The possibility of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews taking the Open Championship back to the Trump Turnberry golf club in Scotland for the first time since 2009 is reportedly becoming a point of negotiation in the relationship between U.K. government officials and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump has asked U.K. government officials about whether his course will be able to host another major championship, and those officials have in turn inquired with the R&A about that potential, according to sources in multiple British reports, including The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The development comes in the wake of R&A CEO Mark Darbon shifting his organization’s stance on Turnberry hosting another Open Championship, which the R&A (the governing body for golf outside the U.S. and Mexico) operates.

“It’s a course we’d love to return to at some point,” Darbon said last week. 

Darbon and the R&A had previously pushed back on the idea of Turnberry hosting another Open Championship, with concerns around both Trump taking the spotlight away from golf at a future tournament there and the course’s limited capacity for fans, compared to other venues.

The Trump Organization purchased Turnberry in 2014 for $60 million and has invested $200 million in making improvements to the property since. 

The Final Word

While this week’s reports indicate that U.K. government officials may be in favor of Turnberry hosting another Open Championship to appease Trump—and bettering their relationship with the current White House administration—they don’t have the authority to place another tournament at the course.

Ultimately, the R&A will have the final say on where the Open Championship is played each year. The first opening in the schedule is 2028. 

Since Turnberry last hosted in 2009, the Open Championship has been played at nine different courses, which all figure to remain in the rotation for future editions. 

Smith Entertainment Group, parent company of the NBA’s Jazz and NHL’s Utah Hockey Club, is beginning an inside-out overhaul of the Delta Center, the downtown Salt Lake City arena that is home to both teams. 

SEG is gutting the event floor and lower seating bowl to solve an inherent problem in which the 33-year-old venue was designed for basketball, creating large amounts of obstructed views and seat kills for hockey when the Utah Hockey Club arrived last year. The company will install a custom-designed seat riser system this summer that will allow unobstructed views for both basketball and hockey, and the Utah Hockey Club’s official seating capacity will ultimately rise from 11,131, the smallest in the NHL, to about 17,000. 

During the debut season in Utah, the hockey team also sold several thousand obstructed-view seats at each home game, inventory that didn’t count toward the official seating capacity. Basketball seating capacity at the SEG-owned Delta Center, meanwhile, will rise slightly from 18,206 to about 19,000.

“The idea is that we have something built for both basketball and hockey, has an incredible fan experience for both, and neither is sacrificed,” said Jim Olson, Jazz president and a senior SEG executive.  

To help accommodate the new seat riser system and a new ice floor slab, SEG will also lengthen the arena bowl by about 12 feet at each end and raise the floor by two feet, in turn improving sightlines. A key part of the riser system is a noticeably higher pitch to end-zone seating compared to other multipurpose arenas. A standard NHL ice rink is nearly twice the size of an NBA court. 

“The Delta Center has been an amazing venue for basketball, in my view, the best in the NBA,” Olson said. “But when you plop in something the size of an ice sheet, the geometry doesn’t work, which is why we’re bringing in the riser system and raising the floor.”

The arena project has been contemplated since the NHL approved the relocation and sale of the former Arizona Coyotes franchise. 

Lower-bowl work will be complete in time for the 2025–2026 NBA and NHL seasons, and will also be the beginning of a much larger development effort in Salt Lake City in which SEG and city leaders are working to create a new, urban entertainment and convention district. Upper-bowl renovations at the Delta Center will follow in subsequent offseasons. 

SEG did not break out specific, updated costs for the current Delta Center work, but said it intends to invest at least $3 billion into the overall downtown district, including the arena. The company, meanwhile, also gained approval last year of $900 million in public funds through an increased sales tax to aid the effort, with $525 million of that earmarked for Delta Center renovations.

New Team Name?

SEG, meanwhile, did not substantively comment on widespread reports late Tuesday detailing how the official YouTube page for the Utah Hockey Club briefly changed its handle to @UtahMammoth. The Mammoth has been one of three finalists, along with Outlaws and the current identity, in a long and winding naming process.

The hockey team is still on track to unveil its new permanent identity in advance of the 2025–2026 season, and only said that “progress continues” on evaluating the choices.

Bill Belichick is going on the offensive after a clip from CBS News that showed his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, awkwardly kiboshing questions about their relationship in a viral interview.

Through the University of North Carolina, Belichick issued a statement on Wednesday in which he says he stipulated—to his publisher, Simon & Schuster—any interviews to promote his book The Art of Winning “focus solely on the contents of the book.”

“Unfortunately, that expectation was not honored during the interview,” the statement said. “I was surprised when unrelated topics were introduced, and I repeatedly expressed to the reporter, Tony Dokoupil, and the producers that I preferred to keep the conversation centered on the book. After this occurred several times, Jordon, with whom I share both a personal and professional relationship, stepped in to reiterate that point to help focus the discussion. 

“She was not deflecting any specific question or topic but simply doing her job to ensure the interview stayed on track. Some of the clips make it appear as though we were avoiding the question of how we met, but we have been open about the fact that Jordon and I met on a flight to Palm Beach in 2021.”

Belichick is 73 and Hudson is 24. 

In the statement, Belichick said that the eight-minute segment that aired on CBS on Sunday had been culled from a 35-minute interview. 

“It presents selectively edited clips and stills from just a few minutes of the interview to suggest a false narrative – that Jordon was attempting to control the conversation – which is simply not true,” Belichick said.

CBS owner Paramount is reportedly nearing settlement terms with President Donald Trump over similar claims. Trump sued CBS last fall, alleging a “deceptive” edit of Kamala Harris’s interview with 60 Minutes.

In his statement, Belichick alluded to the “professional” nature of his relationship with Hudson, which has come into greater focus since the CBS clip went viral. The Athletic reported Wednesday that Hudson’s presence was an “instrumental” part of the reason why the agreement for Belichick and the Tar Heels to participate in HBO/Max’s Hard Knocks: Offseason blew up at the 11th hour. 

There have been rumors percolating in sports media circles—covered in Pro Football Talk on Wednesday—that Hudson sought to be credited as an executive producer on Hard Knocks. 

It is unknown precisely how much money Hudson stands to earn through her professional affiliation with Belichick, as a kind of swiss-army knife consigliere for all things marketing, publicity, and media production. Belichick used to disdainfully call social media networks by the wrong names; now he’s posting on them, presumably while coordinating with Hudson.

There has been rampant speculation about how much Hudson will bank through her work with Belichick. A British tabloid cited property records on Wednesday showing that she had already bought $9 million worth of real estate since meeting Belichick in 2021, with four mortgages getting paid off in 2025.