By TOM LaMARRE
The Sports Xchange
Wake me when it's over.
The PGA Tour's effort to instill some excitement into the end of the season with the FedEx Cup playoffs has turned into a gigantic yawner.
For the second consecutive year, the Tour Championship this week at East Lake in Atlanta will be anticlimactic, which should send commissioner Tim Finchem and other Tour officials back to the drawing board.
It's not only that Vijay Singh has virtually wrapped up the FedEx Cup early, much the same as Tiger Woods did a year ago. The volatility of the new points system has left more questions than answers.
Most notably, how does Padraig Harrington not make the field of the Tour Championship after winning the British Open and the PGA Championship?
Even Camilo Villegas could see it after winning the BMW Championship two weeks ago and climbing to second in the FedEx Cup standings behind Singh.
"We don't want to talk about the FedEx Cup, do we?" said Villegas, who was 42nd in the standings heading into the playoffs. "I don't know. I just think it needs improvement.
"It is just very, very unfair for the guys that have busted themselves all year, worked hard, played great. We've got a good example. The guy (Padraig Harrington) that has a great chance of being Player of the Year is not going to play the Tour Championship."
Said Jim Furyk: "I think we overcooked it."
Added Hunter Mahan: "You can't have 144 guys starting. They don't let every team in the playoffs, they cut it down pretty good."
And Trevor Immelman offered this: "I don't think it's fair that we have a guy who has made over $2 million in prize money not getting into the Tour Championship. I think at that point you might have a scenario where the sponsor of the Tour Championship says, 'Hang on a minute, are we sure we have the top 30 guys here at our event?'
"(Harrington) is going to be the Player of the Year. How can you not have the Player of the Year and two-time major winner in the Tour Championship?"
Perhaps it's a matter of semantics. Since the playoffs are an entity entirely of themselves, perhaps the finale should be named the FedEx Championship instead of the Tour Championship.
That would distinguish the tournament from what it was until last year, a reward for playing well throughout the season. With the advent of the playoffs, that event really does not exist anymore.
Harrington, for his part, has been a gentleman about it, saying he didn't play well enough to deserve a spot in the Tour Championship after missing the cut in the Barclays and the Deutsche Bank Championship to open the playoffs.
However, he believes in the basic concept of the playoffs even though he thinks changes need to be made.
"I think the whole idea is this (the FedEx Cup) is a four-week event," Harrington said. "I think the system needs tweaking, but I don't think it needs tweaking to keep people in there. I think you need to have people missing out. We need to have players get knocked out. That's what happens in a playoff.
"I would reduce the points in the first two weeks for just making the cut (and) increase the points higher up. I'd probably double the points in the BMW Championship (week three) to make it as volatile as it was in the last couple of weeks (in the Barclays and Deutsche Bank), and double the points again at the Tour Championship.
"I'd probably say the first two weeks should count on a scale of, say, one, the third week two and the last week three in terms of how players should move around."
Some middle-tier players who simply made the cut in the first two events were rewarded by moving on to the last two events, where there is no cut.
Others who won tournaments and played well over the course of the season -- most notably Harrington, Boo Weekley and Geoff Ogilvy -- did not.
"If I make the Tour Championship, I make it. If I don't, I really don't give a bleep," said Ogilvy, who finished two spots out of the top 30 and missed a trip to Atlanta. "It's not the Tour Championship it used to be.
"It probably meant more before than it does now, because it was a reward for 40 weeks. Now it's a nod to the year and making the cut at (the first two playoff events). The four weeks (of playoffs) are as important as the 40 preceding them."
Last year, Woods skipped the Barclays to open the playoffs but then tied for second behind Phil Mickelson on the Deutsche Bank and captured the BMW to almost wrap up the FedEx Cup before making it a runaway by winning the Tour Championship, too.
Singh was so far ahead this time after winning the Barclays and the Deutsche Bank that it didn't matter that he tied for 44th in the BMW Championship. That's because Villegas knocked all of the other contenders out of the running for the $10 million prize by winning the BMW.
Not having Woods, sidelined by knee surgery, there to challenge the red-hot Fijian was bad luck for the PGA Tour, but still it seems obvious that further changes are necessary.
Or is it?
"I would say the structure of the playoffs, we like what we've seen," Finchem said. "I know there's some consternation about a player like Padraig Harrington, wins two majors, top 10 (in the World Golf Rankings), missed two cuts and he's ... not getting to Atlanta.
"But that's actually what we heard from a lot of fans that they wanted to see. They wanted it to feel more like a playoff, more like a do-or-die situation, and we just moved the needle a little bit in that regard, and so there is more volatility. That means on the upside and the downside. I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. It's something to look at."
Even though the overall state of the PGA Tour was strong, Finchem thought something was needed to spice things up after the PGA Championship, especially to get a little attention with football season kicking off.
So the NASCAR-style points chase was adopted. But, so far, it's only proved to be a cure for insomnia.
COMING UP
PGA TOUR: Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Thursday through Sunday.
TV: Thursday and Friday, 1-6 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel; Saturday, 10 a.m.-noon on the Golf Channel and noon-3:30 p.m. EDT on NBC; and Sunday, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel and 1:30-6 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel.
LAST YEAR: Tiger Woods posted four rounds of 66 or better and ran away with the tournament title by eight strokes over Zach Johnson and Mark Calcavecchia to claim the FedEx Cup by a wide margin. After skipping the Barclays, the PGA Tour playoff opener, Woods tied for second in the Deutsche Bank Championship before winning the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship to claim the $10 million prize. The No. 1 player in the world earned his seventh victory of the season on the PGA Tour, and the $1.26 million check lifted his official earnings to $10,867,052, the second time in three years he reached eight figures.
CHAMPIONS TOUR: SAS Championship at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, N.C., Friday through Sunday.
TV: Friday, 6:30-8:30 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel; Saturday and Sunday, 1-3:30 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel.
LAST YEAR: Mark Wiebe, a two-time winner in his PGA Tour career, became the 12th golfer to capture his first start on the Champions Tour when he won by four strokes over Dana Quigley. Wiebe closed with a 5-under-par 67 and set a 54-hole tournament record of 18-under 298. He also matched Bobby Wadkins as the youngest winner in Champions Tour history at 50 years, 10 days, and became the first senior circuit player to win on a sponsor's exemption since Christy O'Connor Jr. claimed the 1999 State Farm Classic.
LPGA TOUR: Navistar LPGA Classic on The Senator Course at Capitol Hill on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Prattville, Ala., Thursday through Sunday.
TV: Thursday, 6:30-8:30 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel; Friday, 8:30-10:30 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel, and Saturday and Sunday, 6:30-9 p.m. EDT on the Golf Channel.
LAST YEAR: Maria Hjorth holed a 20-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole to claim her first LPGA Tour victory in eight years, by one stroke over Stacy Prammanasudh. Lorena Ochoa of Mexico, trying to win a fourth consecutive tournament, needed a birdie on the final hole to force a playoff but made a three-putt bogey instead and tied for third. Hjorth closed with a 5-under-par 67 and won for the first time since capturing the Safeco Classic and the Mizuno Classic in 1999.
|
