• World No 2 has been vocal critic of Saudi-backed tour
• Viktor Hovland has also been linked with LIV move

Rory McIlroy has brushed aside reports he is considering a move to LIV Golf, and insists he is committed to playing on the PGA Tour.

The world No 2 has been a vocal critic of the Saudi-backed series but City AM this week reported he is considering a move to LIV worth $850m that would also give him a 2% equity in the tour.

Continue reading...

• LIV aiming to recruit more players from PGA and DP World Tours
• Defection would raise tricky questions for European Tour Group

Rising speculation that Viktor Hovland will be the next high-profile golfer to be coaxed to the LIV tour will increase the need for Ryder Cup Europe to apply a simple qualification process for golfers on the Saudi Arabian-backed circuit.

LIV is forging ahead with plans for 2025, which include new events and the recruitment of more players from the PGA and DP World Tours. The rate of turnover is likely to be increased by the number of golfers who had three-year contracts when joining LIV, which will expire at the end of 2024.

Continue reading...

The No 1 golfer’s edge around the fairways is knowing he has God at his back, even if he’s not actually carrying his bag

Whatever you may have thought watching it on TV, Scottie Scheffler didn’t win the Masters when he made that tricky birdie putt from 10ft on the eighth green, when he hit that lob-wedge to six inches on the ninth, or when he clattered that drive 340 yards down the middle of the 10th for his third successive birdie. No, he explained later, he won it about 2024 years before the tournament even started. “I believe that today’s plans were already laid out many years ago, and I could do nothing to mess them up,” Scheffler explained. And there you were thinking that God had bigger things to worry about right now than who won that green jacket.

Well, you scoff if you want to. But there’s no doubt that it gives a man a certain edge around the fairways to know he’s got the almighty at his back, even if he’s not actually carrying his bag. Scheffler has another passionate Christian, Ted Scott, to do that for him. Like Scott said, “having the God of the universe, the Creator, on your side just makes things a lot easier to deal with”. This was Scott’s fourth Masters victory, he had already won one with Scheffler and a couple of others with Bubba Watson, and he celebrated it by striding across the clubhouse lawn brandishing the flag stick from the 18th green like he was leading the crusaders into Jerusalem.

Continue reading...

• American wins by four shots after final-round 68 at Augusta
• Åberg finishes second after challenge falters on back nine

The Masters is supposed to get under way on the back nine on Sunday. Scottie Scheffler did not bother waiting that long. Such an approach is befitting a golfer now so dominant that comparisons with Tiger Woods in his pomp are perfectly appropriate.

Hopes were rising that Ludvig Åberg might become the first Masters debutant since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979 to take delivery of the Green Jacket. Åberg’s achievement would actually have been even more historic; he had never played in a major championship before teeing up at Augusta National on Thursday.

Continue reading...

Five-time Masters champion is maybe the only person who hasn’t cottoned on to the fact he is playing exhibition golf

The sun rose at 6.58am on Sunday in Augusta, a full three hours after Tiger Woods. Across the city, people were asleep and sharing the very same sorts of dreams, about the view down through the pines along the first fairway, the shots over the water at Amen Corner, the long walk uphill to the 18th green, where the club chairman Fred Ridley and last year’s champion Jon Rahm would be waiting ready with that freshly pressed Green Jacket. Woods says he still has these thoughts himself, in the few hours’ rest he gets between warming-down for the evening and warming-up again in the morning. For him, it’s a sixth win, and a share of Jack Nicklaus’s record.

Only a handful of the people entertaining these thoughts had a chance of actually realising them. In the 29 years Woods has been playing here no one had come from further back than six shots off the lead on Sunday. Which meant you likely needed to be at least one-under already to have the slightest chance of overtaking the third-round leader Scottie Scheffler .

Continue reading...

• Hole-by-hole updates from the fourth day at Augusta
• Any thoughts? Feel free to mail Scott | Official leaderboard

Welcome, patrons! If the final round of the 88th Masters tournament is even half as wild and wonderful as Moving Day …

… we’ll be in for a cracker. Will world No 1 Scottie Scheffler win his second green jacket? Will either Collin Morikawa or Bryson DeChambeau add to their major-championship resumé? Will Max Homa, Xander Schauffele or Tommy Fleetwood make their major breakthrough? Will Ludvig Aberg or Nicolai Hojgaard become the first player since 1979 to win on debut? Will something else happen? We’ll find out soon enough! Here’s the top of the leader board after 54 holes …

Continue reading...

• Third-round of 82 is Woods’s worst score at Augusta
• Scheffler leads on -7 , Morikawa is on -6, before final day

This was a day in which Tiger Woods created unwanted history. This was a day where Scottie Scheffler – only briefly – displayed his fallibility. This was a day where the latest glimpse of golf’s exciting future was provided by Ludvig Åberg. It feels a pity that this Masters, already one for the ages, has to conclude.

Woods entered the record books on Friday after becoming the first player to successfully negotiate 24 Masters cuts in a row . True to form, the 48-year-old made bold predictions about challenging for the Green Jacket. We should probably know better by now than to fall under the Woods spell. Father Time is beaten by no man. A ragged first nine of 42 was his worst at Augusta National. It did not get much better thereafter. Woods signed for an 82, his poorest Masters round by four. Both of those 78s came in 2022; Woods’s pattern now is undoubtedly one of general decline. When taking to the podium for post-round media duties – and it is fully to his credit that he did that – Woods looked emotionally and physically spent.

Continue reading...

• Updates from day three at Augusta National
• Live leaderboard | Feel free to mail Scott

Here we go, then.

It’s Moving Day! Here’s what the top of the leader board looks like …

Continue reading...

• DeChambeau, Scheffler and Homa finish on -6
• Jordan Spieth, Dustin Johnson and Bubba Watson miss the cut

It was a day so fiendishly demanding it reduced even the mild-mannered Zach Johnson to profanity.

Johnson’s stock with American golf galleries is not particularly high after he captained the country to Ryder Cup defeat in Rome last autumn. There was audible mocking as Johnson tapped in for a triple bogey at the 12th. “Fuck off!” came the Johnson utterance. What would Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts, Augusta National’s founders, make of this tawdry scene?

Continue reading...