The PGA Tour is in the Boston area this Labor Day weekend for the second round of the Fed Ex Cup playoff series with the playing of the Deutsche Bank Championship. What initially started last week as the low 125 golfers with Fed Ex Cup points has now downsized to the top 100 golfers. At next week”s BMW Championship, the field will include the low 70, and the final week”s Tour Championship will be a cash grab for the low 30 professional golfers with an added bonus pool of $35 million. It”s a good time of the year to get hot and to make a tidy sum of money toward the old retirement account or the new Lear Jet.
Plans for the Fed Ex Cup playoff series were first announced during the 2005 and 2006 seasons. They have been a part of the PGA Tour”s landscape since 2007 and are the model for the European Tour”s season-concluding Race to Dubai. During the past five years of its existence, the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and the $10 million first-place bonus has gone to Tiger Woods in 2007 and 2009, Vijay Singh in 2008, Jim Furyk in 2010, and Bill Haas last year.
While Fed Ex Cup point accumulation is right up there on the confusion scale with quarterback ratings and tennis rankings, Haas” sudden-death overtime win last September over Hunter Mahan was nothing short of great golf drama. Haas” up and down from a watery lie not only garnered him the Tour Championship, but it also vaulted him into the top spot on the Fed Ex Cup standings. This time around, Tim Finchem and the rest of the PGA Tour brain trust has gotten it right.
When the concept of the Fed Ex Cup playoff series was first announced some seven years ago, I was not exactly the first golf writer to jump on the bandwagon. I remain strongly of the opinion that the bigwigs of the PGA Tour often showed little loyalty to long-time tournaments and communities that have supported professional golf in the best of times, and more noticeably, in the worst of times.
Locating the Fed Ex Cup playoffs to late August and September meant a radical overhaul of the PGA Tour”s traditional schedule. There were lots of hard feelings as the 84 Lumber Classic and the International closed their doors. Tournaments in Las Vegas, Sea Island and Disney World were relegated to B-status Fall Finish Series, and other events had to deal with radical schedule changes. The Hartford tourney went from the last week of August to the week after the United States Open in June. The long-running Texas Open, a fixture on the PGA Tour since 1922, was moved from mid-September to the cluttered Texas Swing in May. The Canadian Open, first contested in 1904, moved from early September to the week after the British Open in July.
Most dramatically, the Western Open, the tour”s third-oldest running event after the British Open and the United States Open, moved off its Fourth of July spot on the tour. First contested in 1899, it had its name changed to the BMW Championship. No longer a full-field PGA Tour event that was a good prelude to the British Open, the all-new BMW became the third of four Fed Ex Cup playoff events, played in September during the start of the college and professional football seasons.
The other aspect of the Western Open changing its name, date and format was a geographical one. Contested exclusively in the Chicago area since 1962, the BMW now rotates throughout the Midwest. It has been played at Bellerive in St. Louis, Cog Hill in the Chicago area, and this year it will be contested at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis. Next year it visits Conway Farms in the western Chicago suburbs.
The one positive from the changeover from the Western Open to the BMW Championship and from the Chicago area to other Midwestern cities, is that the tournament”s main charity, the Chick Evans Foundation administered by the Western Golf Association, remains intact. Evans was a lifetime amateur golfer who won the Western Open at Chicago”s Beverly Country Club in 1910, and doubled up with victories in the 1916 United States Open at Minikahda as well as the 1916 United States Amateur at Merion (site of next year”s U.S. Open). His foundation provides college scholarship to caddies throughout the country and has Evans Scholars Houses on some 15 college campuses.
Also, to be journalistically sound, the Texas Open, the Canadian Open and the Western Open not only have long histories, but they also have a myriad of locations on the calendar over the years. The Western Open hasn”t always been contested during the Fourth of July holiday weekend nor has the Canadian Open always had a September date.
Nonetheless, time does heal most wounds, and although some locales still harbor some resentment and hard feelings about the way the schedule changes were handled, professional golf and the PGA Tour are better served under this new, improved format. Most importantly, the PGA Tour is relevant through the end of September. Prior to the 2007 season and the introduction of the Fed Ex Cup playoff series, professional golf was pretty much an afterthought when that final putt dropped into the cup at the PGA Championship in mid-August.
The game”s top professional such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson often blew off the final 10 weeks of the season, showing up occasionally for a World Golf Championship event. Even though they were ranked among golf”s top 30, there were occasions when Woods and Mickelson didn”t even enter the season concluding Tour Championship contested during the last week of October. Nowadays, the top professionals extend their seasons into late September, and the caliber of the fields are super strong.
More changes are afoot for the PGA Tour as they get ready to sunset Q School as we know it and begin the season in the latter portion of the year, similar to how things are done on the European Tour. While you, like me, may not understand how someone like Nick Watney jumps from 49th place to first place in the course of 72 holes, and certainly can”t explain how this birdie putt moves someone up to 80th place or down to 92nd place, the game is a whole lot more interesting to watch during the month of September.
