First came Golf’s flash grenade. Now, here’s the US Open.

Jon Rahm was at home making coffee with his kids underfoot last Tuesday when the news came in a flurry of text messages. Collin Morikawa glanced at Twitter and saw the word there. Over breakfast at Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Brooks Koepka peered at a television and caught a glimpse of a headline.

What was clear on Tuesday — a week after the PGA Tour said it planned to join forces with the Saudi wealth fund whose LIV Golf league had broken the sport — was the deal Rahm, Morikawa and Koepka learned about in real time. , the golf version was of a flash grenade: stunning, dizzying, disorienting.

And with the effects continuing, they must play the US Open, a major tournament, which begins Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club. Some escape, huh?

“I think there are more guys wondering what the future holds,” Jason Day, who had a stint as the world’s best player shortly after winning the 2015 PGA Championship, said in an interview with a practice green.

“Some guys are emotional, I think, on both sides, which is very understandable,” added Day, a PGA Tour contestant who turned pro in 2006. things are spread out on the table once we know a little bit about where things are progressing.

It’s hardly an optimal prospect right before the third major men’s championship of the year. But it’s a ubiquitous one, and it will certainly contribute to the United States Golf Association’s preference for Opens, which force players to use their wits as much as their clubs.

None Open in recent memory may require more compartmentalization of the field.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” said Rahm, who opened the 2023 majors cycle with a win at the Masters tournament in April. “It’s hard when it’s the week before a major. Try to think about it as little as possible.”

For many of the elite players who could compete for the trophy this weekend in Los Angeles, turbulence in their professional lives, aside from driving, chipping and putting, has traditionally been in short supply.

The PGA Tour was unchallenged as the world’s premier circuit for most of a period that began during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and players who retained their tour cards were handsomely rewarded for their fine performance in Torrey Pines events in San Diego to Sea Pines in Hilton Head Island, SC

LIV’s resounding turnout last year proved a very harsh test of tour supremacy and cast a blur over professional golf. For the first time in generations, the PGA Tour was not the unparalleled signature show in American men’s golf.

With the PGA Tour and LIV poised to merge their money-making ventures into a single new company headed by the tour commissioner and chaired by the governor of the Saudi Wealth Fund, the dimensions of professional golf are fuzzier, even for the greatest names in sports.

Will LIV still exist in a year? How can players who have defected to LIV from the tour return? Should golfers who stayed loyal to the tour be compensated for their loyalty? And what about all that money, reportedly $100 million or more in some cases, that the LIV golfers wealth fund promised?

The deal grew out of seven weeks of secret talks that began with a WhatsApp message on April 18, continued in London, Venice and San Francisco and culminated in an announcement last Tuesday in New York. Much about the framework agreement is unclear, however, with bankers and lawyers still scrambling to fill in blanks on matters as important as asset valuation. Golf executives have suggested months could pass before the deal closes, and some privately acknowledge that the shoals before and after a close may not be easy. (“I don’t yet have enough information about the deal to have an unfavorable or favorable opinion of it,” Patrick Cantlay, a player who sits on the PGA Tour board, said Tuesday.)

In the meantime, some players suggested that they just settle for an answer, or answers, to their most essential questions.

“We all want to know why,” Morikawa said. “We are so interested in why. For us, for me right now, is it just what’s going to happen? Don’t know. But we always want to know why answers — like, what’s the purpose behind it? But I think there are so many different parties involved that there are too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella.”

Substantive answers are unlikely to emerge between now and Thursday’s first tee shots, leaving players wondering and worrying about a tournament that could land one of them a place in history.

“There isn’t really any part of your game in a major championship, let alone a US Open, that can really be questioned,” Rahm said. “You will have to access every aspect of your game to win a championship like this. I think it becomes more of a mental factor, not to overdo it at home. You can never really replicate US Open terms.

Koepka, one of the greatest major tournament golfers ever, admitted that while preparing for a course he played years ago, he had tried to cut out any talk of the deal, and he particularly remembered the presence of the Playboy Mansion on the back nine.

“There are four weeks a year that I really care about and this is one of them and I want to play well so I wasn’t about to waste time on last week’s news,” said Koepka, the LIV star who tied for second at the Masters in April and then won the PGA Championship in May near Rochester, NY

Last Tuesday, he recalled, he saw the news and then went to practice.

After all, the sport itself takes center stage on Thursday, and the questions don’t fade — or go unanswered — this week or next or next week.

“It’s possible it’s a very, very good thing for golf,” Day said. “But I feel like it’s too early to say something like that because you just don’t know where things are going to fall.”

For now, he said, “I’m trying to win a tournament.”

PGA Tour and LIV golfers agree on that – once they stop thinking about last week.