THE PLAYERS CHAMPIONSHIP claim to be the ‘fifth major’ is ringing more hollow than a few of Donald Trump’s scorecards.
While this is the Tour’s flagship event, it’s a sinking fleet.
Too much talent has now been drained away by LIV, who have taken not only the stars but also any sense of soap opera. The heels and the antiheroes are now on the Saudi payroll, so the Tour has been left with a bunch of polite son-in-laws. Who’s the bad guy here? Wyndham Clark?
The Tour is infinitely worse than Hamlet without the prince: this is Hamlet without the fratricidal King.
Scottie Scheffler’s victory at Bay Hill last weekend went some way to redeeming an insipid Spring, greyed as it has been by a drab coalition of diluted fields, diminished stars, damp weather, and D-list winners.
Prior to Scheffler’s victory last weekend, how about this for a list of winners since the start of 2024.
Chris Kirk, Grayson Murray, Nick Dunlap, Walker Montgomery, Matthieu Pavon, Wyndham Clark, Nick Taylor, Jade Eagleson, Hideki Matsyuama, Jake Knapp, and Austin Eckroat.
Clark and Hideki aside, anyone who doesn’t class themselves as a golf sicko won’t know another name on that list. To prove the point, we’ve included on that list two American country and western singers who do not play golf.*
The season also feels like a kind of interregnum, as everyone figures out what the world will look like after the LIV split. The cloak-and-dagger merger proposal seems to have been spoiled in the sunlight, and now that the Tour have struck a deal with an American consortium, the players on the board are talking about not needing to do a deal with the Saudis after all.
(It would be terrific to get Jon Rahm’s view of all of this, given one of his reported reasons for swallowing his widely-stated aversion to LIV’s format was to go down in history as a reverse Helen of Troy; to be remembered as the face who brought golf’s warring tribes together.)
The Tour’s status and history is derived solely from the fact it was the place in which all of the best players competed against each other, not because golf fans across the world pledge an allegiance to Charles Schwab or Rocket Mortgage.
Meanwhile, to compete with LIV, the Tour has vastly increased prize money, but increasing the cost of staging a diminished project with dwindling audiences is what our friends at Rocket Mortgage might recognise as a bubble.
We wondered how many defections the Tour could survive and now we have the answer: it’s fewer than the number it has suffered.
Heaven help the land in need of a hero and all of that . . . but perhaps Scottie Scheffler can save it. The limby, God-fearing Scheffler is nobody’s idea of a charismatic leader, but he does neatly fit one of the prototypes sport sells us: the genius with a fatal flaw.
Since the start of last year, Scheffler has had the best stats from tee to green since Tiger Woods, but crumbled as soon as he picked up his putter. Last year, he led the Tour off the tee and around the green, but ranked 155th in putting. Had he raised those putting stats to even bang-average levels, Sky Sports last week estimated that Scheffler would have won 10 times in 2023.
So step forward Rory McIlroy in the J. Robert Oppenheimer role. McIlroy hopped into the CBS commentary booth for a slice of the Genesis Invitational last month, and when talking about Scheffler’s putting woes, advised him to swap his blade putter for a more forgiving mallet.
Lo and behold, Scheffler rocks up to Bay Hill with a mallet, finishes fifth in the putting and wins by five shots.
“We knew if he started to hole putts, then this sort of stuff would happen”, was McIlroy’s ‘I-have-become-death-style sum up.
If Scheffler has truly figured out the putting, then nobody else really has a chance. Those with pretensions of rivalling him are in woeful form, including McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa, and Viktor Hovland.
While Scheffler’s potential level of dominance never makes for compelling television, it would be a lesser issue than the eddying mediocrity of the Tour’s season so far. Scheffler’s brilliance would legitimise the Tour’s claims to be the pinnacle of golf and also give it some crucial context – anyone who can compete with this guy must be good.
Golf, a sport whose entire scoring system is an exercise in relativity, is suffering from precisely that problem nowadays. The Split has diluted fields and made a joke of the world ranking system, to the point it is now hard to establish who is the best at all of this. This was once the entire point of professional sport.
So perhaps Scottie Scheffler will romp home at Sawgrass this week, and while it would be dull, it might also be the best thing to happen the PGA Tour all year. Which is saying something.
*Congratulations to everyone who said Walker Montgomery and Jade Eagleson.
