GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — Michael Brennan made five straight birdies to pull away from Beau Hossler and close with a 6-under 64 to win the Wyndham Championship and reach the PGA Tour’s lucrative postseason.
Brennan came into the final tournament of the regular season at No. 105 in the FedEx Cup. Now his season gets extended by at least one week after his second PGA Tour title in two years. The FedEx Cup playoffs start Thursday with the FedEx St. Jude Championship at the TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee. Only the top 70 players advance, and Brennan shot up to No. 47.
Jackson Koivun, who left Auburn in June and won the 3M Open in only his third start, narrowly hung on to the 70th spot and goes from college to the postseason in only two months.
Brennan made birdie on the final hole to finish at 22-under 258, matching the tournament record at Sedgefield shot three other times, most recently last year by Wake Forest grad Cameron Young.
Ben James, the No. 1 player from the PGA Tour University ranking who has a card already secure for 2027, fell out of contention on Saturday but roared back with a 61 to finish third.
BEDMINSTER, N.J. (AP) — Joaquin Niemann closed with a 2-under 69 Sunday for a three-shot victory in LIV Golf New York, extending his record with his ninth career victory in the last three years.
Jon Rahm shot 76 and tied for 41st, but that still was enough to win the season points title for the third straight time since the two-time major champion joined LIV Golf.
Niemann, who won earlier this year in South Korea, went wire-to-wire at Trump International. He finished at 16-under 268. Harold Varner III caught Niemann until the Chilean pulled away late with a birdie on the 13th and an eagle on the par-5 15th. Varner shot 70 to finish second.
Bryson DeChambeau shot 71 and tied for 38th, 23 shots out of the lead. He cannot catch Rahm with one tournament remaining.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Frankie Harris made an 18-foot birdie putt on the final hole for a 12-under 59 and won the Pinnacle Bank Championship on Sunday with a par on second playoff hole for his first Korn Ferry Tour title in only his sixth start this year.
Harris shot 27 on the back nine of The Club at Indian Creek by making just over 153 feet of putts. Alistair Docherty birdied his last four holes, including a 53-foot putt on the 16th, for a 64 to force a playoff at 22-under 262.
On the 18th for the second playoff hole, Docherty went long of the green, chipped to 6 feet and missed the par putt.
Harris became the fourth player in the last six weeks with a 59. He became the ninth player worldwide to have a sub-60 final round and win the tournament.
OOLTEWAH, Tenn. (AP) — California teen Asterisk Talley picked up her biggest win yet Sunday when she surged past Anna Iwanaga of Japan for an 8-and-6 victory to win the U.S. Women’s Amateur.
The 17-year-old Talley earned her second USGA title before even leaving high school. She also teamed to win the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball in 2024, the same year she was runner-up in the U.S. Women’s Amateur and U.S. Junior Girls.
Iwanaga, who shared the medalist honors during the 36-hole qualifying, won the ninth hole in the morning for a 1-up lead. But that was the last hole Iwanaga won. Talley squared the match with a birdie on the 11th, and she birdied the next two holes and never looked back.
The victory gets Talley into the U.S. Women’s Open next year at Inverness Club in Ohio.
Anna Huang won her fourth Ladies European Tour title when the 17-year-old Canadian closed with an eagle for a 3-under 70 and a two-shot victory over Charley Hull, who four-putted for double bogey on the 17th hole and shot 69. The 17-year-old Huang is the youngest player with four LET wins. ... Mirabel Ting closed with a 5-under 67 and made birdie on the first playoff hole against Rachel Kuehn to win the Smoky Mountain Championship for her first Epson Tour title. ... Christofer Blomstrand closed with a 3-under 68 for a two-shot victory over fellow Swede Adam Wallin in the Scottish Challenge. ... Darren Fichardt of South Africa closed with a 4-under 68 and won the Staysure PGA Seniors Champion by five shots over Mikael Lundberg at Trump International in Aberdeen, Scotland. ... Yuzuki Yoshizawa won the Hokkaido Meiji Cup on the Japan LPGA with a 4-under 68 for a two-shot victory over Kana Nagai. ... Eunsoo Jang closed with a 3-under 69 for a one-shot victory in Jeju Samdasoo Masters on the Korea LPGA.
AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
Michael Brennan kisses the trophy after winning the Wyndham Championship golf tournament in Greensboro, N.C., Sunday, Aug. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
CHAMONIX-MONT-BLANC, France (AP) — For centuries, French and Italian mountain communities on the flanks of Western Europe's highest peak have gazed upon seemingly eternal glaciers and snow that gave the colossus its name: Mont Blanc, the white mountain.
But climate warming is dismantling the picture at alarming speed.
