Rory McIlroy has won his sixth Race to Dubai title after triumphing in the season-ending DP World Tour Championship.

The 35-year-old has now won three successive Race to Dubai crowns and his sixth overall — previously winning in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2022 and 2023 — to match the record of golfing legend Seve Ballesteros on the European tour.

McIlroy entered the season-closing tournament with a 1,785-point lead over closest challenger Thriston Lawrence, who needed to win the DP World Tour Championship and hope McIlroy finished outside the top 11 in Dubai if he were to win.

McIlroy won the trophy ahead of the South African by finishing two strokes ahead of Denmark’s Rasmus Hojgaard on 15-under at Jumeirah Golf Estates as he shot a three-under-par 69 in his final round. Hojgaard was level with McIlroy with four holes left to play but a superb approach shot allowed the Northern Irishman to birdie the 16th and pull ahead of the Dane, who then missed a birdie putt on the 18th before McIlroy sealed the win with one of his own.

“It means a lot because I have been through a lot this year, professionally and personally,” McIlroy told Sky Sports.

“It feels like the fitting end to 2024; there have been a lot of close calls where I haven’t been able to get it over the line, but this was a tough day when I could get the job done.”

McIlroy’s Race to Dubai win comes after he looked to be on the cusp of ending his 10-year wait for a major in June, but struggled in his final round at the US Open and lost to the American Bryson DeChambeau by one shot.

When asked about equaling the Race to Dubai record held by the late Ballesteros, McIlroy became visibly tearful as he explained the significance.

“Everyone knows what Seve means to European golf and Ryder Cup players,” he said.

“In the European locker room, all we have are quotes from Seve — we have a changing room with a Seve shirt from ’95, the last Ryder Cup he played.

“He means so much to European golf and for me to be mentioned in the same breath as him…I’m very proud.”

GO DEEPER

McIlroy: Donald Trump’s election ‘clears the way’ for PGA Tour-PIF deal

(Richard Heathcote / Getty Images)

UFC star Jim Miller expressed hope that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will help clean up the government a bit after his win at UFC 309.

Miller, who has the most wins as a UFC fighter with 27 wins, spoke to Joe Rogan after his victory over Damon Jackson at Madison Square Garden. He called for justice for Peanut the Squirrel.

“New York, I got one thing to say first – we need justice for Peanut. It’s not just a squirrel,” Miller explained. “It’s all the kids that went hungry that night and all the other things the money and resources could have been put to.

“Hopefully, that DOGE will clean things up at the state level.”

The animal, which became an internet sensation, was killed after a raid earlier this month.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation seized Peanut and a raccoon named Fred from owner Mark Longo’s home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, earlier this week. 

Peanut the Squirrel, who had over 500,000 followers on Instagram, was euthanized by New York State officials earlier this month. (peanut_the_squirrel12 via Instagram)

TRUMP THANKS DANA WHITE, UFC FANS FOR RAUCOUS WELCOME AT MSG

The agency, which said it had received complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally, then euthanized the critters, to the horror of Longo and about 550,000 of Peanut’s best friends.

The incident sparked outrage just ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.

X CEO Elon Musk reacted to Miller’s words on the social media platform.

The billionaire was at Madison Square Garden with the president-elect and other cabinet nominees. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were tapped to lead DOGE.

Ramaswamy outlined the initiative for DOGE in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.” He wants to bring “sweeping change” and “as early and as quickly as possible.”

“The failures of the executive branch need to be addressed because the dirty little secret right now is the people we elect to run the government, they’re not the ones who actually run the government. It’s the unelected bureaucrats in the administrative state that was created through executive action. It’s going to be fixed through executive action,” he said.

Elon Musk speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“Think about the Supreme Court’s environment. Over the last several years, they’ve held that many of those regulations are unconstitutional at a large scale. Rescind those regulations, pull those regs back, and then that gives us the industrial logic to then downsize the size of that administrative state. And the beauty of all of this is that can be achieved just through executive action without Congress. Score some early wins, and then you look at those bigger portions of the federal budget that need to be addressed one by one.” 

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When Amazon Prime Video became an exclusive partner with the NFL in 2022 — the first time a streaming service received a full, exclusive package of NFL games — the buzzword in the sports media industry was “proof of concept.” Though Amazon had worked with NFL Network and Fox on “Thursday Night Football” starting in 2017, one of the biggest questions the streamer faced when it started its 11-year run as the exclusive broadcaster of TNF was whether it could handle the audience load. Would the streaming hold up? Would the product look and feel like an NFL broadcast? You can disagree on the choice of broadcasters, graphics, music — these are all subjective things. But what is not subjective is accessibility.

