The big boys on the PGA Tour are in Indianapolis this week competing in stage three of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs at the Crooked Stick Golf Course. Crooked Stick is a Pete Dye course that will always be a footnote in golf history, the site of an unknown John Daly and his totally unbelievable triumph in the 1991 PGA Championship. Nowadays, Crooked Stick is part of a rotation of courses that host the BMW Championship, once known as the Western Open.
After this week, the tour cuts playoff participation down to the final 30 golfers who head to Atlanta’s East Lake County Club, the home course of amateur great Bobby Jones, for the big-money Tour Championship and conclusion of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs. With barely a moment to take a breath, the biennial Ryder Cup Matches commence the following week at Hazeltine in the Minneapolis area. At that point, professional golf’s 2015-16 season comes to its conclusion. With barely a moment to recoup, the 2016-17 PGA Tour campaign begins a mere 11 days later at the Silverado Resort’s North Course in Napa.
The wraparound golf season has been a relatively new development. The traditional golf calendar used to run from early January through late October, but the glitch in the scheduling was the fact that the game’s big names pretty much called it a year after the PGA Championship in August. The Fed Ex Cup playoffs made for relevant golf through the month of September, but there were still those B-level events in October in places such as Las Vegas, Sea Island, Annadale and Disney World that attracted the most minor of fields. The October tourneys were a tough sell for the tournament directors and sponsors as well as the fans and volunteers at those sites. The wraparound schedule with its newfound official money and official Fed Ex points made the October tournaments much more attractive.
Nonetheless, the big guns were still more likely than not to avoid Sea Island and Las Vegas. After all, you can’t play in all 44 tour events, and the autumn seemed like a good time for some of the game’s top stars to recharge their golfing batteries. Even with the wraparound schedule, past winners of the fall events during the past two seasons included the likes of Sang Moon Bae, Ben Martin, Nick Taylor, Charley Hoffman, Robert Streb, Emiliano Grillo, Smylie Kaufman, Justin Thomas, Peter Malnati and Kevin Kisner. For some linksters such as Grillo and Kisner, their victories at Silverado and Sea Island just might be the kick-start to a long career. For others such as journeyman Charley Hoffman at Mayakoba, it was a way to regain exempt status on tour. Nonetheless, there has been very little that would make one compare Annadale or Vegas with Arnold Palmer’s Bay Hill or the Memorial and its host Jack Nicklaus.
However, the big golf news this week has a direct impact on the B-level event at Silverado, which commences in slightly less than five weeks on Oct. 13. After a 14-month hiatus from the PGA Tour because of issues ranging from multiple back surgeries to the chipping yips, former world No. 1 golfer Tiger Woods has announced he will commit to playing at Silverado next month. Phil Mickelson has already decided to tee it up at Silverado and the word on the street is that Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy is considering entering the Safeway Open at Silverado as well. All of a sudden, the folks at Silverado will need to contemplate a much greater gate as well as more demands from the media for space and access.
From the moment he turned professional in the fall of 1996 through his victory in the United States Open at Torrey Pines in 2008, Tiger was the game’s dominant player as well as its dominant personality. His victory in June of 2008 at Torrey was his 14th major championship victory and put him front and center for eclipsing Jack Nicklaus’ mark of 18 major titles as well as Sam Snead’s record of 81 PGA Tour wins. Yet since his 2008 National Open win, Woods has undergone knee surgeries, a tabloid-fueled marital scandal and divorce, a tell-all book by his former swing coach, multiple back surgeries, and head-scratching incidences such as his quest to become a Navy Seal as well as his battle with the chipping yips.
The two main questions about Tiger that only time will tell involve his willingness to return to the game with the same work and practice ethic he had during his prime as well as the chances of success for a soon-to-be 41-year-old professional golfer. Tiger is returning to a world of professional golf that includes a whole new generation of 20-somethings such as Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Rory McIlory and a host of others. They grew up admiring and hoping to emulate the Tiger Woods of 2006. However, a decade is a lot of time even in professional golf and the Tiger who won the 2006 Open Championship, PGA Championship and Player of the Year honors is a distant shadow of his former self.
Johnny Miller, who has an ownership interest in Silverado and is the host of the Safeway Open, is overjoyed at the prospect of having Woods in the field next month. Earlier this week, Miller stated that he “fully expects Tiger to win six to eight more times” during this next phase of his career. His good friend and former Stanford teammate, Notah Begay III, mentioned that “Tiger won’t just settle to compete. He’s going out there to win.” The current No. 1 golfer in the world, Jason Day, had a much different take on Tiger’s return. Speaking about the return of Woods to the PGA Tour, Day was less than positive, saying “I don’t expect too much from him.” I am of the belief that Day’s assessment may turn out to be closer to reality.
What Begay and Miller need to consider is that we’re talking about a 41-year-old golfer who now has an eight-year history of roadblocks to his career. True, Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan each won three major titles after their 40th birthdays, but they were the exception to the rule. In fact, Hogan won all three of his majors during the 1953 season, and while he had some close calls, he was pretty much through by then. Nicklaus won a pair of majors at age 40 and most would acknowledge that his Masters win at age 46 was totally unexpected. Julius Boros won two majors in his 40s as did Mark O’Meara, but other than that, it just doesn’t happen. Just ask Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh.
Tiger Woods starts a new chapter of his golf career with his return to the game next month at Napa’s Silverado North Course. It will be hard to know whether championship golf in his 40s will be a gratifying last hurrah or simply another ugly stumble during the final days of his career.
