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J.J. Spaun’s future, favorites at The Open and how Ryder Cup are teams shaping up

by admin June 17, 2025

Mark Schlabach
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Mark Schlabach
ESPN Senior Writer
- Senior college football writer
- Author of seven books on college football
- Graduate of the University of Georgia
Paolo Uggetti

Jun 17, 2025, 08:11 AM ET

OAKMONT, Pa. — The U.S. Open, the third major championship of the season, produced the most unlikely champion in J.J. Spaun, who won in thrilling fashion with back-to-back birdies on the final two holes at Oakmont Country Club on Sunday.

Spaun was the only golfer to finish under par at 1-under 279, and he was the lone survivor on a day when the rain and wind made Oakmont even more treacherous.

The final major championship of the season, the Open Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club in Northern Ireland on July 17-20, is a month away.

Who will be the favorites in The Open? Will Spaun’s unlikely victory propel him to more wins? What about the Ryder Cup?

What do you expect from J.J. Spaun the rest of the season?

J.J. Spaun talks to the media after winning the 2025 U.S. Open. Andrew Redington/Getty Images

Mark Schlabach: Last season, Spaun missed the cut in 10 of his first 15 starts on the PGA Tour and was ranked 169th in the world. He was worried he might lose his tour card.

“Last year in June I was looking like I was going to lose my job, and that was when I had that moment where, ‘If this is how I go out, I might as well go down swinging,” Spaun said.

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Spaun turned things around late in the summer, and he’s been playing some of the best golf of his career this year. He tied for second at the Cognizant Classic in the Palm Beaches in February and lost to Rory McIlroy in a Monday playoff at the Players Championship. He’d been close to adding a second career victory on tour, and he finally got it done at one of the most difficult golf courses in the world.

“I think it’s just perseverance,” Spaun said. “I’ve always kind of battled through whatever it may be to kind of get to where I needed to be and get to what I wanted. I’ve done this before. I’ve had slumps kind of at every level. I’ve always kind of, I went back and said, ‘You’ve done this before. You’ve been down before. You got out of it.’ There’s kind of like a little pattern, so hopefully I don’t do that pattern again.”

Spaun’s competitors weren’t all that surprised that he won the U.S. Open, which is saying something. Although Spaun might not be that familiar of a name to people who don’t follow golf closely, he is considered one of the best ball-strikers in the world. His putter got hot over four days at Oakmont, which is one of the biggest reasons he won.

Paolo Uggetti: While at first glance it may seem like Spaun was a fluke U.S. Open winner, it’s a testament to his evolution as a player that he was able to outlast every person in the field this week.

As his new coach Josh Gregory detailed following the final round, Spaun could have been content just being a middling PGA Tour player — he had $17 million in career earnings prior to this week, after all — but instead he wanted, Gregory said, to be elite.

“It’d be very easy to settle and say what I’m doing works,” Gregory said. “To his credit, he said ‘I need to be better.'”

For Spaun, who has always been an elite ball-striker, that meant working on his putting and his chipping, which Gregory said he has helped with. This week was proof of the work he’s put in, and it will set him up well for the rest of the year. Now, whenever there is a course that prioritizes iron play, Spaun looks like he’ll also be able to rely on converting once he finds the green.

While contending at the final major of the year may be far-fetched given Spaun has never played in the Open, I fully expect Spaun to be in the mix at several PGA Tour events, including the upcoming Tour Championship.

Thoughts on the Ryder Cup after the year’s first three majors?

Schlabach: U.S. Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley was greeted by cheers of “USA! USA!” when he reached the 18th green at Oakmont Country Club on Sunday, and it’s a battle cry he’s going to hear often over the next few months.

Spaun all but secured his Ryder Cup spot by winning the U.S. Open. He’s third in points, trailing only world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and two-time major winner Xander Schauffele. Bryson DeChambeau is fourth, followed by Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa. They’re probably locks to make the team.

Besides Spaun winning, Russell Henley and Ben Griffin were probably the biggest moves at Oakmont. They tied for 10th at 5 over, and they’re now seventh and eighth in Ryder Cup points, respectively.

The top six players in the points standings after the BMW Championship on Aug. 17 will automatically make the team; Bradley will also make six captain’s choices.

Uggetti: I’m certain captain Luke Donald enjoyed seeing Viktor Hovland once again get close to securing his first major title as well as Tyrrell Hatton and even Jon Rahm, who nearly backdoored himself into contention, performing well. They all finished inside the top 10 and will all certainly be at Bethpage even if Rahm and Hovland are currently outside the top-6 in the European rankings at the moment.

Someone who is inside the top-6 is Robert MacIntyre, whose Sunday run to second place helped him score his best-ever finish in a major and bump his name all the way up to fourth in Ryder Cup standings.

MacIntyre was considered the last man two years ago in Rome, but he more than held his own going 2-0-1. On Tour this season, MacIntyre has four top-10 finishes, and that kind of result at a course like Oakmont will certainly strengthen his case and put him in a great position to return to the team in September.

Too-early thoughts on The Open Championship?

Scottie Scheffler didn’t play great the U.S. Open, but still managed to finish T-7. David Cannon/Getty Images

Schlabach: Scheffler battled his swing and his putter for 72 holes at Oakmont, but he managed to tie for seventh at 4 over for another top-10 finish at a major. Even at less than his best, Scheffler is still better than most, and I think the list of golfers who can contend at Royal Portrush starts with the three-time major winner.

“My main takeaway is I battled as hard as I did this week,” Scheffler said. “I was really proud mentally of how I was over the course of four days. I did a lot of things out there that could really kind of break a week, and I never really got that one good break that kind of propels you. I’d hit it this far off, and seemingly every time I did, I was punished pretty severely for it.”

Shane Lowry took home the Claret Jug the last time The Open was played in Northern Ireland in 2019, and I think he’ll be among the favorites again. Lowry struggled mightily in his second straight major and missed the cut after posting 79-78.

Rory McIlroy will be looking for redemption after missing the cut at Royal Portrush five years ago. He still battled his driver a bit at Oakmont but went home with some momentum after posting a 3-under 67 on Sunday. I think he’ll get his mind and swing in the right place before arriving in Northern Ireland.

“Look, if I can’t get motivated to get up for an Open Championship at home, then I don’t know what can motivate me,” McIlroy said. “Yeah, as I said, I just need to get myself in the right frame of mind. I probably haven’t been there the last few weeks.

“But as I said, getting home and having a couple weeks off before that, hopefully feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, will get me in the right place again.”

Uggetti: How about the defending champion making another run at it? With everyone’s eyes on top of the leaderboard Sunday, Xander Schauffele quietly put together an under-par round to finish inside the top 12 at Oakmont.

Slowly but surely, Schauffele’s game has been rounding back into major championship form after he missed some time early in the season with a rib injury. In his last seven starts, Schauffele has five top-15 finishes.

“I’ve never been hurt before. So I think it was all kind of new,” Schauffele said this week. “I felt like I was playing at a pretty high level. Then I got hurt. My expectations of what I knew I could do to where I was were very different, and accepting that was tough. I think that was sort of the biggest wake-up call for me coming back.”

It’s fair to say Schauffele is nearly all the way back and just in time for the second major championship he won last season. The 31-year-old secured the Claret Jug last year at Troon with a marvelous Sunday performance that proved he could excel, not just on PGA Tour setups, but also on links courses with links conditions. Portrush will bring those two things to the stage in a month, and Schauffele will have the benefit of knowing he has won in that kind of environment before.

Besides Spaun, who were the biggest winners at Oakmont?

Schlabach: Viktor Hovland’s swing has been a mess — or at least he believed so — for much of the season, but he managed to get in the mix and finished third at 2 over and in third place. Hovland’s inner battle for perfection might preclude him from joining Scheffler, Schauffele and others as the truly best golfers in the world, but there’s little debate that he’s one of the most talented. Everything is there for him to win a couple of majors, at least.

“I keep progressing in the right direction, and to have a chance to win a major championship without my best stuff and not feeling very comfortable, it’s super cool,” Hovland said. “So I’m going to take a lot of positives with me this week.”

