U.S. President Donald Trump has notched another victory in his efforts to host premier professional golf events at the courses he owns across the world.

As momentum seemingly builds for Trump Turnberry to potentially host a future edition of the Open Championship (also known as the British Open), the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour) has added a tournament at another Trump-owned property in Scotland to its 2025 schedule. 

Trump International Golf Links Scotland in Aberdeenshire will host the Scottish Championship on Aug. 7–10. Featuring a $2.75 million purse, the event will be played directly following the Staysure PGA Seniors Championship—a tournament for men age 50 and above—at the same venue.

Trump International Golf Links Scotland opened in 2012. The Scottish Championship has been played only once previously, in 2020 at Fairmont St Andrews. 

August’s tournament will be played the same week as the first leg of the PGA Tour’s playoffs, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, and LIV Golf Chicago event, so not many of the world’s top-ranked and most popular players will be available for the Scottish Championship.

One Small Step

R&A CEO Mark Darbon, whose organization is the governing body for golf outside of the U.S. and Mexico and operates the Open Championship, recently shifted his stance on returning golf’s oldest major to Trump Turnberry, which last hosted the Open in 2009. “It’s a course we’d love to return to at some point,” Darbon said last month.

Multiple British outlets then reported that Trump had asked U.K. government officials about whether Turnberry will be able to host another Open Championship, and those officials in turn inquired with the R&A about that potential.

Sealing the Scottish Championship on the DP World Tour won’t guarantee anything for Turnberry, but it is a positive sign for Trump’s relationship with golf stakeholders across the pond.

In an era of unprecedented change in college sports, the Big 12 is doubling down on its leader.

Big 12 presidents and chancellors have agreed to a three-year extension on commissioner Brett Yormark’s contract, a source confirmed to Front Office Sports. Yormark originally signed a five-year deal when he was first hired in 2022, but now, his contract will run until 2030 rather than 2027. 

ESPN first reported the news.

Financial terms of the deal were not reported, though the source noted the contract was an extension of the previous deal, rather than a completely new one. Yormark earned $1.2 million in 2023, according to the Big 12’s most recently available tax filings, with about $75,000 in extra related compensation.

Challenging the Status Quo

Yormark arrived in 2022 as an outsider in college sports—his previous postings were with Roc Nation and the Brooklyn Nets. In his three years at the helm of the Big 12, however, Yormark has steered the conference through innumerable changes, becoming known as an aggressive leader unafraid to lean in to the professionalization of college sports.

He secured stability with a media-rights extension with ESPN and Fox in the fall of 2022, leapfrogging the Pac-12, whose media-rights deal was up one year before the Big 12’s. Then, in the summer of 2023, he pounced on the Pac-12 breakup, adding Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State to the conference. Yormark also picked up the work of previous commissioner Bob Bowlsby in helping realize the 12-team College Football Playoff.

Yormark has reportedly been considering other innovations, including a league naming-rights deal and taking private equity capital. He’s also considered more radical expansion ideas, like adding basketball powerhouse UConn. 

Now he’ll lead the conference through the upcoming revenue-sharing era (if the House settlement is approved) as well as the next iteration of the CFP.

It had been more than seven months since Caitlin Clark played an organized game on national TV, and fans clearly missed her.

The preseason game between Clark and the Indiana Fever vs. the Brazil women’s national team drew 1.3 million viewers Sunday on ESPN, the network announced Tuesday. The exhibition contest, the first time ESPN televised a WNBA preseason game on its lead channel, drew more than the 1.2 million viewers ESPN averaged for all its regular-season WNBA games in 2024. Last season was the most-watched WNBA regular season on record.

According to The Athletic, only two NBA preseason games since 2010 eclipsed the viewership number of Sunday’s WNBA preseason game, both of which featured LeBron James. The most watched was in 2018 when the Warriors faced the Lakers, James’s first game with Los Angeles, which drew 2 million viewers. In 2017, James, who was still with the Cavaliers, drew 1.4 million viewers in a preseason contest against the Bulls.

While the outcome of Sunday’s game had no bearing on the regular season, the viewership was even more impressive considering the Fever blew out the Brazil women’s national team, 108–44, and Clark played just 19 minutes.

The game, which was played at the Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa, was the first game back for the 22-year-old at her alma mater since she entered the WNBA last year. The average resale ticket price for the game was $440, the most for any game Clark has played in, professionally or collegiately, according to data provided to FOS by ticketing technology company Victory Live.

The Fever will have a league-high 41 of 44 of their regular-season games nationally televised or streamed this season. Indiana’s season opener is May 17 against Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky.