Amid chaos of pro golf, The American Express still has that warm, familiar feeling
One thing that has distracted sports fans in recent years is how history and tradition seem to have been eased out of so many sports.
Well, actually, history and tradition haven’t been eased out as much as they have been bulldozed out of existence by television, money and a new wave of fans who just don’t have the time to figure out what happened 20 or 30 or 40 years ago.
In baseball, a ground ball to second base to advance a runner to third is a lost art, just as the 15-foot jump shot in the NBA is no longer in vogue. College football, with its transfer portal and NIL money, is barely distinguishable from the professional game. It has, in fact, become a professional game, diminishing bowl games in which fewer and fewer star players participate and demolishing traditional rivalries and conference alignments in the name of a few extra dollars. The NFL, by the way, is putting playoff games behind streaming service paywalls.
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So it has been in men’s professional golf. The battle between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian-backed LIV Tour has ripped apart friendships, seen players sign for staggering amounts of money to join LIV and cast at least some doubts on just how viable the PGA Tour is in a new era of sports and money.
In the middle of all of this, the PGA Tour returns to the Coachella Valley this week for the 65th annual The American Express tournament. It feels a little like slipping into a favorite pair of golf shoes or putting on a well-worn Arnold Palmer cardigan sweater. There is something familiar and comforting about the return of The American Express.
Familiar feel in the desert
To be sure, there have been some major changes in the desert’s PGA Tour event in the last decade or so, from the number of courses used to the end of celebrities in the pro-am to a change in the number of amateurs in the field.
But this is still a multi-course pro-am event played in generally glorious weather in the first weeks of a new PGA Tour season. Palmer, Billy Casper and Johnny Miller may not be in the field this week and Bob Hope won’t be handing out the trophy Sunday afternoon, but all of those personalities are in the very DNA of The American Express. The modern PGA Tour event in the Coachella Valley still has its roots in the tournament of the 1960s and maybe even that old Thunderbird Invitational of the 1950s.
It was Palmer who showed it was cool to play golf in the desert. It was Miller who proved a certain kind of player can thrive in the desert Southwest. It was players such as Casper, John Cook and others who proved that a pro-am is not an evil thing, but something that can be embraced on the way to victory.
Don’t think this week is about nostalgia, though. Palmer’s imprint is all over the golf tournament, but the last of his five wins in the event came in 1973, well before the top golfers in the field this week were born. Memories of Jack Nicklaus and Fred Couples and David Duval winning in the desert are nice, but today’s players need more than memories to earn a berth in the Masters or the FedEx Cup playoffs.
Money and television have certainly changed The American Express from when it debuted as the Palm Springs Golf Classic in 1960, from when Bob Hope put his name on the event in 1965 and even from when American Express joined the event as title sponsor in 2020. That’s how fast sports can evolve these days.
But structurally, there are still striking similarities from 1960 to 2024. The bones of this year’s tournament were put in place 60 years ago, when what we know as the PGA Tour didn’t even exist. History and tradition still mean something – though certainly not everything – in the Coachella Valley.
Hang around the desert golf world long enough and you’ll run into someone who will say, “It’s still the Hope to me.” Maybe that’s enough to ward off the money, the defections and the uncertain future of professional golf for a week.
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Desert Sun.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: PGA Tour's The American Express still has recognizable feeling
