The Players pleads the 5th (major)?
After 51 years, The Players Championship has all of the ingredients of a major, except for some LIV Golf stalwarts. If that issue is ever resolved, then a compelling case can be made for a new major.
Hank Haney said the quiet part out loud … if tweeting counts as saying something out loud.
Wrote Haney: “I’m ready to do a 360 (sic) on the Players Championship and make it the fifth major. Golf desperately needs more meaningful events. Four majors and the Ryder Cup just isn’t enough.”
Sure, coach, go ahead and snub the global thermonuclear war that is the Presidents Cup and the 30-man brazen cash grab that is the FedEx Cup. (Sarcasm alert, in case you missed it.) Not to mention the Barracuda Championship, which I just inadvertently mentioned.
Actually, I agree with Haney. I have long been a four-major traditionalist who wouldn’t even consider a fifth one. Having a one-for-the-thumb major is fine for the LPGA Tour and PGA Tour Champions. I’ll leave it to the clubhouse lawyers to debate the major merits of the Amundi Evian Championship or the Kaulig Companies Championship, among others.
I know some critics who believe any tournament with a sponsor’s name in the title is, by definition, definitely not a major. (Of course, that crusty old curmudgeon still harks back to former Masters chairman Hord Hardin proclaiming decades ago that a “Pizza Hut Masters” would never happen.)
I’m not sure what changed my mind about The Players or exactly when the PGA Tour finally wore down my resistance regarding the fifth-major topic.
It may have been last year when Scottie Scheffler came from behind to be the first to win back-to-back Players in an exciting week. In the post-ceremony shuffle, I found former commissioner Deane Beman and asked him if this one, the 50th Players, was possibly the best ever. It was a leading question — I plead guilty as charged. But Beman, the man who got pushed into the lake by 1982 champ Jerry Pate in what was obviously the most important Players ever, answered in the affirmative. “Oh, I think so, I think it was,” he told me. “We had more players with a chance at the very end and everybody played great golf. It was fantastic.”
If Haney is ready to call it the fifth major, I am, too — with one important reservation. The LIV Golf impasse has to be resolved in some manner first. A tournament can’t be called a major championship if some of the world’s best players aren’t in the field. The Masters has the smallest field of any major but none of the best players are kept out. They’re all there.
The Players Championship can’t be a major with Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm, ex-Players champ Cameron Smith, Joaquin Niemann, Dustin Johnson and a few others missing in action.
The whole reunification issue is above my pay grade. As far as I’m concerned, pro golf can continue on this merry course with LIV Golf players doing their thing around the world and PGA Tour players competing in the usual U.S. events. There’s room for two tours and a lot of global markets, especially in Australia and Asia, are underserved by top-level professional golf.
The current major championships have figured out ways to get a few of LIV’s best into their events. The PGA Tour’s dream of fifth-major status for The Players could be LIV’s biggest bargaining chip, at least for scoring a few Players spots for its stars if nothing else.
I’m not optimistic about any big framework agreement. LIV Golf doesn’t have any tournaments or formats of interest to the PGA Tour and it has only half a dozen players (or maybe less) of serious interest to American fans. Reunification isn’t necessary in the eyes of the PGA Tour, maybe, or in the eyes of some fans. But a smattering of LIV’s best players is necessary to vault The Players to major status.
The event’s unique venue, TPC Sawgrass, has grown nearly as familiar to the public as Augusta National. That’s no small feat. Sawgrass has Masters-like back-nine drama throughout its full 18 and on a windy day it features more crashes than three NASCAR races. The Players has therefore produced great champions and surprising champions, just like the other majors have. Ben Curtis, Scott Simpson, Trevor Immelman and Shaun Micheel come to mind, for instance.
I think The Players has percolated long enough after 51 years to warrant major consideration.
Of course, we’ll have to back-date those major titles, won’t we? Jack Nicklaus won three Players, that would bump him to 21 professional majors. Tiger Woods, a two-timer winner, moves up to 17; Lee Trevino and Phil Mickelson to 7; Rory McIlroy to 6; and Scottie Scheffler suddenly to 4. It means Calvin Peete scored a landmark win with his Players title. It means Fred Funk, Craig Perks and Jodie Mudd are major champions while Davis Love, Fred Couples, Steve Elkington and Hal Sutton added two more major wins apiece. It’s a simple matter of bookkeeping.
