PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland \u2014 Two-time champion Ernie Els has withdrawn from The Open, the second time this year he has chosen not to compete in big championships.<\/p>\n
The R&A did not give a reason Sunday for the withdrawal of the 55-year-old South African. Els was replaced in the field by Si Woo Kim, who was next on the alternate list taken from last week\u2019s world ranking.<\/p>\n
Els won The Open at Muirfield in 2002 after a four-man playoff. He won again in 2012 at Royal Lytham & St. Annes when Adam Scott lost a late lead.<\/p>\n
Open champions are exempt to play until they are 60.<\/p>\n
Els also chose not to compete this year in The Players Championship, for which he qualified by winning the Kaulig Companies Championship at Firestone in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland \u2014 Two-time champion Ernie Els has withdrawn from The Open, the second time this year…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-7216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7216","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=7216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}