{"id":644294,"date":"2026-05-15T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/644294\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:00:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T08:00:09","slug":"champions-dinner-slight-fueling-martin-kaymers-pga-championship-tear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/644294\/","title":{"rendered":"Champion’s dinner slight fueling Martin Kaymer’s PGA Championship tear"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 You\u2019re not alone if you are surprised to see Martin Kaymer at the top of the leaderboard after the opening round of the PGA Championship.<\/p>\n

Consider this:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll tell you a funny story,\u2019\u2019 Kaymer said after shooting a 3-under-par 67 at Aronimink. \u201cOn Tuesday evening we had the champion\u2019s dinner, and there was a gentleman sitting next to me from the PGA of America and he asked me if I still play.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd I said, \u2018What do you mean?\u2019 He said, \u2018Well, are you playing this week?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Yeah, that\u2019s why I\u2019m here. I\u2019m not flying from Europe to here to have a New York strip with you guys. Of course I\u2019m playing.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that really motivated me. So it was a good start to the week. Again, I really enjoy Aronimink Golf Course. It really suits my eye. It\u2019s a very fair test. Great for the PGA Championship. It\u2019s fun to play and I look forward to hopefully have another three good days.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

People forget how accomplished the 41-year-old German is, having won a U.S. Open, a PGA and a Players championship and who was once No. 1 in the world.<\/p>\n

\"GolferMartin Kaymer is pictured during the first round of the PGA Championship on May 14. UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Kaymer hasn\u2019t posted a top-10 finish in a major since a tie for seventh at the 2017 PGA, a span of 23 major starts.<\/p>\n

Riddled with injuries in recent years, he\u2019s never won on the LIV tour and played so poorly on it that he\u2019s been in position to be relegated out of the league, but was saved from that ignominy because he\u2019s the captain of the Cleeks GC.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been struggling since 2021,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u201cI had a couple surgeries then and other issues came with it the years after. And it was quite disappointing for me that playing out there on the LIV Golf league I could never really perform, because I could never really practice because I was always hurt.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all need to play the tournaments, and I didn\u2019t really have enough time and enough rest in between events to rest, so I always came into tournaments never prepared. The other guys were ready to play. They were playing great. To be honest, it really pissed me off.<\/p>\n

\"MartinMartin Kaymer swings during the first round of the PGA Championship on May 14. Getty Images<\/p>\n

\u201cFortunately, the last four, five weeks I had great treatments, I have no pain any more. Everything is going the right direction. I can practice. It\u2019s fun. I have a great passion for the game.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n

When he left the PGA Tour and DP World Tour for LIV, Kaymer was famously stripped of his 2023 Ryder Cup captaincy.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a former Ryder Cup hero, who sank the winning putt for the Europeans in 2012 at Medinah, and was forced to cede his captaincy for the 2023 team in Rome to Luke Donald.<\/p>\n

All Donald has done is lead Europe to victory in the last two Ryder Cups and he\u2019s going for a third in a row in 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. \u2014 You\u2019re not alone if you are surprised to see Martin Kaymer at the top…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644295,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,275115,14192,99],"class_list":["post-644294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-martin-kaymer","tag-pga-championship","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644294\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}