When the PGA Tour announced last summer that it would feature what is now known as a “designated event,” this week’s Phoenix Open was Exactly what it had in mind.
Of the top 24 golfers in the Official World Golf Ranking also qualifying for the event, 23 will attend this week at TPC Scottsdale. Only Will Zalatoris will miss the first all-round designated event of this new era of PGA Tour golf.
Name an elite, big-name, talented golfer, and they could be in Scottsdale this week for the People’s Major. Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm, who have won seven of their last 14 combined events, will both be in attendance. Patrick Cantlay (who almost won last year), Scottie Scheffler (who do last year), Max Homa (who won his last match at Torrey Pines) and Collin Morikawa (who came close to winning each of his last matches) father begin).
Add Justin Thomas, Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick, Jordan Spieth, Tony Finau, Viktor Hovland and a few hundred thousand (lubricated) patrons over the next four days, and we have ourselves a golf tournament.
This isn’t necessarily as unusual for the Phoenix Open in the same way it could be at the end of the year for something like RBC Heritage, which is also a designated event but one that is rarely experienced. great arenas. The trajectory of the Phoenix field has been upward for a long time, but it marks the roots of a new PGA Tour, one that will be a much more entertaining offering than in recent years.
One of the hundreds of reasons the PGA Tour has faced the $800 million LIV golf machine in the past year is because the PGA Tour has spread so thin across the entire golf scene. Imagine if NFL play 40 weeks or NBA had the game for 11 months. Any of those would be a good idea? Does it create the scarcity that often causes different sports to thrive?
No, it won’t.
Because the goal of the PGA Tour leadership is to create as many competitive opportunities as possible for the greatest amount of money possible — and because the Tour, a membership-based tournament, has no distribution system. player level (McIlroy and Peter Malnati both count equally in the eyes of the Tour) — it leads to over 45 events on the calendar.
Without an audience large enough to maintain this as a premium production 90% of the year, viewership fatigue and overall illiterate about what’s important on the PGA Tour has surfaced in recent years. past year.
Now, since a group of over 20 players (including Rahm) got together for the BMW Championship last summer and decided they needed to play the same event in the same week, the Tour has an unwritten, unwritten distinction to its product. Honestly, it now runs two different leagues.
“I think, for the most part, [the PGA Tour’s designated event plan has] happened the way I envisioned it going,” Rahm said Tuesday in Phoenix.
There was the tournament last week when Justin Rose beat Denny McCarthy, Keith Mitchell, Brendon Todd and Malnati at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and there was the tournament this week with Rory, Rahm, JT, Cantlay and Last. They are one but not the same.
Interestingly, in the upcoming Netflix documentary “Full Swing,” which offers a lot of insight into golf in 2022, McIlroy hinted that the top players aren’t necessarily agree that these enhancement events are required. At the very least, there was some frustration about that word being used. When they were described as such by PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan in a press conference after the aforementioned players-only meeting, the golfers weren’t exactly thrilled. McIlroy plays the mediator and tells the player, essentially, if I If you can play all of these, you can also play.
So here we are gearing up for the second of 13 advanced events in 2023 but the first of 10 events that will cover the full course of nearly every good golfer. present in the world.
Sure, Cameron Smith (4th in OWGR), Joaquin Niemann (23rd) and Dustin Johnson (50th) will also be absent, but LIV golfers make up just 7.5% of the OWGR top 40 (the LIV events not included) and 7.5% of the top 40 Data Golf (including LIV events).
Bottom line: This is an event of almost the same quality as a major championship.
It took a long time and a lot of money (from many organizations!) to get here. LIV spent nearly $900 million in 2022 on players and leagues. The PGA Tour has raked in tens of millions of dollars for 2023.
However, in the end, this is a professional game. The best players play the same event every year, even if that leaves the rest of the league with weaker pitches and lower viewership.
The way forward is consolidation, and while the PGA Tour hasn’t technically consolidated, it has fully done so. We’ll see some of the fruits of that labor this week in Phoenix. Definitely a pickled fruit, probably cab or merlot.
Whatever it is, however it turns out, no matter which way this goes, from the outset, it looks like the undefined future has been clearer than the PGA Tour has been for a long time. . And for all involved, it’s a potentially pretty good future.
