ADMIT IT PGA, FEDEX CUP IS FAILURE
Rearranging schedule won’t make golf fans care about contrived playoff-style format
Quick, what do Brandt Snedeker, Bill Haas and Billy Horschel have in common?
If you are anything other than an ardent golf fan, you probably have no idea. Uh, their first names start with the same letter?
True. Also, they are all winners of the Fedex Cup, the year-end PGA Tour “playoff ” that was envisaged as a thrilling capper to the golf season, but instead has largely been an afterthought.
The golf season has always been defined by the four major championships and occasionally the Ryder Cup, and right now by whenever Tiger Woods has a good week.
When the tour launched the Fedex Cup in 2007 and its Us$10-million prize, it thought it was giving a new structure to its season, with all the events building toward a Super Bowlstyle finish. But everyone still mostly cared about the majors, including the players, which quickly became apparent when some of them skipped Fedex Cup events. Turns out you cannot just declare a tournament to be important and have everyone agree. When Sergio Garcia won the Masters last year and the relief of having finally won a major washed over him, no one thought to ask about the lack of a Fedex Cup win on his resume.
And so, as part of a process that has been in the works for years but was finally unveiled this week, the PGA Tour is blowing up its schedule, moving tournaments all over the place, rewarding some and angering others, all of it with a number of stated goals in mind but mostly because it desperately wants the Fedex Cup to matter. It would have been a lot easier to just admit the original mistake.
The biggest change puts the PGA Championship in May (and the Players Championship back in March), to clear the path for a three-week Fedex Cup in August. The tour has admitted it can’t compete with football in September and so it will stop trying.
For Canadian golf, there is another big move, as reported last week, with the RBC Canadian Open getting out of its dreadful late July date, right after the British Open slot, and moving to early June. Events in Houston and West Virginia will move into the fall, new events are added in Detroit and Minnesota, and the former WGC in Akron, Ohio, has been punted and shifted to Memphis in late July, in the slot formerly held by the Canadian Open. Late July in Memphis could set new records for players sweating through their pants. But as the tour has done all this rearranging to try to solve one problem, it creates new ones. A PGA Championship in May removes large portions of the United States from consideration as a host site, and also Jim Nantz won’t get to call it Glory’s Last Shot anymore. And with the Open Championship the final major in mid-july — it has been moved up a week — there will now be an eight-month gap between it and the Masters in April. In trying to accommodate the Fedex Cup by moving it to a month that might attract more interest from casual golf fans, the tour has compressed the tournaments that casual fans presently care about into a much smaller window.
The reality of the new date for the RBC Canadian Open was also made clear with the release of the full schedule.
While no doubt a better slot than right after the British, the tournament now falls in the middle of a five-week stretch — PGA Championship, Colonial, Memorial, Canadian Open, U.S. Open — that includes two majors.
It will be less of a challenge to attract a top field to cross the border, but it will still be a challenge.
One of the reasons for all this upheaval is Tiger Woods. Or rather, the recent lack of Tiger Woods.
In his long hiatus from relevance, the prominence that he gave to golf in the larger sporting landscape has waned, forcing the tour to consider life without him.
It’s a problem, as evidenced by the surge in television ratings this past spring when he suddenly played himself into contention.
The Fedex Cup might have done well in September with Woods regularly competing in it, but the tour honchos, wisely, are not taking that bet.
Instead, the whole of professional golf has been upended to try to find a way to make the title event of the sport’s single biggest corporate benefactor happy. No one particularly cared if golf had a playoff, but the tour took a reported Us$35-million from Fedex a decade ago and created one anyway. It didn’t take. There have been 11 Fedex champions since its inception and only five of them have been awarded the PGA Tour Player of the Year. The players choose the winner of that award and they care about major wins.
That isn’t about to change, no matter when the Fedex Cup is handed out.
The whole of professional golf has been upended to try to find a way to make the title event of the sport’s single biggest corporate benefactor happy.