Brian Rolapp is playing chess. The rest of us are playing checkers.
The PGA Tour has spent 51 years not actively promoting its flagship event, The Players Championship, as golf’s fifth major. That would have been crass and presumptive, to be polite. Traditionalists would have handed the PGA Tour its rear end, if an organizational body had an actual rear end.
But here comes the Tour’s new CEO, fresh off his job with the National Football League, a sport run by billionaires whose leaders spend every waking moment devising ways for the NFL to take over every day of the week around the globe. The NFL is a big, big fish in America’s biggest sports pond. The new guy looks around, notices that golf has four major championships and the Tour somehow doesn’t control any of them.
So the first TV spot promoting the Players in March ends with the not-even-a-little-cryptic line, “March will be major.”
Fire lit. Golf Channel’s outspoken analyst Brandel Chamblee uses facts and figures to declare the Players not only a major championship but the one with the strongest field. The world explodes. Even famed oil firefighter Red Adair couldn’t extinguish this blaze if he was still alive. (Ol’ Red passed in 2004 and is buried in Houston.)
Rolapp merely dropped a hint. The result is a raging debate rolling over golf like a tsunami about whether the Players should be golf’s fifth major. That one line in a commercial got us right where the PGA Tour wanted us — putting “The Players” in the same sentence with “fifth major.” That doesn’t mean it will happen but talking about a concept like this is The First Big Step toward acceptance. Rolapp is playing us like a viola. (Violas are better than violins, by the way. You know why? They burn longer. Sorry, a musician friend told me that joke once and it stuck in my brain.)
Let’s address the big questions.
Does any other major championship have a better, stronger, deeper field than the Players?
Nope. Chamblee has that part correct but it comes with an asterisk. The LIV-PGA Tour rift means some top players are currently MIA at the Players. That’s Missing In Action, not Miami, in case acronyms aren’t your thing. The PGA Championship still invites some club professionals. The Masters includes a few amateurs and geezers and limits its field to only 90 or so players. The two Open championships have qualifiers around the world to fill in the spots not already claimed by exempt players. That’s a nice meritocracy but it leads to some players getting in who will never be heard from again, unlike, say, the top 100 in the world rankings.
Is four major championships a sacred number?
Nope again. That number has evolved. The Western Open was once considered a major. So was the North & South Open and the U.S. Amateur. When Bobby Jones won the Grand Slam in 1930, although some writers called it the Impregnable Quadrilateral, it was the U.S. and British Opens and Amateurs. The Masters hadn’t even been born yet.
Somehow, five majors work for the LPGA and PGA Tour Champions but for a long time, the Senior PGA was the only major tournament in senior golf. Sponsorship money and TV marketing subsequently led to five designated majors for the seniors. In women’s golf, the LPGA declined to acknowledge the Women’s British Open as a major for an embarrassingly long period of time.
But those are apples and armadillos compared with the PGA Tour. It isn’t certain when the four current majors gained their major status. Some say it was Arnold Palmer deciding to start playing the British Open in 1960, thus putting it on the radar of American fans. But even that may not be right because the PGA Championship was scheduled the week after the British Open until 1965, thus preventing most golfers from getting back from the United Kingdom in time to play the PGA. That’s why Ben Hogan went three-for-three in 1953 at the majors. He missed the PGA because ocean liners were the mode of travel then.
Jack Nicklaus was thrilled to win the 1972 U.S. Open to tie Jones with 13 major titles and pass him the next year with a victory at the PGA Championship. The U.S. and British Amateurs were still considered majors then and a player’s total included them. During the 1986 Masters broadcast, someone on the CBS broadcast team mentioned that Nicklaus was going for his 20th major title — 18 professional, two amateur. So 40 years ago, we still had six majors, not four.
That all faded away, somehow, as professional golf behind the Big Three — Palmer, Nicklaus and Gary Player — took the spotlight and relegated amateur golf to Bob Uecker’s seat in “the front row.” Nicklaus has joked more than once that he still doesn’t know how he lost two majors and went from 20 to 18. At least, he was probably joking.
A year ago, I wrote about respected golf instructor Hank Haney’s tweet. 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.”
After assorted wisecracks, I got to the point that while I have always been a traditionalist and was never going to cave on the Players as a fifth major — in part, perhaps, to not give crusty ex-commissioner Deane Beman the satisfaction — I have been won over by 50 years of memorable Players Championships. I am OK with the Players being the fifth major if that’s what somebody thinks we should have.
Who’s going to decide this dilemma?
Well, that’s the biggest question of all. While the LPGA and PGA Tour Champions were able to simply decree some of their own properties as majors — I’m looking at you, Peter Jackson Classic, Evian Championship and Kaulig Companies Championship —there is no one ruling body for professional golf on Earth. Professional golf is a dog-eat-dog world fighting for corporate bucks and the folks at the Masters, the U.S. Golf Association, the Royal & Ancient Society and the PGA of America certainly aren’t going to vote for a fifth major that might in some way diminish their own events.
It is also a moot point until the PGA Tour and LIV Golf reach some kind of agreement. Which will be, in my estimation, in the month of Never-ember.
The Players can’t be a major without Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, ex-Players champ Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed and maybe even past champ Sergio Garcia, to name a few.
What happens if the Players does become the fifth major?
We’ll have to back-door some major status, won’t we. Guess what? That would mean Fred Funk, Craig Perks, Jodie Mudd and Si Woo Kim are major champions. It would mean Rickie Fowler finally got his major — in 2015. And Matt Kuchar, Tim Clark and Stephen Ames. Don’t let those names put you off the idea. Plenty of one-hit wonders have captured other official majors: Ben Curtis, Lou Graham, Scott Simpson, Scott Micheel, Paul Lawrie, Gay Brewer and so on.
Nicklaus won three Players. So he’d have 21 majors. Tiger Woods won two, he bumps up to 17.
One thing in favor of the Players is what Haney said. Golf needs more meaningful events. The Tour’s signature events will never be meaningful with small fields (70 or so, barely bigger than LIV) and no cuts. And they aren’t played on courses nearly as iconic as the Stadium Course. Even if you despise that track, you have to admit the finishing holes are as exciting as any in golf.
As for those whining that any fifth major should be played outside the U.S., well, Europe and Australia had the last hundred years to create their own major championship and didn’t do it. To be a major, you have to attract all or most of the best players.
Only one tournament can claim that these days. And it’s the one that rose out of a swamp 44 years ago in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Should it be considered a major championship? That’s for an all-knowing, all-seeing being from a higher celestial plane to decide.
So, Tiger Woods, what do you say?
