Cite as: 532 U. S. 661 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
To be sure, the waiver of an essential rule of competition for anyone would fundamentally alter the nature of petition-er's tournaments. As we have demonstrated, however, the walking rule is at best peripheral to the nature of petition-er's athletic events, and thus it might be waived in individual cases without working a fundamental alteration. Therefore, petitioner's claim that all the substantive rules for its "highest-level" competitions are sacrosanct and cannot be modified under any circumstances is effectively a contention that it is exempt from Title III's reasonable modification requirement. But that provision carves out no exemption for elite athletics, and given Title III's coverage not only of places of "exhibition or entertainment" but also of "golf course[s]," 42 U. S. C. §§ 12181(7)(C), (L), its application to petitioner's tournaments cannot be said to be unintended or unexpected, see §§ 12101(a)(1), (5). Even if it were, "the fact that a statute can be applied in situations not expressly anticipated by Congress does not demonstrate ambiguity. It demonstrates breadth." Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections v. Yeskey, 524 U. S., at 212 (internal quotation marks omitted).51
51 Hence, petitioner's questioning of the ability of courts to apply the reasonable modification requirement to athletic competition is a complaint more properly directed to Congress, which drafted the ADA's coverage broadly, than to us. Even more misguided is Justice Scalia's suggestion that Congress did not place that inquiry into the hands of the courts at all. According to the dissent, the game of golf as sponsored by petitioner is, like all sports games, the sum of its "arbitrary rules," and no one, including courts, "can pronounce one or another of them to be 'nonessential' if the rulemaker (here the PGA TOUR) deems it to be essential." Post, at 700. Whatever the merit of Justice Scalia's postmodern view of "What Is [Sport]," ibid., it is clear that Congress did not enshrine it in Title III of the ADA. While Congress expressly exempted "private clubs or establishments" and "religious organizations or entities" from Title III's coverage, 42 U. S. C. § 12187, Congress made no such exception for athletic competitions, much less did it give sports organizations carte blanche authority to exempt themselves from the fundamental alteration inquiry by deeming any rule, no matter how peripheral to the competition, to be
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