Dawn of the designated-event era begins in Sentry Tournament of Champions at Kapalua
KAPALUA, Hawaii — On the rolling hills of a former pineapple plantation in West Maui and amid an array of the state’s signature rainbows, 39 PGA Tour pros will begin a chase for a pot of gold at Kapalua Resort’s Plantation Course.
With the flip of the calendar, the PGA Tour is set to debut the first of 10 designated tournaments with lucrative purses – $15 million this week or nearly double the prize money of a year ago – aimed at attracting the top players to compete against one another more often. This week’s Sentry Tournament of Champions has attracted 17 of the top 20 in the world, though World No. 1 Rory McIlroy opted to skip it. The WM Phoenix Open and the Genesis Invitational hosted by Tiger Woods in Los Angeles mean three of the first seven tournaments on the West Coast Swing have been elevated in status by the Tour this year.
“I’m excited to see how they are received throughout the year,” said Tour veteran Adam Scott. “Change needs to happen. If you don’t change, you get run over. The world is moving forward. I’m excited for something different.”
If all goes according to plan, the Tour elite will compete against each other at least 17 times per year. The idea of the best players competing against each other more frequently was a player-driven concept aimed to prevent more top talent from jumping ship for the upstart LIV Golf, which will expand to a 14-event circuit next month. Patrick Cantlay, for one, contends that LIV Golf has helped improve the professional golf landscape by forcing the Tour to adapt.
“I think that it’s been interesting how much it’s changed golf, as in, like, everyone’s trying to innovate and make golf better all of a sudden,” he said. “I think that will be a massive benefit for the viewer because I think now more than ever competition is making people evolve and making people grow and think outside the box.
“So I think it’s been really good and will be good for professional golf in the long run. But it’s been such a polarizing issue that it’s made people, you know, feel emotional about something that has been the same for such a long time.”
Some claim the Tour’s designated events aren’t all that different than what the Tour did previously in the 1990s to combat Greg Norman, LIV Golf CEO and Commissioner, and his previous effort for a breakaway circuit. Will Zalatoris, who is a member of the Tour’s Player Advisory Council, noted it won’t change his schedule significantly and termed it “a rebrand or a rename, however you want to look at it.”
Will the Tour’s changes be drastic enough to attract fans and stave off more player defections?
“What I hope is the Tour and its broadcast partners and everyone do a really good job of making a big deal of how strong the fields are these particular weeks and will it resonate with what people want to see,” Scott said. “The fields are going to be phenomenal if everybody shows up as they are meant to. Hopefully the elevated events are like a whole group of World Golf Championship events in today’s world.”
Having the top players committed to show up to the same events is the dream for Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and will make life easier for tournament directors of the designated events, who can promote the appearance of the top stars in advance. But on the flip side, what about the other 30-plus events whose job just got that much tougher to attract any star power?
“When you have 47 events, you want to be careful of maybe watering down the product, and now we’re just making sure that our product is as strong as possible,” Zalatoris said. “And, quite frankly, no, I’m not worried about these other events, worrying about their viability or whatever it is going forward.”
The top players are allowed to skip one of the designated events and still earn their full Player Impact Program bonus. Will McIlroy’s no-show at the inaugural designated event set a trend of players taking turns skipping out of the Tour’s premiere events? Zalatoris doesn’t think so.
“Why would I turn down any of the nine events where we’re playing for $20 million against the best players in the world?” Zalatoris said. “When I’m at home, I would be playing golf anyway, so I might as well play it against some of the best players in the world.”
