I have been a big fan of team sports and individual sports since I was a young boy growing up in Chicago. I attribute this to the fact that my father was a big-time sports fan coupled with the fact that the Midwest winters were so miserable that I stayed indoors, watching everything on television from the Big 10 game of the week to professional bowling to the hapless Chicago Cardinals (long before they moved to St. Louis and now Arizona).
It was a golden era for many sports and while the long seasons were most entertaining, I also learned early on that there was nothing like the playoffs. The do-or-die nature of the playoffs added to the drama of the moment. In just a five-year period of time, I watched on the small screen Bill Mazeroski’s ninth inning home run in Game 7 the 1960 World Series, Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita lifting the Stanley Cup trophy in 1961 for the Blackhawks, Papa Bear George Halas and the defense-oriented Monsters of the Midway led by George Allen winning the 1963 NFL title, and most importantly, the Boston Celtics win over the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 7 of the 1965 Eastern Division finals. For the next few years my basketball friends and I mimicked the famous words of Celtics’ broadcaster Johnny Most, who is still an iconic part of basketball history, with his call of “Havlicek stole the ball.”
Nothing beats the playoffs, whether it was last-minute drama of those 1965 Celtics or the surprising Milwaukee Bucks triumph over the Phoenix Suns just last month. Then again, maybe I over exaggerated that a wee bit. After all, there is the PGA Tour and the Fed Ex Cup playoffs.
The PGA Tour’s three weeks of playoff golf commences next Thursday and runs for three weeks. The exempt 125 golfers are at Liberty National outside New York City for stage one of the Fed Ex Cup. The Northern Trust Championship has served as the playoffs opener since the world of professional golf initiated its playoff format in 2007. The second stage of golf’s postseason moves on to Caves Valley outside Baltimore with a field of 70 golfers. The tourney is sponsored by BMW and also has been part of the playoff rotation since 2007. It is hosted by the Western Golf Association and benefits caddie scholarships through its Evans Scholars Foundation. The BMW is the stepchild of the old Western Open, the third-oldest professional golf tournament in history, which was initially contested in 1899.
The final 30 golfers with Fed Ex Cup points advance to Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club, an iconic Donald Ross course where amateur great Bobby Jones learned the game, for the playing of the Tour Championship. East Lake has hosted the PGA Tour’s finale since 1987 and it too became part of the Fed Ex Cup playoff format in 2007. Getting to East Lake is a big deal for a number of reasons, most notably because it automatically gets you into golf’s four majors and the Players Championship the following year. It’s also the locale where a whopping $70 million is divided up among the golfers with the eventual winner putting $15 million into his bank account. Dustin Johnson took home the big prize last year.
Yet aside from the exemptions and the big bucks, the Fed Ex Cup playoffs are stuck in a distant fifth or sixth place in priority as far as the world of golf is concerned. No one really cares who wins 100 games if it isn’t punctuated with a World Series trophy or 73 wins and an NBA title. However, in the world of golf, the money and the prestige of the Fed Ex Cup is not exactly up there with the Masters, U.S. Open, PGA Championship, British Open or even perhaps the Players Championship. Part of the rationale for that is based on newness versus tradition, but part of that is because of the confusion surrounding who exactly is the Fed Ex Cup champ.
During the past 15 years the Fed Ex Cup system has had numerous tweaks. In 2008, Vijay Singh won two playoff tournaments and didn’t even need to show up for the final event to still win the whole thing. Yes, that part of the playoff system was altered the next year. In 2009, Heath Slocum barely got into the playoffs, ranked at 123rd in the standings. However, his win at the Northern Trust vaulted him to third place in just one week. That too was altered the next time around. Most amazingly was the 2011 Tour Championship that went into overtime. Bill Haas made a classic up-and-down from the water alongside the green to win the Tour Championship. Yet it took awhile to figure out who was the Fed Ex Cup winner. It turned out to be Haas, but the tour needed its headiest accountants to figure it out.
Most recently the four 2018 playoff tournaments were captured by Bryson DeChambeau, Bryson DeChambeau, Keegan Bradley and Tiger Woods. The Fed Ex Cup winner was Justin Rose. Yes, that too was quite the head-scratcher. Nowadays the final 30 go into the Tour Championship with a graduated start on one another, so the fans can figure out who the eventual champion will be (and the players as well). The No. 1-ranked golfer starts at 10-under-par, the No. 2-ranked golfer is 8-under-par, and on and on with numbers 26-30 starting at even par. There is no longer room for that one-hit wonder let alone any accounting errors.
Nowadays there are just three playoff tournaments in the PGA Tour’s efforts to finish the wraparound season prior to the commencement of college football and the NFL. When the new season begins in September, the schedule is filled with former Fall Finish events in such places as Napa, Las Vegas, Sea Island and the like. Unlike the earlier days of the Tour Championship which was held at the end of October, golf is still somewhat on center stage for sports fans who aren’t just yet prioritizing football and the baseball playoffs because we’re in late August.
Yet there is a certain undefined nature to the Fed Ex Cup playoffs. While Tiger and Rory McIlroy have won a pair of Fed Ex Cup titles, so too have such one-hit wonders as Haas, Brandt Snedeker and Billy Horschel. Unlike most sporting events with a winner and a loser, there are instead 29 losers and just one winner.
Yet the reality of the situation comes down to history and tradition. Would a professional golfer rather own a Masters green jacket or a British Open claret jug, or instead take home the $15 million paycheck? I guess that crucial question doesn’t need to be answered by Rory or Tiger. However, I have a funny feeling that Haas or Snedeker would willingly trade in their Fed Ex Cup trophy and money for the chance to hold the U.S. Open trophy. I bet Henrik Stenson cherishes his claret jug a whole lot more than his Fed Ex Cup trophy.