Although Adam Scott would have liked a better finish than Sunday’s 9-over 79, he was right there in the mix until conditions got bad on the second nine. I had believed Scott’s chances of contending in majors were over since he is 44 years old. But this was the first time he’s done it in quite a while, and he still might have something left in the tank to do it again.

Uggetti: I’ll go back to MacIntyre here. The man from Oban looked comfortable in the chaotic conditions Sunday and played the back nine at Oakmont in a bogey-free 2-under to grab the clubhouse lead that nearly got him in a playoff with Spaun.

“I’m just a guy who believes,” MacIntyre said. “Today was a day that I said to myself, ‘Why not? Why not it be me today?'”

All week, the Scotsman putted lights out, ranking fourth in strokes gained: putting and, despite a round of 74 on Friday, kept himself in the tournament that he predicted would have an even par winner.

MacIntyre was almost right.

Once he was finished with his round and he could only watch as Spaun drained the 64-foot birdie to secure a 1-under finishing score and the victory, cameras caught MacIntyre in the scoring room giving Spaun a hearty clap and an earnest “Wow.” It was a human moment that garnered a lot of praise and capped off a week MacIntyre will not soon forget.

“It feels great,” MacIntyre said of being in contention. “It’s what I’ve dreamed of as a kid, sitting back home watching all the majors. Yeah, it feels unbelievable.”

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June 17, 2025 0 comments

SAG-AFTRA files an unfair labor practice for AI Darth Vader in Fortnite

Esports

As AI faces court challenges from Disney and Universal, legal battles are shaping the industry’s future | Opinion

by admin June 13, 2025

In some regards, the past couple of weeks have felt rather reassuring.

We’ve just seen a hugely successful launch for a new Nintendo console, replete with long queues for midnight sales events. Over the next few days, the various summer events and showcases that have sprouted amongst the scattered bones of E3 generated waves of interest and hype for a host of new games.

It all feels like old times. It’s enough to make you imagine that while change is the only constant, at least it’s we’re facing change that’s fairly well understood, change in the form of faster, cheaper silicon, or bigger, more ambitious games.

If only the winds that blow through this industry all came from such well-defined points on the compass. Nestled in amongst the week’s headlines, though, was something that’s likely to have profound but much harder to understand impacts on this industry and many others over the coming years – a lawsuit being brought by Disney and NBC Universal against Midjourney, operators of the eponymous generative AI image creation tool.

In some regards, the lawsuit looks fairly straightforward; the arguments made and considered in reaching its outcome, though, may have a profound impact on both the ability of creatives and media companies (including game studios and publishers) to protect their IP rights from a very new kind of threat, and the ways in which a promising but highly controversial and risky new set of development and creative tools can be used commercially.

A more likely tack on Midjourney’s side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool

I say the lawsuit looks straightforward from some angles, but honestly overall it looks fairly open and shut – the media giants accuse Midjourney of replicating their copyrighted characters and material, and of essentially building a machine for churning out limitless copyright violations.

The evidence submitted includes screenshot after screenshot of Midjourney generating pages of images of famous copyrighted and trademarked characters ranging from Yoda to Homer Simpson, so “no we didn’t” isn’t going to be much of a defence strategy here.

A more likely tack on Midjourney’s side will be the argument that they are not responsible for what their customers create with the tool – you don’t sue the manufacturers of oil paints or canvases when artists use them to paint something copyright-infringing, nor does Microsoft get sued when someone writes something libellous in Word, and Midjourney may try to argue that their software belongs in that tool category, with users alone being ultimately responsible for how they use them.

If that argument prevails and survives appeals and challenges, it would be a major triumph for the nascent generative AI industry and a hugely damaging blow to IP holders and creatives, since it would seriously undermine their argument that AI companies shouldn’t be able to include copyrighted material into training data sets without licensing or compensation.

The reason Disney and NBCU are going after Midjourney specifically seems to be partially down to Midjourney being especially reticent to negotiate with them about licensing fees and prompt restrictions; other generative AI firms have started talking, at least, about paying for content licenses for training data, and have imposed various limitations on their software to prevent the most egregious and obvious forms of copyright violation (at least for famous characters belonging to rich companies; if you’re an individual or a smaller company, it’s entirely the Wild West out there as regards your IP rights).

