It’s common knowledge that Pressing Pause is the place to go to make sense of all things professional golf. Apologies to RZ, DDTM, and the legion of other regulars who have just about lost all their patience with me.

First, James Colgan and Sean Zak did a nice job detailing Rose Zhang’s arrival on their most recent Drop Zone podcast. If you don’t know this RZ (what are the odds of two famous golf RZ’s?), you will soon enough.

Zhang, in two years at Stanford, played in 20 tournaments and won 12 of them. That’s absurd. Then, last week she won her first professional tournament becoming the first pro to do that since 1951. Smart, personable, seemingly immune to pressure. The “future of women’s golf”.

For as thoughtful as they are, Colgan and Zak dropped the ball (Drop Zone pun intended) by not pointing out that Zhang won $412,500 versus Viktor Hovland’s $3.6m check he earned an hour earlier at Nicklaus’s Memorial tournament. For those keeping score at home, Zhang’s victory earned her 11.5% of Hovland’s.

That’s a woefully underreported scandal in professional golf. Critics of this discrepancy always say that’s because of the vast differences in commercial sponsorships, meaning eyeballs, but that begs the question of how/when is that calculus ever going to change. Maybe I should be the LPGA commish.

Tangent. Hovland deserves major props for cashing his check on Sunday and then caddying for his college teammate at a US Open qualifier on Monday. The young Norwegian carried his boy’s bag. That’s class personified.

Alright, are we warmed up now? When one of my golf besties texted me about the LIV/PGA merger, I texted back, “Is this for real?” I thought someone might have been punking us.

All I’ll say is some decisions are so bad—Chris Licht amplifying Donald Trump’s bullshit, everything Elon Musk has done at Twitter since buying it, dismembering a dissenting journalist—that there’s no coming back from them. Licht is out at CNN. Twitter’s ad revenue has cratered and the value of the company has fallen by two-thirds. And yet, Musk and MBS are so wealthy it looks like they can survive anything, thanks to the likes of PGA commissioner Jay Monahan.

Jay Monahan won’t survive though. “Hypocrisy” isn’t a strong enough word for his double dealing with LIV’s Saudi’s funders, we need another. One Pressing Pauser asked me “If the PGA supports dismemberment now?”

It appears so, at least a few of the most influential suits. I went cold turkey on CNN post Trump “town hall” vowing to never watch it again. Professional golf’s future is still as murky as the New York City skyline. Sadly though, my golf sickness is far too advanced for me to go full CNN on the PGA.

Go ahead, call me a sad (sick) sellout. Probably fits.