Former President Donald Trump says PGA Tour ‘is being destroyed by the PGA’ at LIV Miami pro-am

Trump also hinted that LIV is not done poaching the PGA Tour.

While praising LIV Golf and the Saudis for doing “a fantastic job,” former president Donald Trump continued his crusade Thursday against the PGA Tour.

Saying the Tour “really blew a great opportunity,” Trump called LIV Golf “big time” with “unlimited money.” Trump properties are hosting events in LIV’s inaugural season, including this week’s season-finale at Trump National Doral and will add a third next season at his course in Washington, D.C.

Trump also hinted that LIV is not done poaching the PGA Tour.

“And by the way, a lot of other people are coming over,” he said. “Big names.”

Trump spoke for several minutes following the tournament’s pro-am. Trump played nine holes with Jupiter’s Brooks Koepka and nine holes with Sergio Garcia on the Blue Monster. His team – which included son, Eric Trump, and granddaughter, Kai Trump – was 9-under and tied for the low score of the day.

Trump has aligned himself with LIV, the controversial tour financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, partly because of his disdain for the PGA Tour. Trump’s anger at professional golf dates to the PGA Tour moving its World Golf Championship event out of Doral and to Mexico in 2017 and the PGA of America moving the 2022 PGA Championship out of his club in Bedminster after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on the US Capitol.

“They never wanted to go to Mexico,” Trump said. “The pros didn’t want to go to Mexico and they went and that didn’t work out. They wanted to be here and the Tour wants to be here, too. The Tour wants to be here badly.”

PGA Tour leadership has never indicated they want to return to Doral.

When the tour announced in 2016 that it was moving its event out of Doral, Trump said, “I hope they have kidnapping insurance.”

LIV Golf Miami
Former President Donald Trump with his security detail greeting patrons during the Pro-Am tournament before the LIV Golf series at Trump National Doral. (Photo: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports)

Donald Trump says PGA Tour ‘breaking into (players’) pension fund’

Trump claimed the Tour is upsetting its players because it is “breaking into their pension fund” to pay for increased prize money. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has said the Tour is using reserves to help pay for elevated purses.

“The PGA is being destroyed by the PGA,” Trump said. “They were stupid and they shouldn’t be stupid. This was a great opportunity for them.

“The Tour mishandled it so badly and the people at the top, something should happen with them, they mishandled it so badly. The Tour decided to go, as Richard Nixon said, to stonewall it. That didn’t work out too well for them.”

Trump praised his course and his game.

“Not bad, right?” he said to a group of reporters after learning they were golf writers. “I played pretty good.”

As for the Blue Monster …

“I think the course is great,” he said. “The players are in love with this place and they always have been even though it is big and long and hard.

“We put in over a thousand palm trees. Over the years they started disappearing because of the Tour. They put soup stands there, they put up food or some ridiculous thing and they’d take down two palm trees. So we put them all back and multiply it by about 750.”

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Here’s how LIV Golf’s $50 million season-ending team event at Miami’s Trump National Doral will work

Peter Uihlein has made more than $11.3 million this year. He made just more than $4 million since joining the PGA Tour in 2011.

LIV Golf may be winding down its inaugural season next week at Trump National Doral, but in reality, the controversial tour is just getting started.

LIV’s final event will be held Oct. 28-30, a three-day extravaganza on the Blue Monster that will determine the series’ season-long team champion and include a $50 million purse, double the prize money for each of the first seven events. The winning team will split $16 million and all 12 teams receive prize money.

Former President Donald Trump will play in the Pro-Am — closed to the public — on Oct. 27.

LIV, financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, will be rebranded as the LIV Golf League next year and include 14 events. The league will stick to its 54-hole, no-cut format.

The most recent event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, won by Brooks Koepka, determined the season-long individual champion.

Dustin Johnson captured the $18 million bonus by claiming the individual title, followed by Branden Grace ($8 million bonus) and Peter Uihlein ($4 million bonus). All three reside in Jupiter.

Uihlein, 33, has pocketed more than $11.3 million in prize money and bonuses. He made just more than $4 million since joining the PGA Tour in 2011.

“Just a lot happier out here than I have been the last five years playing on Tour,” Uihlein said following the final round of the event in Saudi Arabia in which he lost to Koepka in a playoff.

“The team aspect of it I like. I was never really a fan of the lone wolf kind of thing that we had to do. But being a part of the team, practicing, hanging out, kind of like college. It resonates with me and sticks with me. I really like it.”

Each event in the LIV series included 12 four-man teams. Those teams will be seeded for Doral based on their finish at the first seven events.

2022 LIV Golf Chicago
Dustin Johnson plays his approach shot to the 17th green during the first round of a LIV Golf tournament at Rich Harvest Farms. (Photo: Jamie Sabau/USA TODAY Sports)

Dustin Johnson’s team leads LIV standings heading into finale

4 Aces, captained by Johnson and including Patrick Reed, Talor Gooch and Pat Perez, leads the team standings with 152 points. Johnson’s team has won four of the seven events.

