It should not be this hard to like golf.

Even if you can chuckle at a golf company putting a YouTube channel logo on a driver and charging $700, accept that the polo in the pro shop can easily cost upwards of $100, rationalize the cost and hassle of the trip to the top-tier golf resort, or nap your way through umpteen “playing through” commercial breaks on the Sunday afternoon broadcast, at least live professional golf has generally been good.

You walk around or find a good spot and take a seat. And either way, you see the best players in the world in competition closer than just about any other sport can offer. Most of the time it’s an excellent value — I can buy a ticket right now for Sunday at the 2025 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club outside of Pittsburgh for $185.

That would not get me past the gates on Tuesday at the 2025 Ryder Cup, three full days before the competition actually begins. And if I actually wanted to see Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm and the rest of the best players in the world in an alternate shot match? The PGA of America has made it beyond the limits of most golf fans.

A single ticket for each match day at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in New York will cost $749.51.

Seven hundred and forty-nine dollars and 51 cents. For one ticket. For one day.

It’s beyond. It just is. I do not want to hear about supply and demand, or how much tickets go for on the resale sites. Rory McIlroy is not Taylor Swift, and face value for tickets to her shows is nowhere near that high.

That’s four times the prices at the last U.S.-hosted Ryder Cup, at Whistling Straits in 2021. It’s $255.27 to attend practice days, and $423.64 for Thursday’s practice round, opening ceremony and celebrity competition. Has the PGA of America gone mad?

They rationalize that these tickets are actually Ryder Cup+ tickets, a marketing ploy that means I can get all the food and non-alcoholic drinks I desire. How good are these hot dogs if I have to pay an extra $500 for them? And can you bring a case of them around to the parking lot? Because I’ll need to bring them home to feed the family for a while. Throw in some buns, yes.

It will cost a family of four $3000 to attend the Ryder Cup. I’m not arguing everything should be for everyone, but that feels excessive, no?

I expect the crowd at Bethpage Black, as a result, to be a bizarre mix. On one hand, it’ll be overly corporate, because those charge cards don’t blink. Those fans also do not care what’s happening on the course, because they’re more concerned with making deals under the tents. Then you’ll have the crowd that has scraped together the cash to get in, and feels that paying $1,000 (once you include parking, merchandise and alcoholic drinks) entitles them to do and say anything they damn well please. Should be fun!

Normal golf fans are outraged. They should be. We have put up with years of bickering and lawsuits, and desperate decisions that aided bank accounts and made the product worse. Purses have never been higher, but the same can be said for the costs of sponsoring and airing a PGA Tour event. That means more commercials and less golf shots, and we wonder why TV ratings are down week to week.

But at least the live product was good. It still is — if you live near a pro golf stop on any tour, you should go. You’ll probably enjoy it.

But the Ryder Cup is the Ryder Cup. It’s the only event we have that can rival the Masters, and it brings out a sense of nationalism in all of us. The stakes feel so high that the anticipation for every shot is heightened, and the atmosphere around that first tee box can take your breath away.

I hope you can experience it one day. I hope you’ve been lucky enough to be able to go to Bethpage and not worry about the cost. But if you can’t, I hope what has been done here is only an outlier, and not a sign of what is to come.

(Top photo: Alex Burstow / Getty Images)

Cooper Kupp was limited in practice again Thursday. If the Rams star receiver’s left ankle is fully recovered by this weekend, he could play Sunday against the Las Vegas Raiders at SoFi Stadium.

Coach Sean McVay is expected to update Kupp’s status Friday.

Offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur said Thursday that it was good to have Kupp back on the practice field.

“His energy, his presence, I know the guys feel it,” LaFleur said.

Kupp, the 2021 NFL offensive player of the year, went into this season having appeared to put behind the hamstring and ankle injuries that plagued him the previous two seasons. He caught 14 passes for 110 yards and a touchdown in the opener against the Detroit Lions before he was injured in a Week 2 rout by the Arizona Cardinals.

Kupp was sidelined the last three games — a victory over the San Francisco 49ers and defeats by the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers. The Rams are 1-4, so Kupp’s return could buoy a team attempting to avoid early elimination from playoff contention.

“There’s just a calming presence when a guy like Cooper Kupp’s on the field, right?” LaFleur said. “He’s been there. He’s done that. He’s played at a high level since he’s got in this league. So anytime he’s out on the field, we’re going to be a better offense.”

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An earlier version of this article misidentified the manager in 2015 for Taylor Swift as Scooter Braun.

As Formula One returns to Austin, Texas, for this weekend’s United States Grand Prix, one of the sport’s other American venues is also occupied with a major event.

Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, the centerpiece for the grand prix held at the start of May, will be used for three nights of Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour, which begins its final stretch of North American dates this week.

Both F1 and Swift have experienced extraordinary surges of popularity in recent years in very different realms. But eight years ago, they shared top billing at the Circuit of The Americas.

The 2015 event, at which Swift played a concert on the Saturday night after qualifying, proved to be critical for the future of the United States Grand Prix, a race that has since been the cornerstone of F1’s rapid American growth.

“It was a big-dollar commitment at the time, and it paid off,” COTA chairman Bobby Epstein told The Athletic. “We’re grateful to Taylor for taking the chance.”

F1’s current foothold of three American races would have been unthinkable a decade ago when holding one grand prix stateside was a considerable achievement. There had been a five-year absence for F1 in America between the final event at Indianapolis in 2007 and its return in 2012 at COTA, the first purpose-built facility for the sport in the United States.

