DUBLIN, Ohio (AP) — Former U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover says players have found a way to beat the system by handing the USGA a backup driver if they get picked for random testing on the thinness of the clubface.
That didn’t bother Mike Whan, the CEO of the USGA, who says it’s not that easy.
“We keep serial numbers of the driver that were given us, and 90% of the drivers that were given us in those practice facilities when we test are played on the first tee,” Whan said Tuesday ahead of the U.S. Women’s Open in Wisconsin. “And we expect 10% of players to be making changes, anyway.
“I don’t think that’s a real concern for us.”
Glover got some attention on his SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio show when he said the test is not stringent enough because only about 30 drivers are randomly selected for testing. And he mentioned another loophole.
“I’ve been trying to think all morning and all day how to say this without sounding like it’s going to sound, but most guys don’t give them their real driver, anyway,” Glover said when asked why the USGA didn’t just test drivers of every player. “They give them their backup just in case.
“I know a lot of guys, they keep two drivers in their bag just in case,” he said. "'Hey, oh, yeah, it’s this one. It’s this one right here. Yeah, do this, test this one.’”
The driver testing has been going on for years because after hundreds of swings, the face gets too thin for USGA standards without the players or manufacturers being aware.
Rory McIlroy’s driver failed the test at the PGA Championship and he had to use a backup. Scottie Scheffler said his driver also was tested and didn’t pass, though he knew it was getting close. He went on to win the PGA Championship.
Whan said test results are green (pass), yellow (getting close) and red (fail). They are kept confidential to prevent a routine matter from getting too much attention, as was the case at Quail Hollow.
“If they got a yellow, they start preparing for a backup driver or switch,” Whan said. “It seemed like a big week to everybody else. But for us, it was a pretty standard week.”
For the second time in three years, Will Zalatoris is missing the heart of the PGA Tour season because of back surgery.
Zalatoris, 28, posted a message on Instagram on Monday saying that instability and discomfort in his back this spring kept getting worse, and tests revealed another round of herniated discs. He had surgery on Friday and said he would be out until the fall.
“I’m happy to say I woke up feeling good and excited about my long-term health,” Zalatoris said. “Time to focus on my recovery and get back after it.”
He hit his peak in 2022 when he lost in a playoff at the PGA Championship, missed a 15-foot putt that would have forced a playoff at the U.S. Open and won a playoff in the PGA Tour playoffs opener.
He withdrew the following week at the BMW Championship with back pain (and missed the Presidents Cup), and had his first surgery in 2023.
Zalatoris reached No. 7 in the world after 2022. He now is at No. 84.
The PGA Tour is adding three players straight out of college from the PGA Tour University ranking, a program aimed at creating a quicker path from college to the pros.
A fourth player, Auburn sophomore Jackson Koivun, also earned a PGA Tour card through the accelerated program for underclassmen. Koivun told Golf Digest he would defer membership and return for his junior year at Auburn.
Koivun picked up his final point by finishing in the top 10 at the NCAA championship on Monday. He turned 20 last week, making him the youngest player to get a card through the PGA Tour University Accelerated program.
North Carolina senior David Ford finished atop the PGA Tour University ranking and will have PGA Tour membership the rest of the year.
Florida State junior Luke Clanton earned enough points through the accelerated program and will make his pro debut next week in the Canadian Open. Vanderbilt senior Gordon Sargent secured his PGA Tour card in October 2023 and stayed in school.
The biggest move Monday came from UCLA senior Pablo Ereno. He tied for sixth in the NCAA championship — the best finish by a Bruins player since Patrick Cantlay tied for fourth in 2012 — and moved from No. 12 to No. 10 in the ranking. That gives him Korn Ferry Tour membership the rest of the year, instead of a spot on PGA Tour Americas.
Incoming LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler learned how different people have different expectations, all because of a conversation with his three young sons.
Kessler said he and wife Nicole sat down with their boys — ages 9, 7 and 5 — to explain that he had been offered the job as LPGA commissioner and he wanted their thoughts.
He said the oldest asked a dozen qualifying questions to make sure this was the right fit.
“Our 7-year-old said, ‘But Dad, you’re a boy and I’m a boy, so why don’t you just do boy sports?’” Kessler said. “Which by the way, provided the most incredible teaching moment and we shared with them, ‘Look if all we did in life were things that looked like us, that sounded like us, we’re sort of missing the plot and leaving so much richness in life on the table.’”
Leave it to the 5-year-old to get right to the point.
Kessler had told the boys they would take them out of school on occasion so they could join their parents on tour. That included stops in Europe and Asia.
“Our 5-year-old looked at me and said, ‘But Dad, do they sell chocolate milk in Asia?’
“It just goes to show you that different stakeholders have different concerns, and it’s certainly no different in the Kessler family.”
The Korn Ferry Tour will have a new tournament in South Carolina next year. The Colonial Life Charity Classic will be May 14-17 at The Woodcreek Club near Columbia. It will be the second Korn Ferry Tour event in South Carolina, which also has two PGA Tour stops. ... The Senior PGA Championship is moving to The Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, Florida, for the next three years starting in 2026. The senior major will be played April 16-19, getting it off the crowded May calendar. It was held this year after the PGA Championship and was the second straight week of a PGA Tour Champions major. ... Ben Griffin became the first player in 10 years to make eagle on the first hole of the final round and go on to win. Griffin won the Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial. ... Colonial runner-up Matti Schmid and Bud Cauley, who closed with a 67 to finish third, earned spots in the Memorial this week.
Max Homa was No. 10 in the world when he played the Memorial last year. He arrived at Muirfield Village this year at No. 87.
“I can’t answer your question because I don’t like them.” — Jack Nicklaus, on why a golf course should have a long par 3.
AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
FILE - Luke Clanton hits on the third hole during the final round of the Cognizant Classic golf tournament, Sunday, March 2, 2025, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)
Will Zalatoris lines up a putt on the 10th hole during the second round of the PGA Championship golf tournament at the Quail Hollow Club, Friday, May 16, 2025, in Charlotte, N.C. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
Lucas Glover hits off the ninth tee during the first round of the Charles Schwab Challenge golf tournament at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
