Changes Beneath The Surface

After a Renovation at Sawgrass, Schedule Switches Might Be on the Way for the Players and the PGA Championship
 

- Jaime Diaz

BIG-TIME PROFESSIONAL GOLF, anchored by the PGA Tour, is an intricately constructed mosaic designed to bring the best players to the best courses for the right tournaments without upending the international circuits that produce an increasing supply of the world’s elite. It’s a marvel of coordination, painstakingly fine-tuned. Somehow, it usually works.

But not perfectly, which is why the whole megillah is under constant assessment and adjustment.

Over the years, some of the biggest tweaks have included the all-exempt tour in 1983, the Official World Golf Ranking in 1986, the World Golf Championships in 1999, the FedEx Cup in 2007 and the wraparound PGA Tour season in 2013-’14.

But for all the improvements, there’s an underlying consensus that the golf season is too long, too crowded, too much the same from event to event, and irregularly paced. It starts at a crawl, crescendos briefly at Augusta before hitting another lull, then has a steady beat from the US Open through the PGA Championship. However, the finale is an anticlimactic blur.

The ending never felt more cluttered than last year, when golf in the Summer Olympics for the first time in 112 years forced a scheduling squeeze culminating in a Rio-to-Ryder Cup rush that, while at times thrilling, was clearly going to be unsustainable for the game’s stars, let alone the rank and file. The 2016-’17 wraparound season began only 11 days after the United States won the cup.