Crushers captain Bryson DeChambeau leads a team that includes Anirban Lahiri of Palm Beach Gardens, Paul Casey and Charles Howell III. They are second with 96 points and have three runner-up finishes and a third place in seven events.

Fireballs is third with 93 points and includes captain Sergio Garcia along with Carlos Ortiz, Abraham Ancer and Eugenio Chacarra.

The all-South African Stinger team captained by Louis Oosthuizen and including Jupiter’s Branden Grace, Palm Beach Gardens’ Charl Schwartzel and Hennie Du Plessis, is fourth.

Smash, captained by Brooks Koepka, is fifth with 62 points after winning the team competition at Jeddah. Koepka’s team includes Uihlein, his brother Chase Koepka of West Palm Beach and Jason Kokrak.

“We’re excited for Miami,” said Brooks Koepka, who finished eighth in the season-long individual standings. “I think everyone is playing really well and that’s what we need.”

Top four seeds get first-day bye

The top four seeds receive a bye at Doral and the 5th through 12th seeds will compete in head-to-head match-play competitions on Friday, Oct. 28. For each head-to-head team match-up, three matches will take place: two singles matches and one alternate-shot foursomes match.

The four winners from Friday will join the top four seeds for the same format Saturday. Four teams earning two points will advance to Sunday’s team championship.

All 16 players will compete in twosomes Sunday, with team captains playing together. All four scores count towards the team’s score and the team with the lowest score is the LIV Golf Invitational Series Team Champion.

With no individual component for the Doral event, the only players on the course each day will be those from the teams scheduled to compete.

Following the $16 million first-place prize, the runner-up team will split $10 million, third place receives $8 million and fourth place takes home $4 million. The next four teams each split $2 million and the final four teams each split $1 million.

When the winning team is crowned, the season will end with LIV having awarded $225 million in prize money, plus another $30 million in bonuses.

That does not include around $1 billion in signing bonuses handed out by CEO Greg Norman and paid in yearly installments.

The Doral event begins Friday, Oct. 28 and runs through Sunday, Oct. 30 with the shotgun start each day at 12:15 a.m. Gates and fan village open at 9 a.m. each day starting Friday.

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Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play: Florida

TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course is No. 1 on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in Florida, with Streamsong claiming Nos. 2, 3 and 4.

Sure, we all know about the 17th hole of the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. That island green soaks up much of the attention every year in the PGA Tour’s Players Championship.

As the No. 1 course in Florida on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for public-access layouts, the Players Stadium is the epitome of golf in the Sunshine State. Built by Pete Dye – with plenty of inspiration from his wife, Alice Dye – on flat, swampy ground and opened in 1980, it is a perfect example of the challenges that often face course designers in golf-rich Florida and the creative ways in which architects attempt to address them.

Golfweek ranks courses by compiling the average ratings – on a points basis of 1 to 10 – of its more than 750 raters to create several industry-leading lists of courses. That includes the popular Best Courses You Can Play list for courses that allow non-member tee times. These generally are defined as layouts accessible to resort guests or regular daily-fee players.

The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass is No. 1 on that list, and it can be a beast for amateurs in the 51 weeks a year the course does not host the Tour’s best. Water, long rough, plenty of length – there’s no shortage of challenges. But it’s the creativity of the shaping and the demands on shotmaking that set the layout apart from most courses in Florida.

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That famed 17th green is a perfect example of the Dyes’ creative thinking to handle the challenges architects often face when building in Florida. Designers frequently dig ponds all around a course, both to handle drainage from frequent heavy rains and to supply building material to lift fairways and greens above the water table. Dye’s island green certainly wasn’t the first in Florida – it wasn’t even the first on that stretch of A1A, as that honor goes to No. 9 at the nearby Ponte Vedra Inn and Club’s Ocean Course – but the 137-yarder he created faces players at a critical time in one of the Tour’s largest events.

For Pete and Alice Dye, No. 17 was a perfect opportunity to make something special instead of having just another pond – if you must have all that water, why not stick an island green in it? The results have had players shaking over their 9-irons ever since.

It’s all part of an experience that lifts the Players Stadium Course to No. 22 in the United States on Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses list for layouts built in or after 1960. It’s also No. 11 on Golfweek’s Best Resort Courses list for the whole U.S.

Streamsong Red in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong/Laurence Lambrecht)

Water wasn’t nearly as big a part of the equation at the next four courses on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list in Florida. Streamsong Resort in Bowling Green and World Woods in Brooksville had something even better: sand. Lots and lots of it.

Within the past decade, Streamsong has opened three courses built on sand. The Red, designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, ranks No. 2 on Golfweek’s Best list for public-access tracks in Florida. The Black by Gil Hanse is next at No. 3, followed by Tom Doak’s Blue at No. 4. Built largely on old phosphate-mining spoil, the layouts at Streamsong stand out because of their other-worldly topographies created by all that sand, which once was an ancient seabed – the place is littered with shark teeth – and that provides an ideal playing surface.

Streamsong Black (Courtesy of Streamsong Resort/Laurence Lambrecht)

On top of some of that sand sits new green surfaces for the nearly decade-old Red and Blue courses. Streamsong installed new Mach 1 putting surfaces on those two courses in 2020, ensuring its oldest layouts – dating to 2012 an hour southeast of Tampa or 90 minutes southwest of Orlando – remain fresh and provide world-class conditioning.