Let’s get back to Haney’s original point.
Golf “desperately needs” more meaningful events. The sure way to make a PGA Tour event less meaningful is to shrink the field size and make it an exclusive outing for the players who are already the richest of the rich. The Signature Events with their limited fields and no cuts, in some cases, goes against the concept of meritocracy that the PGA Tour built its success on. The Signature Events, a thinly veiled attempt to guarantee name players for sponsors and television, actually undercut their own credibility with the small field sizes.
There have always been — and always will be — transition periods between eras of great players and superstars. Golf is more compelling during an era of Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan or even Greg Norman. The Shark didn’t rack up the major titles he hoped for — just three, including The Players we just belatedly bequeathed him — but he was must-watch TV for a lot of reasons and network cameras loved him.
Between Nicklaus and Woods, we had Norman and other notables to watch such as Curtis Strange, Nick Faldo and Seve Ballesteros, even though he was limited in his U.S. appearances. The early and mid-1990s were pretty darned exciting during the summer of Couples and Love, followed by the rise of Nick Price. And we had some scorching Ryder Cup duels in the 1990s as the Europeans rose to prominence (and then dominance) in that event.
We enjoyed Tiger and Phil for two decades plus, we couldn’t have been luckier than that. In their wake, we have McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, DeChambeau and Koepka and other compelling figures. J.J. Spaun just lost The Players in a playoff but he’s fifth on the tour money list with $4.5 million already and Arnold Palmer Invitational winner Russell Henley careened upward to No. 7 in the world rankings. Who’s to say these guys aren’t going to go on and become stars, maybe win majors or multiple majors?
Stars are made on the PGA Tour. Danny Walker, who got into The Players at a moment’s notice Thursday morning when Jason Day pulled out sick, could be one. He finished sixth, racked up almost $850k and has the sweet tempo of a world-class player. And he’s just getting started. There’s Luke Clanton and Isaiah Salinda and Akshay Bhatia and so many more.
An overlooked item the PGA Tour has is its lineup of courses and tournaments. Sure, the sponsor names change every so often and so do the courses but a lot of them have been around for decades. The tournaments themselves are stars. We know East Lake and Bay Hill and Muirfield Village and Innisbrook and Colonial and Pebble Beach and TPC Scottsdale and Riviera and others. They are often as important as the fields who play them.
LIV seems to have missed this point. In three-plus years, its tournaments don’t have names, the events move around without rhyme or reason and there is no stability and no building of brand awareness. It’s like the Kentucky Derby where a new crop of 3-year-olds race very year. Golf needs continuity to grow.
We’ve watched TPC Sawgrass evolve over 43 years, from rustic, man-eating jungle to pristinely manicured video game track. Holes have been tweaked (the 12th into a drivable-but-dangerous-to-try par 4), altered (a new 500,000-pound tree with an overhanging branch blocking the sixth tee this year) and lengthened but it has remained a risk-reward hole where errant shots are penalized far more severely than any other major championship course.
Just being difficult doesn’t turn a course into a major. Nor does having a superstar such as McIlroy win it, although neither of those hurts. There is no definition of what makes a major championship or a procedure of how a tournament becomes one. The Western Open was a major once upon a time. And then it wasn’t.
The Players has a deep field with more good players than the Masters (well, there goes my press credential) and the PGA Championship, a stronger field than the U.S. Open and a field as strong as the Open Championship (but not nearly as globally accessible). The Open Championship is golf’s true World Championship, in my book.
If, and only if, LIV Golf’s cream of the crop players get invites to The Players, the tournament will be on an even footing with the other four majors.
Does golf need a fifth major? Hank Haney thinks so. I’m not sure if golf needs it. There have been a few pretenders for such elevated status but The Players is the only real contender that was ever qualified to take the fifth.
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Money changes things, agreed.
agree, randy. but bryson is not less meanningful. he was The Show on the pga tour for a year when he bulked up and was smashing 370-yd drives. between internet stuff he does and his near-miss pga and his thrilling us open last year, he's the no. 1 draw in golf if he's back on the pga tour.