In the process, though, they’re essentially risking a court showdown over a set of not-quite-clear legal questions at the heart of this dispute, and if Midjourney were to prevail in that argument, other AI companies would likely back off from engaging with IP holders on this topic.

To be clear, though, it seems highly unlikely that Midjourney will win that argument, at least not in the medium to long term. Yet depending on how this case moves forward, losing the argument could have equally dramatic consequences – especially if the courts find themselves compelled to consider the question of how, exactly, a generative AI system reproduces a copyrighted character with such precision without storing copyright-infringing data in some manner.

The 2020s are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once

AI advocates have been trying to handwave around this notion from the outset, but at some point a court is going to have to sit down and confront the fact that the precision with which these systems can replicate copyrighted characters, scenes, and other materials requires that they must have stored that infringing material in some form.

That it’s stored as a scattered mesh of probabilities across the vertices of a high-dimensional vector array, rather than a straightforward, monolithic media file, is clearly important but may ultimately be considered moot. If the data is in the system and can be replicated on request, how that differs from Napster or The Pirate Bay is arguably just a matter of technical obfuscation.

Not having to defend that technical argument in court thus far has been a huge boon to the generative AI field; if it is knocked over in that venue, it will have knock-on effects on every company in the sector and on every business that uses their products.

Nobody can be quite sure which of the various rocks and pebbles being kicked on this slope is going to set off the landslide, but there seems to be an increasing consensus that a legal and regulatory reckoning is coming for generative AI.

Consequently, a lot of what’s happening in that market right now has the feel of companies desperately trying to establish products and lock in revenue streams before that happens, because it’ll be harder to regulate a technology that’s genuinely integrated into the world’s economic systems than it is to impose limits on one that’s currently only clocking up relatively paltry sales and revenues.

Keeping an eye on this is crucial for any industry that’s started experimenting with AI in its workflows – none more than a creative industry like video games, where various forms of AI usage have been posited, although the enthusiasm and buzz so far massively outweighs any tangible benefits from the technology.

Regardless of what happens in legal and regulatory contexts, AI is already a double-edged sword for any creative industry.

Used judiciously, it might help to speed up development processes and reduce overheads. Applied in a slapdash or thoughtless manner, it can and will end up wreaking havoc on development timelines, filling up storefronts with endless waves of vaguely-copyright-infringing slop, and potentially make creative firms, from the industry’s biggest companies to its smallest indie developers, into victims of impossibly large-scale copyright infringement rather than beneficiaries of a new wave of technology-fuelled productivity.

The legal threat now hanging over the sector isn’t new, merely amplified. We’ve known for a long time that AI generated artwork, code, and text has significant problems from the perspective of intellectual property rights (you can infringe someone else’s copyright with it, but generally can’t impose your own copyright on its creations – opening careless companies up to a risk of having key assets in their game being technically public domain and impossible to protect).

Even if you’re not using AI yourself, however – even if you’re vehemently opposed to it on moral and ethical grounds (which is entirely valid given the highly dubious land-grab these companies have done for their training data), the Midjourney judgement and its fallout may well impact the creative work you produce yourself and how it ends up being used and abused by these products in future.

This all has huge ramifications for the games business and will shape everything from how games are created to how IP can be protected for many years to come – a wind of change that’s very different and vastly more unpredictable than those we’re accustomed to. It’s a reminder of just how much of the industry’s future is currently being shaped not in development studios and semiconductor labs, but rather in courtrooms and parliamentary committees.

The ways in which generative AI can be used and how copyright can persist in the face of it will be fundamentally shaped in courts and parliaments, but it’s far from the only crucially important topic being hashed out in those venues.

The ongoing legal turmoil over the opening up of mobile app ecosystems, too, will have huge impacts on the games industry. Meanwhile, the debates over loot boxes, gambling, and various consumer protection aspects related to free-to-play models continue to rumble on in the background.

