Mark O’Meara to retire after PGA Tour Champions event at Pebble Beach
AP Golf Writer
Mark O’Meara is ready to retire, and he has picked the ideal spot in Pebble Beach.
O’Meara won the California State Amateur in 1979, the first of his six titles over three decades at Pebble Beach. Five of those were the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the last one in 1997 when at age 40 he held off Tiger Woods and David Duval.
O’Meara, 67, is ending his career this week at the Pure Insurance Championship, held at Pebble Beach and Spyglass, a unique PGA Tour Champions events that puts pros with kids from The First Tee.
O’Meara, inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2015 at a ceremony at St. Andrews, ends his career with 16 wins on the PGA Tour, three on the European tour, two on the Japan Golf Tour, one on the PGA Tour of Australasia and the 1994 Argentina Open.
He won on every continent golf is played except Africa, although he did partner with Nick Price of Zimbabwe to win the Liberty Mutual Insurance Legends of Golf, one of his three PGA Tour Champions titles.
Pebble was the obvious choice to walk away, starting with that 8-and-7 win over Lennie Clements.
O’Meara also won the U.S. Amateur that year, and his two biggest wins were the Masters and British Open in 1998, making him the oldest player to win two majors in the same year.
His favorite Pebble moment was winning in 1990 with his father.
“I flew him and mom out and then I won the tournament playing alongside my dad,” O’Meara said. “I put that right at the top of the list of great things, winning at Augusta with a putt on the final hole, winning the U.S. Amateur. But to play with my father and coming up the last hole, the 18th hole at Pebble, you can’t do better than that.”
LIV money
Scottie Scheffler had such a banner year he even topped the highest earner from Saudi-funded LIV Golf.
Jon Rahm cashed in with two late victories and the season points title worth an $18 million bonus. That pushed his total to $34,754,821 in just 13 starts.
Scheffler, with his $25 million bonus for winning the FedEx Cup and $8 million bonus from the Comcast Business Top 10, earned $62,228,357 in 19 starts while winning seven times on the PGA Tour (that doesn’t include his gold medal from the Olympics and a $37,500 payoff from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympics Committee).
Of course, Scheffler didn’t get a signing bonus, either.
The LIV Golf League ended the individual portion of its season with five players earning at least $10 million. Joaquin Niemann was second with just under $24.4 million, followed by Sergio Garcia ($17 million), Tyrrell Hatton ($11.6 million) and Brooks Koepka in fifth at just under $11.6 million.
Talor Gooch leads the LIV Golf career money list with $51,856,381 in three seasons, narrowly ahead of Dustin Johnson at $51,502,981.
Missing the big picture
Shane Lowry finally made it back to Royal Portrush for the first time since he won the British Open in 2019. But he left without seeing the enormous mural of him holding the claret jug painted on the side of a large building.
The mural was unveiled in July to mark one year to go before the Open returns to Royal Portrush next year.
It’s hard to miss — unless someone is in a hurry.
“I’ll be completely honest, we left Portrush, and we were in a rush leaving and we totally forgot about going in to see it,” Lowry said last week at the Irish Open. “We were 10 miles down the road, and we forgot to get a picture. I’ve been sent a lot of pictures. It is pretty cool what they did there.”
Ryder Cup tickets
The Ryder Cup opened early registration to be randomly selected to buy tickets to the September 2025 matches at Bethpage Black.
Practice rounds for Tuesday and Wednesday for a ticket that includes food and non-alcoholic beverages are $255.27. It goes up to $423.64 for Thursday because that includes a Junior Ryder Cup exhibition, celebrity matches and the opening ceremony.
For the three competition days, tickets go for $749.51.
The U.S. Open has only offered weekly tickets so far for next year at Oakmont. Those weekly ground passes (good Monday through Sunday) are going for $881.80 including taxes and fees.
A four-day badge to tournament days at the Masters last year was $450, daily tickets for tournament rounds were $140 and practice days were $100.
To be determined is which tickets are the most accessible.
Anthony Kim
LIV Golf signed Anthony Kim to much fanfare right after the season started, getting plenty of curiosity because Kim had been out of golf for 12 years and was an enormous talent.
He played as a wild card — he and Hudson Swafford were not attached to a team — and the results showed someone who had been completely detached from golf for more than a decade.
Kim’s best finish was 36th in the 54-man lead, and he only cracked the top 50 in five other LIV events. He made $879,500 in 11 events.
What happens next is unclear. One of the 13 teams could choose to sign the 39-year-old Kim, or he could get another year as a wild card. LIV had the two wild cards to allow for an even starting field of threesomes on every hole in the shotgun start.
Swafford, meanwhile, won $1,002,500 in all 13 tournaments.
Divots
Patton Kizzire at the Procore Championship was the fourth player to have a 54-hole lead of at least four shots this year. All eight have gone on to win. … The LPGA has hired Samantha Simmons as its chief people and international operations officer. Simmons previously was senior vice president of people and culture at Spurs Sports & Entertainment. … Brian Harman is still cashing in on his British Open victory last year at Royal Liverpool. He is playing the SJM Macao Open on Oct. 10-13 on the Asian Tour. Others competing include Min Woo Lee. … Florida State junior Luke Clanton made another cut on the PGA Tour last week and picked up another point toward getting a tour card through the accelerated PGA Tour University ranking for underclassmen. Clanton has made six cuts in his seven PGA Tour events this summer, dating to when he qualified for the U.S. Open. The No. 1 amateur in the world, he is No. 138 in the Official World Golf Ranking.
Stat of the week
Rose Zhang needed only 58 holes to win her four matches at the Solheim Cup. She only lost eight of the holes she played.
Final word
“This team played really, really good this week. It doesn’t matter the pairings or any of that. If you play really, really good golf, you’re going to win.” — U.S. Solheim Cup captain Stacy Lewis.
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