Bad delivery on FedEx Cup
Posted: Friday, September 07, 2007 2:39 PM
The FedEx Cup isn’t working out that well for the PGA Tour, but there’s an easy way to fix it - dynamite.
It’s the only way. There’s too many things wrong with this event whose rules are indecipherable, whose object isn’t totally clear and whose $10-million grand prize is bogus. It’s stupid, it’s incomprehensible and it’s a playoff even the players don’t want to play.
It’s supposed to be a four-tournament playoff to determine, well, I’m not quite sure what. It isn’t the best golfer on the planet. That much is clear by the fact that Steve Stricker can win it. Nothing against Stricker, who is by all accounts a wonderful man, salt of the earth, generous to friends and families, sews his own clothes and cooks a mean meatloaf. But if he wins this thing there isn’t a person on the planet who’s going to think it means more than a major, and that includes Stricker. No matter who wins, Tiger Woods is still the platinum standard, end of discussion.
The PGA Tour thinks this will inject some juice into the end of the season, and that’s dumb, too. How can you get excited about something you can’t understand?
I tried to get a handle on it, clicking over to the PGA Tour Web site to see what this week’s tournament, the BMW Championship, meant. Here’s the second paragraph of the tournament preview:
“First, there's history (what little we have of it). In the first two events of the PGA TOUR Playoffs for the FedExCup, we've seen how hard it is to get into the next event from outside the "elimination line." Only two players initially seeded outside the Top 120 made it from The Barclays to the Deutsche Bank Championship (Rich Beem moved from 134th to 113th with a tie for seventh and Doug LaBelle II moved from No. 121 to 120 with a tie for 41st), and only two moved from outside the Top 70 to qualify for the BMW Championship (John Mallinger and Bo Van Pelt, with ties for 14th and 30th, respectively, at the TPC Boston).”
Well, that clears everything up, doesn’t it?
The rules of this thing (There’s a full page of them here) are denser than U.S. Open rough.
Then there’s the schedule - four tournaments in four weeks. This was set up by the PGA Tour, which knows full well that there aren’t three premier players in the world who ever play four straight weeks. The idea of playing every tournament went out with Jack Nicklaus. Vijay Singh is the only top player who plays just about every tournament. Everybody else plays twice a month - three times at the very most.
So Tiger Woods skipped the first week, Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els skipped the third. And everybody’s grousing that the Tour never asked them about how to run this thing. Much as I think that athletes should collect their money and say, “Thank you, very much,” I have to agree with them. If you want Tiger and Phil and Ernie in your event, find out what it takes to get them there.
And if you’ve spent even a week following the Tour, you know that you have to spread four tournaments out over a minimum of five weeks - two weeks on, one week off, two weeks on - to get everybody in.
But the Tour can’t do that because of the President’s Cup and the tour Championship and everything else they have to get in before the silly season begins in November.
Ah, you say, but first-place money is $10 million. Doesn’t that make it worth it?
Ah, even the golfers reply, it’s not really $10 million. It’s an annuity for that amount – a retirement account - that pays off as a pension when the golfers are off on the Senior Tour. And there’s no cash option.
So you can win $10 million, but you can’t have it, and when you can have it, it’s in installments. As my friend Walter from Warwick said, it’s not the FedEx Cup, it’s the Publishers Clearinghouse Open.
