyed playing golf, including Barack Obama and George W Bush. In fact, as a private citizen, Trump mocked Obama dozens of times for leaving Washington to play golf during his presidency. In August 2016, during his first presidential campaign, Trump pledged he wouldn’t have much time to hit the greens. “I’m going to be working for you,” he told a rally in Virginia. “I’m not going to have time to go play golf.”Of course, Trump ended up spending far more of his first term as president playing golf than Obama had. And Trump’s problem is not how often he plays or how many weekends he takes off. Because Trump refuses to divest from ownership of his family business, his frequent golf outings go beyond questionable government spending – the president is enriching himself through payments that US agencies make to Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.The president is exempt from conflict of interest laws that ban federal employees from taking actions that would directly benefit them. Since the 1970s, US presidents have voluntarily abided by these laws, and put their financial holdings in a blind trust. But Trump refused to divest from his extensive business interests during his first term, creating a web of conflicts and potential corruption. Today, Trump is more emboldened to ignore US laws and norms set by past presidents, partly thanks to last year’s supreme court ruling that concluded that Trump has “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts”.Since taking office in January, Trump and his allies, especially the billionaire Elon Musk, rushed to dismantle many of the safeguards put in place after the Watergate scandal to monitor government corruption and punish officials involved in ethics violations. Trump fired 17 inspectors general who served as watchdogs over federal agencies, and he gutted a unit at the justice department that was created in 1976, after Watergate, to prosecute public corruption cases.In his first term, Trump did not suffer any consequences for playing a lot of golf – and using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Now, he seems determined to spend even more time shuttling back and forth to his golf courses at taxpayer expense, with a chunk of that money going to his businesses.

    Mohamad Bazzi is the director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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    Trump is using the presidency to seek golf deals – hardly anyone’s paying attention | Mohamad Bazzi

    In his first month in office, Donald Trump destroyed federal agencies, fired thousands of government workers and unleashed dozens of executive orders. The US president also found time to try to broker an agreement between two rival golf tournaments, the US-based PGA Tour and the LIV Golf league, funded by Saudi Arabia.If concluded, the deal would directly benefit Trump’s family business, which owns and manages golf courses around the world. And it would be the latest example of Trump using the presidency to advance his personal interests.On 20 February, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House between Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, chair of LIV Golf and head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, along with the golf star Tiger Woods. It was the second meeting convened by Trump at the White House this month with PGA Tour officials involved in negotiating with the Saudi wealth fund. A day before his latest attempt at high-level golf diplomacy, Trump travelled to Miami to speak at a conference organized by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which is managed by Al-Rumayyan but ultimately controlled by the kingdom’s de facto ruler and crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.Trump’s sports diplomacy in the Oval Office and cozying up to Saudi investors in Miami did not get much attention compared with his whirlwind of executive orders and new policies. But these incidents encapsulate Trump’s transactional and corrupt approach to governing – and the ways that wealthy autocrats including Prince Mohammed will be able to exploit the US president. While Trump will often boast he is making good deals for the US, his relationship with Saudi Arabia and its crown prince is largely built on benefits for Trump’s family and its extensive business interests.During Trump’s first term, the Trump Organization had dealings with Saudi Arabia that posed a potential conflict of interest for the president, especially after Saudi government lobbyists spent more than $270,000 on rooms at the Trump International hotel in downtown Washington. Now with no guardrails from Congress or the courts, the Trump family business is plowing ahead with new agreements that could reap tens of millions of dollars in profit from Saudi-linked real estate and golf ventures.In December, a month after Trump was elected to a second term, the Trump Organization announced several real estate projects in Saudi Arabia, including a Trump Tower in the capital, Riyadh, and another $530m residential tower in the city of Jeddah. The projects are branding deals for Trump’s family business with Dar Global, an international subsidiary of Dar Al Arkan, one of the largest real estate companies in Saudi Arabia. While Dar Al Arkan is a private company, it relies on large Saudi government contracts and the crown prince’s goodwill.After a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, the Trump Organization lost a series of real estate partnerships and other deals in the US. During Trump’s years out of power, Saudi Arabia became one of the few consistent sources of new deals and growth for the Trump brand, which was considered toxic by many US customers and businesses. Aside from real estate branding agreements with Saudi companies, Trump convinced the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund to host the LIV professional golf tour at several of his golf courses, including those in Washington, Miami and Bedminster, New Jersey. After the assault on the Capitol, the PGA of America, which is a separate organization from the PGA Tour and runs one of golf’s most important tournaments, the PGA Championship, cancelled a 2022 tournament at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey. The LIV Golf tournaments brought Trump’s properties back into the professional golfing circuit and provided millions of dollars in revenue for the Trump family business.In November 2022, as Trump was preparing to announce his presidential campaign, the Trump Organization finalized a deal with Dar Al Arkan and the government of Oman to be part of a multibillion-dollar real estate development in Oman. While the Trump Organization is not expected to contribute funds toward the project’s development, it will earn millions of dollars in licensing fees for a Trump-branded hotel and golf course – and will be paid millions more in management fees for up to 30 years. The project raised concerns that if Trump was re-elected, he would violate the US constitution’s emoluments clause by profiting from being in a partnership with the government of Oman, a longtime US ally, and a real estate firm with close ties to the Saudi government. (A report released by Democrats in Congress last year found that Trump’s businesses had received $7.8m from at least 20 foreign governments during his first term as president.)As Saudi Arabia helped keep Trump’s family business afloat after the Capitol insurrection, it provided even more crucial support to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser during the first Trump administration. Six months after Kushner left the White House in 2021, his newly created firm, Affinity Partners, secured a $2bn investment from the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund. Prince Mohammed overruled a panel of advisers who had recommended against investing in Kushner’s company, citing its lack of experience and track record in private equity. The advisers warned that due diligence had found the firm’s early operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects”, but internal documents leaked to the New York Times showed that the prince and his aides were more concerned with using the investment as part of a “strategic relationship” with Kushner.Why was Prince Mohammed so eager to invest in Trump and Kushner’s businesses, even when they were out of power? The prince was betting on a second Trump term – and he was rewarding Trump’s steadfast support throughout his presidency. The Trump administration helped Prince Mohammed survive a severe challenge to his rule: fallout from the assassination of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In October 2018, Khashoggi was ambushed inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member hit team, who suffocated the Saudi journalist and dismembered his body with a bone saw.As the international outcry over Khashoggi’s killing intensified and members of Congress demanded sanctions against Prince Mohammed and other Saudi officials, Trump and Kushner never wavered in their support for the prince and his regime. While Saudi officials at first tried to claim that Khashoggi had left the consulate alive, the crown prince eventually blamed rogue operatives for the assassination. But a US intelligence report, which Trump refused to release, found that Prince Mohammed had ordered Khashoggi’s killing.The president later made sure to remind Prince Mohammed that he owed Trump for defending him after Khashoggi’s assassination. In interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward in early 2020, Trump boasted: “I saved his ass”– meaning he protected the crown prince from a backlash in Congress. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump told Woodward. “I was able to get them to stop.”Today, the president is trying to reap more benefits based on his protection of Prince Mohammed – beyond what Kushner and the Trump Organization have already amassed from Saudi investments during Trump’s time out of office. Trump is corrupting the presidency by using it to negotiate international golf agreements and other deals that will ultimately enrich his family – and hardly anyone is objecting.

    Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University More

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    PGA Tour and LIV Golf Look for Merger Deal Under Trump

    A tie-up involving the tour and LIV Golf was stalled under President Biden. They’re aiming to forge a new agreement under President Trump.The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund are racing to reshape their plans to combine their rival golf circuits, emboldened by President Donald J. Trump’s eagerness to play peacemaker for a fractured sport, according to four people familiar with the matter.Since the start of secret talks in April 2023, PGA Tour executives and their Saudi counterparts have been weighing how they could somehow blend the premier American golf circuit with the Saudis’ LIV Golf operation. But negotiators have struggled to design a deal that would satisfy regulators along with players, investors and executives.Mr. Trump’s return to Washington has offered a new opening: After an Oval Office meeting this month that ethics experts have said tested the bounds of propriety, the two sides are considering options that might have stalled during Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency but that the Trump administration’s antitrust enforcers could offer a friendlier glance.The details of any prospective agreement, including LIV’s fate, remain in flux. In general, regulators would see any transaction that led to the dissolution of one of the leagues as anticompetitive; under Mr. Trump, though, antitrust regulators could take a more relaxed view.The two sides are looking beyond a simple cash transaction, though it is unclear how exactly the deal would be structured. The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, has said they are looking at a “reunification,” but there are many complicating factors, including how to value both ventures.There is also the matter of how to handle any deal alongside a separate $1.5 billion investment in the PGA Tour by a band of American sports magnates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Shaken but Upbeat After Secret Service Stops Gunman

    Former President Donald J. Trump was said to be shocked at what the F.B.I. described as the second attempt on his life in two months, but he was already cracking jokes about it on Sunday afternoon in phone calls with advisers and allies.One such call, with his former White House doctor, Representative Ronny L. Jackson of Texas, reflected the mixture of unease and jocularity that defined Mr. Trump’s immediate reaction. Mr. Jackson said in an interview that he called Mr. Trump to check in on him around two hours after the Secret Service had driven off a gunman from the fence line of Mr. Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course.“He told me he was always glad to hear from me but he was glad he didn’t need my services today,” said Mr. Jackson, who tended to Mr. Trump’s wounded ear while traveling with him the day after an assassin’s bullet flew within inches of his brain, at a rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13.“I just told him I was glad he was OK and he said he can’t believe this happened,” Mr. Jackson added. “But he said he’s doing well and the team was doing well.”Mr. Trump had been playing golf with his friend and campaign donor, the real estate investor Steve Witkoff, around 1:30 p.m. when gunshots rang out. Mr. Trump was between the fifth and sixth holes and Secret Service agents were traveling ahead of him, scoping out potential threats on the course. An agent had spotted the barrel of a semiautomatic rifle poking through the bushes. The agent opened fire on the man, who escaped in his car before being caught by police later, law enforcement officials said.Mr. Trump gave his own renditions of the episode to advisers and allies. Mr. Trump’s friend, the Fox News host Sean Hannity, went on air to deliver dramatic eyewitness accounts he said he received from both Mr. Trump and Mr. Witkoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More