COTA quickly became one of the drivers’ favorite tracks thanks to its challenging, undulating layout, and it was popular with fans. The first year pulled in a Friday to Sunday race weekend attendance of 265,000 — which looks small compared to the 2022 record of 440,000, reported by F1 — as crowds flocked to see the sport’s return to the United States. Even with a calendar fixture toward the end of each season, giving the potential of seeing a race that could influence the crucial part of a championship battle, there was a struggle to build greater interest. The weekend figures dropped to 250,000 for 2013 and lower still to 237,000 in 2014.

But the 2015 race left serious doubts over the future of the grand prix in Austin. As Hurricane Patricia brought record rainfall and high winds to Austin, FP2 was canceled, and qualifying was postponed to Sunday morning after three hours of rain delays. After long waits at the track hoping to see some on-track action, the disappointed fans had to contend with the grass parking lots turning into mud baths, making getting in and out of the track challenging.

Sunday’s grand prix went ahead on schedule as Lewis Hamilton clinched his third world championship, but weekend attendance dipped to a low of just 224,000, leading to concerns about the event’s popularity.

There was also a fresh challenge to fund the United States Grand Prix. In the weeks after the race, Governor Greg Abbott’s office announced it would cut $6 million in state funding for the grand prix. Bernie Ecclestone, then F1’s CEO, admitted at the time that it looked challenging to see a future for the race in Austin.

It left Epstein and his team looking for new ways to boost the event’s fortunes if they wanted to help secure the long-term future of F1’s only American grand prix.

“We had a lot of people very upset about the experience they had with the rain and the mud, and we needed to make it up to them,” Epstein said. “We put in a lot of sidewalks, and we paved a lot of parking lots, and we got a lot more buses. But on top of it, we wanted to do better and offer more.”

That is where Taylor Swift came into the picture.

Austin’s reputation as a music city meant adding concerts to the race weekend offering had always been a big part of COTA’s identity. Kid Rock and Elton John were among the first headliners, but as plans came together for 2016, Epstein and his team looked for the biggest star possible.

Epstein contacted Swift’s team, wanting to see if she would be interested in being the 2016 race headliner. Swift had no performances scheduled for the year, having spent the entirety of 2015 on her “1989” album world tour.

If any diehard Swifties were desperate to see her in concert that year, they would have to go to the F1 race. Suddenly, a United States Grand Prix ticket became much more valuable. A three-day general admission ticket started at $150 and would include access to the concert.

“We remember the massive amount of criticism we took from the race fans when we said we were going to bring in a performer like that, that it was taking attention away from the racing,” Epstein said.

Ecclestone was among those to share some concern, semi-jokingly asking Epstein if he should even bother to bring the F1 cars to COTA.

After watching Hamilton lead a Mercedes front row lockout in qualifying on Saturday, 80,000 fans stayed well into the evening at the track to watch Swift’s show from the infield, making it — at the time — one of her highest-attended shows. The 15-song set mainly featured songs from “1989” and “Red,” and there was no new material, but it did have a first performance of “This Is What You Came For,” a song that Swift wrote for Calvin Harris and Rihanna.

The concert received rave reviews. Billboard called it a “knockout performance,” while Rolling Stone said, “it showed no drop off or rust from a star determined to remain one of the biggest names in music for a long time to come.” How true that would prove.

Swift closed out the set with “Shake It Off,” which fit the mood of COTA’s weekend. After all the struggles of the previous year, it had drawn a record crowd of almost 270,000 fans who enjoyed good weather and good music on top of the racing action. It was an important bounce-back after the 2016 washout, proving that F1 had a bright future in Austin.

It also helped draw in a very different demographic of attendees as younger fans, more women and more families attended. “When we look back, we feel validated for the vision that this group had to do that and offer more to the race fan and allow them to bring family members,” Epstein said. “You can give a very full amount of entertainment, and not at all compromise the quality of the on-track action. You don’t have to take anything away from the race by giving more to the fans.”

The change in F1’s fan demographic to become younger and more diverse has been a core part of its recent growth, particularly in the “Drive to Survive” era. But Epstein felt COTA had been ahead of the curve thanks to its off-track offerings.

“I don’t know if we’re given any credit for it, but we’ll take it because it’s true,” he said. “We started (it), we did. We got a much younger audience starting to watch and pay attention to that, because of Taylor, Justin Timberlake (the 2018 headliner), and Ed Sheeran (2022).

“You start looking at some of those, and that’s who was paying attention to those artists, with Instagram and things that people post on, it very quickly reaches that demographic and that generation.”

Fans explored the track during qualifying as they waited for the Taylor Swift concert. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

COTA’s model of having a huge headliner perform on a race weekend has become common in F1. Under Liberty Media, which completed its acquisition of F1 in early 2017, grands prix have now been turned into multi-day events where the off-track entertainment is a big part of its offering to fans.

However, even with the addition of new American events in Miami and Las Vegas, each of which has its own appeal, the concerts have remained a big part of the United States Grand Prix’s identity in Austin. Sting will headline on Friday before Eminem performs on Saturday night. Like Swift in 2016, it will be his only live show of the year.

Epstein expected that with changes made at the track to allow even more fans to attend, it would likely break Swift’s record at COTA and draw in a crowd of 100,000 people.

“It’s a fun event to play, just the way that the whole setting is,” Epstein said. “I think the agents and the performers know about it now. It has credibility, and it’s something that they want to be named the headliner for the United States Grand Prix.

“Playing at the halftime of the Super Bowl is a pretty well-recognized honor for performers. I think playing the US Grand Prix is also an honor.”

With more than 12 months until the 2025 race — which will mark 10 years since F1’s low point in Austin, when the future of the sport in the United States looked to be in doubt once again — Epstein is already engaged in conversations about the next headliners. He said getting a big name was “somewhat expected of us.”

“I know the conversations we’re having for 2025,” he said. “I’m pretty excited about it.”

Top photo: Sipa USA