SAN DIEGO (AP) — Patrick Reed is the second major champion to leave Saudi-funded LIV Golf, announcing Wednesday he will spend the rest of the year on the European tour with an eye on returning to the PGA Tour as early as September.
His stunning decision, just three days after he won the Dubai Desert Classic, comes the same week that five-time major champion Brooks Koepka returns to the PGA Tour at Torrey Pines.
“I’m a traditionalist at heart, and I was born to play on the PGA Tour, which is where my story began with my wife, Justine,” Reed said on social media. “I am very fortunate for the opportunities that have come my way and grateful for the life we have created. I am moving forward in my career, and I look forward to competing on the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. I can’t wait to get back out there and revisit some of the best places on earth.”
The PGA Tour sent a memo to players outlining the path back for players like Reed, who did not fit into the “Returning Member Program” that was offered only to those who had won a major or The Players Championship since 2022.
Reed won the Masters in 2018. The tour said he would be eligible to return a year from his last LIV Golf appearance on Aug. 24, 2025. He would not face additional discipline from the PGA Tour because Reed resigned his membership when he left for LIV, and he was not part of the antitrust lawsuit filed against the PGA Tour in 2022.
“I'm not surprised guys are wanting to come back,” Xander Schauffele said. “Thanks to the whole split, I think we've tried to make our product as good as possible. If they didn't like it then, I'm sure they'll like it the second time around.”
Reed can play in the FedEx Cup Fall — the first event is the Biltmore Championship Asheville in North Carolina on Sept. 17-20 — if he receives a sponsor exemption. He cannot use his limited status as a past champion until 2027.
Reed also could earn a full card by finishing among the top 10 players in the Race to Dubai who don't already have PGA Tour membership. His victory in Dubai moved him to No. 2 in the standings, and now he has a full schedule in Europe — commercially known as the DP World Tour — ahead of him.
He also is set for the four majors, having risen to No. 29 in the world.
LIV Golf begins its fifth season in one week in Saudi Arabia. Reed is playing in Bahrain this week as part of the European tour schedule, his third straight week.
Upon his return to the PGA Tour, Reed would not be eligible to receive shares in the Player Equity Program through 2030. That was part of the agreement for Koepka's return — no equity for five years, and no access to FedEx Cup bonus money this year.
Reed would be eligible to be a captain's pick for the Presidents Cup in September.
Reed last played a team competition in the 2019 Presidents Cup in Australia. While he has a 12-9-5 record overall in Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup competitions, his last two appearances included some negativity. He complained to The New York Times about not being used the right way in a U.S. loss in Paris in 2018, and his caddie shoved a fan in Australia in 2019.
It was not clear who would replace Reed on the 4 Aces team in LIV Golf, which begins its fifth season next week in Riyadh. Dustin Johnson is the captain, with LIV newcomer Thomas Detry and Thomas Pieters also on the team.
“We were not able to come to terms with Patrick on a potential contract extension. We’re grateful for everything he contributed during his time on the 4 Aces at LIV Golf and wish him the best,” LIV Golf said in a statement.
The PGA Tour said three other players — Kevin Na, Hudson Swafford and Pat Perez — also have reinstated their membership but face other disciplinary issues the tour did not disclose.
Perez, who is eligible for the PGA Tour Champions through career money, and Swafford were plaintiffs in the antitrust lawsuit filed against the tour. Perez and Swafford, who last played LIV Golf in 2024, can return in 2027. Perez was part of the LIV broadcast team last year.
“The dominos are starting to fall,” Harris English said. “I think they're seeing the PGA Tour is getting stronger, and seeing that money isn't the be-all, end-all.”
Reed doesn't have the achievements of Koepka, though he has long been a polarizing figure that often overlooks his status as one of the most global players in golf and fiercest competitors. He has won 12 times on four tours — frequently playing in Europe or Asia without big appearance fees — and began his PGA Tour career by going through Monday qualifiers.
He is best known for taking down Rory McIlroy in a spirited Ryder Cup match at Hazeltine in 2016, and engaging the Scottish crowd when he made his Ryder Cup debut in 2014.
But he came under scrutiny in the Bahamas in 2019 at the Hero World Challenge for being penalized two shots for twice swiping sand behind his golf ball in a waste area, improving his lie.
Reed said he would continue to compete on the European tour as an honorary member, afforded to him from his Masters victory. The European tour is in Qatar next week. It then goes to South Africa for three weeks, China and India heading into the Masters.
AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
Patrick Reed of the United States plays his second shot on the 18th hole during the final round of the Dubai Desert Classic in United Arab Emirates, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
Winner Patrick Reed of the United States poses with the Dubai Desert Classic in United Arab Emirates, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
Patrick Reed of the United States reacts after winning the Dubai Desert Classic in United Arab Emirates, Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.
The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.
As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.
Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.
“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."
To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.
“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”
Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.
The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.
“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”
For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.
Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.
During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.
Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.
“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”
A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.
Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.
A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.
“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.
Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.
Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”
Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.
Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.
“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.
When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.
In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.
Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.
Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."
In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.
State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.
Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.
“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”
He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.
Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.
Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."
The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.
“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”
FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Rental Ripoff Hearing at Fordham University on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki, File)
Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