Streamsong’s threesome also has broken into Golfweek’s Best Modern Courses list. The Red is No. 39 on that listed, followed by the Black at No. 46 and the Blue at No. 57. The trio also made it into Golfweek’s Best Resort Courses list for the U.S., with the Red at No. 15, the Black at No. 18 and the Blue at No. 21, making Streamsong one of the premium three-course destinations in the world.

Streansong Resort
Streamsong Blue (Courtesy of Streamsong Resort/Laurence Lambrecht)

Tom Fazio’s Pine Barrens course at World Woods north of Tampa also utilized sand instead of water. Opened in 1993, Pine Barrens’ native, rolling terrain and large sandy waste areas offer a non-traditional Florida experience. Rolling Oaks, the second 18 at World Woods, ranks No. 20 in Florida on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can play.

So while the Players Stadium Course has made the most of its water, the next four public-access layouts in Florida on Golfweek’s Best rankings took advantage of their sandy environments. For a state that prides itself on beach life, these five layouts are a perfect meeting of water and sand.

Each year, we publish the three lists that are the foundation of our course-ratings program: Golfweek’s Best 2020: Top 200 Classic Courses, Golfweek’s Best 2020: Top 200 Modern Courses and Golfweek’s Best 2020: Best Courses You Can Play.

These are the best courses you can play in Florida.

  1. TPC Sawgrass (Players Stadium), Ponte Vedra Beach (No. 22 m)
  2. Streamsong (Red), Bowling Green (No. 39 m)
  3. Streamsong (Black), Bowling Green (No. 46 m)
  4. Streamsong (Blue), Bowling Green (No. 57 m)
  5. World Woods (Pine Barrens), Brooksville (No. 171 m)
  6. Trump National Doral Miami (Blue Monster), Doral (m)
  7. Black Diamond Ranch (Quarry), Lecanto (m)
  8. Bay Hill Club, Orlando (m)
  9. Innisbrook (Cooperhead), Tarpon Springs (m)
  10. Hammock Beach Resort (Ocean), Palm Coast (m)
  11. PGA National Resort & Spa (Champion), Palm Beach Gardens (m)
  12. Camp Creek, Panama City Beach (m)
  13. Turnberry Isle Resort (Soffer), Aventura (m)
  14. Hammock Beach Resort (Conservatory), Palm Coast (m)
  15. Sandestin Resort (Burnt Pine), Destin (m)
  16. Juliette Falls, Dunnellon (m)*
  1. PGA Golf Club (Wanamaker), Port St. Lucie (m)
  2. Crandon Park, Key Biscayne (m)
  3. Trump National Doral Miami (Gold), Doral (m)
  4. World Woods (Rolling Oaks), Brooksville (m)
  5. Hammock Bay, Naples (m)*
  1. Orange County National (Panther Lake), Winter Garden (m)
  2. Victoria Hills, Deland (m)
  3. Mission Inn Resort (El Campeon), Howey-in-the-Hills (c)
  4. PGA Golf Club (Dye), Port St. Lucie (m)
  5. Black Diamond Ranch (Ranch), Lecanto (m)
  6. Turnberry Isle Resort (Miller), Aventura (m)
  7. Gasparilla Inn & Club, Boca Grande (c)
  8. TPC Sawgrass (Dye’s Valley), Ponte Vedra Beach (m)*
  1. Reunion Resort (Watson), Kissimmee (m)

*New to the list in 2020

(m): modern
(c): classic

Golfweek’s Best 2020: Top 30 Campus Courses

The rankings below reflect where these courses fall among the top 30 Campus Courses in the United States.

24. Mark Bostick GC (Florida), 5.82

Gainesville, Fla.; Donald Ross, Bobby Weed, 1921

Golfweek’s Best 2020

How we rate them

The members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged together to produce a final rating for each course. Then each course is ranked against other courses in its state, or nationally, to produce the final rankings.

Trump National Doral Miami lays off 560 employees

A notice filed with the State of Florida said the resort had been forced to halt its business because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic continues to hit all sectors of the economy, including the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort.

The Associated Press reported that the golf resort in South Florida, where President Donald Trump once talked of hosting the Group of Seven summit, has temporarily laid off 560 workers.

The resort hosted the PGA Tour for more than 60 years on its Blue Monster Course before what was then the WGC-Cadillac Championship moved to Mexico City in 2017 and became the WGC-Mexico Championship.

A notice filed with the State of Florida at the end of last month said the resort was forced to halt its business because of the coronavirus pandemic. The resort near Miami International Airport shut down mid-March.

The AP reported that the laid off workers are mostly food and beverage workers, golf attendants, housekeepers and bellhops. None of them are part of a union.

Last fall the White House announced plans to host the Group of Seven summit at the resort, but bipartisan concern that Trump would violate a clause in the Constitution that prohibits presidents from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments forced a change of those plans.

About two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that the Trump Organization had laid off or furloughed 1,500 employees at hotels in the U.S. and Canada.

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