Tour should rethink cramped calendar
Winter is just a few short weeks away, and it’s not even August.
If you’re like me, then the coming months stretch out like a long, bleak prison sentence. It’s 254 days until Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player will hobble to the first tee at Augusta National and get golf’s next major championship underway.
But hey, as long as football fans can enjoy their early-season games free from the distractions of other sports, right?
The PGA Tour schedule was rejiggered this year to ensure the FedExCup playoffs are over by September, though fans might need a few more weeks to grasp the ridiculous numerology that will see the points leader begin the Tour Championship at 10-under par before a shot is hit. Thus the PGA Championship shifted from August to May, concluding the major season at Royal Portrush, about three weeks earlier than usual.
That might not seem like much, but it means that golf ’s four most important championships were decided in a span of 101 days. (It would be 129 days if we include The Players Championship, but while I’ve argued that it should be considered a major I’m omitting it from my calculations purely out of pettiness.)
That’s why Justin Rose became the first player to give the new schedule a thumbs down. “It’s too condensed,” he said at Portrush in Northern Ireland. “As a professional in terms of trying to peak for something, the process that’s involved in trying to do that can be detailed and it can be longer than a month.”
The world No. 4 was not persuaded by the rationale for the changes. “A major championship should be the things that are protected the most. That’s how all of our careers ultimately are going to be measured,” he said. “Thirty, forty years ago there wasn’t a FedExCup, so if you’re trying to compare one career to another career, Jack versus Tiger, it’s the majors that are the bench marks.”
Those comments will have been about as welcome as a Cantonese robocall at Tour headquarters. Rose traveled last week from Northern Ireland to Memphis, Tennessee, for the World Golf Championship-FedEx St. Jude Invitational, a tournament that didn’t just lack economy of words in its title. It lacked the winners of the Masters (resting) and the British Open (still celebrating). The WGC will precede the British Open in 2020, but the cramped calendar means Rose will still face another dash: this one from Royal St. George’s to Tokyo, where he’ll defend his Olympic gold medal.
Others could be suspected of voting on the new schedule with their feet. Tiger Woods has been a ghostly presence this summer, playing in just a single regular Tour event since the Masters more than 31⁄2 months ago. Sponsors have reason to be frustrated too. Wyndham backed a $10 million bonus pool to be split among FedExCup points leaders at its regular season-ending tournament in Greensboro, North Carolina, this week. But since the Wyndham Championship falls immediately after a major and a WGC, only one of the top-10 points leaders opted to play. Wyndham’s bonus was essentially decided in Memphis. Just mail ’em the checks, guys.
The Tour Championship ends on Aug. 25, the 237th day of the year. The 120-odd days remaining in 2019 will see the PGA Tour bounce around from Japan to Georgia. For fans drawn to significant tournaments, the acreage unfolding before us is depressingly fallow.
The Fall schedule ought to be more than an opportunity for journeymen to get a head start on FedExCup points before the stars return from vacation at Kapalua in January, but it lacks an anchor event. The Tour created this barren expanse on the calendar to protect the FedExCup playoffs — which is fair enough, since that’s where the bankroll is — and could remedy it by moving The Players to the fall. It won’t happen, of course. Even being the biggest event of the early wraparound season would still be seen as diminishing The Players, and ratings might suffer against the pigskin. So the highlight of our fall will be a broadcast from Royal Melbourne in the middle of the night after all, this one the Presidents Cup.
Since the FedExCup began in 2007, the playoff format has undergone more tweaks than the Kardashians. We can only hope the schedule changes get the same kind of rolling reassessment. A good start would be if the Tour worried about what golf fans want to see, and not football fans.