Amazon Prime Video’s NFL debut in September 2022 — an exciting 27-24 win for the Kansas City Chiefs over the Los Angeles Chargers — was a mix of beautiful images and mild anger over tech issues that dissipated very quickly through the opening weeks of the season. Sure, the broadcasters might have pushed hard to sell the audience the 20-year-old Mazda regarding the schedule, but the company passed the proof-of-concept test. My former colleague Bill Shea captured that opening broadcast, and today we don’t see discussions about buffering or tech issues about Amazon’s NFL presentation. Latency can be problematic for live sports if the stream is more than a few seconds behind the real-time action, but Amazon has been very good here.

This was all front of mind Friday as Netflix aired multiple hours of pro boxing from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. Jake Paul and Mike Tyson were the headline act, and it was not a great moment for sporting excellence. The Paul-Tyson bout was horrible, and so was the streaming experience for many viewers. As my colleague Tess DeMeyer chronicled, viewers were plagued by frequent bouts of buffering and freezing. There were technical issues in the broadcast, with Evander Holyfield’s earpiece and Jerry Jones’ microphone malfunctioning during separate interviews. (As wryly noted on X by Fox Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill, there was great irony in Jones’ praising Netflix’s future with the NFL as viewers experienced tech issues.)

Streaming issues of course vary depending on multiple factors, including internet connectivity. But there were loads of viewers who experienced problems Friday night, including The Athletic’s own media writer, Andrew Marchand, who updated his followers on Bluesky on the error message he was receiving.

Netflix has over 280 million subscribers in more than 190 countries including Canada, where I watched from Friday night. I struggled to get access to the streamer for a couple of minutes before the sensational Amanda Serrano-Katie Taylor bout (Serrano was robbed, it says here) and had moments of buffering throughout; I was clean for the whole Tyson-Paul event. Social media was lit with complaints. (The website Down Detector noted nearly 85,000 viewers logged problems with outages or streaming leading up to the fight, per the CBC.) It’s the worst kind of publicity for Netflix, which declined to comment. An NFL spokesperson had not responded as of publication.

This isn’t the first live sports rodeo for Netflix. It aired an F1-golf crossover event last November and a tennis match between Carlos Alcaraz and Rafael Nadal in March. Those were successful. What was a disaster was the live reunion in April 2023 to the conclusion of the fourth season of the reality dating show “Love Is Blind,” when users were unable to access the stream. Netflix issued an apology to viewers and an apology during an earnings call.

But the big one for Netflix is coming Christmas Day, given it landed exclusive rights to stream two NFL games — the Chiefs against the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens versus the Houston Texans. The three-season deal also includes a game on Christmas Day in 2025 and 2026. The game production will not be an issue as CBS is handling that, and the NFL Network is charged with pregame, halftime and postgame coverage. Neither of those entities has a role in transmission and streaming; that’s on Netflix, and it’s under six weeks until kickoff.

The Tyson-Paul fight was ultimately sports entertainment. Even Netflix’s recent deal with WWE — paying more than $5 billion for exclusive rights to the long-running “Raw” franchise, along with other rights outside the U.S. — could be tagged as sports-adjacent given WWE falls under sports entertainment. But the NFL matters to those that fuel weekly sports consumption in North America, and these matchups would easily draw more than 25-plus million on a traditional outlet in the United States. The NFL desperately wants Netflix to work as a partner because Netflix represents a multiple-decade ATM for it. Netflix needs it to work because it sees advertising as part of its long-term ambition for sustainable earning sources, and live sports can be a driver there. The NFL has an international slate of games it can easily turn into a future media rights package, and you know it wants Netflix at the table for that. Netflix executives announced this week they had sold out of advertising inventory for the games. It’s a big deal in the sports business world.

The NFL wants to put on a show far more entertaining than Tyson-Paul, and you can be sure Friday night spooked league officials a bit. Given the trajectory of the four teams playing Christmas Day, the games are shaping up to be of serious consequence for playoff seeding. There is money and reputation at stake, and you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. Both entities will be crushed by NFL fans if Christmas brings buffering and dropped streams.

(Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)