Because the industry moves fast while governments move slow, it’s easy to forget that that’s still an active topic for as far as governments are concerned, and hammers may come down at any time.

Regulation by governments, whether through the passage of new legislation or the interpretation of existing laws in the courts, has always loomed in the background of any major industry, especially one with strong cultural relevance. The games industry is no stranger to that being part of the background heartbeat of the business.

The 2020s, however, are turning out to be the decade in which many key regulatory issues come to a head all at once, whether it’s AI and copyright, app stores and walled gardens, or loot boxes and IAP-based business models.

Rulings on those topics in various different global markets will create a complex new landscape that will shape the winds that blow through the business, and how things look in the 2030s and beyond will be fundamentally impacted by those decisions.

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June 13, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Switch 2 Is Shaping Up To Be A Much Better Port Machine

by admin May 29, 2025

I hope all of you are ready for a lot of PS4, PS5, and Xbox ports arriving on Switch 2 over the next few months, because that seems to be our future. For folks who primarily play on Switch and soon Switch 2, it will be a chance to play a lot of great games that were too much for the OG console to handle, or which arrived via less-than-stellar ports. For everyone else, well, that new Donkey Kong game looks cool…

Nintendo Switch 2 Could Launch With Almost No Reviews

The $450 Nintendo Switch 2 is nearly here, though some people already have their hands on the console ahead of its June 5 launch. Its launch lineup isn’t horrible, but it’s nothing too impressive either. It mainly features a handful of new, exclusive games, like Mario Kart World, and some upgraded versions of OG Switch games. But the majority of the Switch 2’s launch lineup is ports like Cyberpunk 2077. And that’s because, unlike the old Switch, Nintendo’s new machine is actually going to be able to run these games without compromising visuals and features.

Looking at the launch lineup for June 5, of the 25 or so games arriving on day one, about 10 of them are ports of old games that didn’t arrive on the original Switch. Stuff like the previously mentioned Cyberpunk 2077, Street Fighter 6, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and Split Fiction. Then there are some Switch 2 ports that are replacing or upgrading older Switch ports, including Civilization 7, Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, and Hitman: World of Assassination, which was only available as a cloud-powered streaming game on the old machine. There are also ports that are coming after launch, like Star Wars Outlaws in September.

It’s not surprising that a big chunk of games announced for Switch 2 so far are ports of older titles. The original Switch got plenty of ports during its run, but most AAA games were chopped up and squished onto the aging hardware, resulting in some really ugly conversions.

Sure, some of these games, like Doom (2016), ran mostly fine and looked okay on Nintendo’s hybrid console, but there was always this feeling when playing these ports that the Switch hardware was being pushed to its limits. And then, when the PS5 and Xbox Series X arrived on the scene in 2020, games started targeting the more powerful hardware, and Switch ports became harder to pull off. As a result, we got some truly gnarly versions of great-looking games. Remember Mortal Kombat 1 on Switch? Yikes.

In the last few years, fewer and fewer big games have been making the leap to Switch, primarily because the hardware is so old and outdated that they would be impossible to pull it off, or you’d have to compromise the visuals and performance so much that it wouldn’t be worth it.

So the Switch 2 is a big deal for a lot of publishers who have been unable to bring some of their recent games to Nintendo’s audience, which is often cited as a group of people hungry for new content. And for players, it means they’ll receive some fantastic-looking ports.

As recently pointed out by Digital Foundry, Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2 looks as good (and sometimes better) than the open-world game running on an Xbox Series S or PS4. That’s thanks in large part to DLSS, but also the guts of the Switch 2 are just significantly better than those of the Switch. There is more power inside this new console, and that’s going to be good news for devs, publishers, and players.

All of this does mean that the Switch 2 will likely end up being something of a port machine as publishers race to get their big games running on the new console. That might be annoying for people who buy Nintendo consoles for exclusives and unique experiences, but with Mario Kart World, Metroid Prime 4, and Donkey Kong Bananza on the way, we can feel pretty confident that we’ll get plenty of those games, too. They’ll just be the outliers among a ton of nice-looking PS5 and Xbox ports.

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May 29, 2025 0 comments