Europe's record heat waves this summer savaged permafrost that for millennia has acted like glue on the Alpine landscape. Defrosting cliffs came apart as high-altitude cold gave way to higher temperatures, sending rock falls cascading from the heights. A famously dangerous rock-prone gully that climbers have long braved on ascents to the summit, 4,805 meters (15,766 feet) up, became temporarily impassable.
“We weep for our mountain, the way it's changing. It hits us in the gut,” said Stéphane Bozon, a deputy mayor in Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, a French town at the foot of the giant that straddles France's border with Italy.
“From mid-July onward, we saw an increase in rock falls. We saw areas becoming difficult to access because of glacial retreat and snowmelt on the glaciers, with crevasses opening up and rock collapses making some areas difficult to reach or traverse,” he told The Associated Press.
Each degree of warming can have an outsized impact. On the Aiguille du Midi peak, which rises to an altitude of 3,842 meters (12,605 feet) in the Mont Blanc range, average temperatures for July have soared. From a chilly 1.6 C (33.8 F) in 1994, the monthly average for this July was the warmest ever recorded, at 3.3 C (37.4 F), says Meteo France, the national weather service.
“The mountain really dried out, with temperatures unlike any I had ever experienced,” Bozon said.
In the wake of devastating floods in the Himalayas, AP talked to researchers, climbers and residents coping with the risks and uncertainties of climate change on Mont Blanc.
The Aug. 26 floods that swept through Nepal and China were triggered after a collapse of bedrock and glacier ice sent debris and water surging through multiple Himalayan rivers. Initial assessments of many scientists are that climate change played a key role in creating conditions for the catastrophe.
As Earth’s global average temperature rises because of the burning of oil, gas and coal, the chances of such disasters increase.
In the Alps, glaciers once admired for their icy majesty are being eyed with trepidation as they shrink and lose stability.
Bozon, who is in charge of safety for Chamonix, says his town urgently needs to prepare for “serious scenarios” of chunks of glacier or mountain potentially falling onto inhabited areas.
“We have to move quite quickly because this summer has shaken us and year after year we’re being shaken by the glaciers’ retreat,” he said.
In Italy, researchers are also documenting dramatic damage wrought by heat on glaciers this year. In Lombardy, Alpine glaciers have lost more than 40% of their surface area since 1991, according to the region's glacier service.
“While it used to snow at high altitudes in the past, now it rains,” said Vanda Bonardo, head of the Italian branch of the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps, a nongovernmental organization.
“So we’ve also seen the effects on the stability of the terrain,” she said.
Permafrost that has held Alpine peaks in its icy grip for thousands of years acts as a cement, helping to hold their steep rock faces together. It took a beating from the succession of heat waves.
“That doesn't mean that all the rock faces will collapse in the coming years or decades but quite a number of them are on the verge of becoming unstable and remain stable today only because of the presence of that ice. As the ice changes, we have seen a huge, huge number of rock falls and rock collapses this year,” said Ludovic Ravanel, a researcher at Savoie Mont Blanc University who specializes in climate change's impact on mountain snows, glaciers and frosts.
A collapse is a major fall involving more than 100 cubic meters (3,531 cubic feet) of rock — more than enough to fill a large shipping container. Ravanel expects this year's tally of collapses in the Mont Blanc massif “will probably reach around 400.” He says that is about 10 times more than two decades ago.
The last time things got close to this bad was the ’’catastrophic year″ of 2022, he said, with nearly 300 collapses.
“This has really been one of the defining features of the summer of 2026,” he said.
Chamonix-based mountain guide Stuart MacDonald says it shocks him to see how rapidly and extensively glaciers that hang from the flanks of the Mont Blanc massif are retreating.
When he guides people up the peaks, he points them to “where the glacier was last year and this is where it was 10 years ago. And that usually has quite an effect.”
Melting and the risk of rock falls made his job “pretty challenging” this summer and forced him to cancel plans to lead a group to Mont Blanc's summit last week.
“You hear it before you see it and then you’ll turn round and you’ll just see an enormous cascade of rocks coming down a slope and it can be quite terrifying,” MacDonald said.
“What’s most scary is that sometimes these rocks are falling on routes that we used to be climbing at this time of year,” he added. “It can be depressing sometimes when you look at something that you maybe climbed in July or August in the past and you see that it’s absolutely impossible to do it now.”
Leicester reported from Paris. Associated Press journalists Trisha Thomas and Paolo Santalucia in Rome and Angela Charlton in Paris contributed.
People look at the 'Mer de Glace' glacier as tarpaulins cover the ice cave to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tarpaulins cover the ice cave of the 'Mer de Glace' glacier to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
The Mont-Blanc massif mountains are seen from the Aiguille du Midi in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tourists enjoy the view on the Mont-Blanc massif mountains from the Aiguille du Midi, in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
Tarpaulins cover the ice cave of the 'Mer de Glace' glacier to prevent it from melting, at the Montenvers station in Chamonix, France, Saturday, Sept. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani)
