The PGA Tour’s inaugural wraparound season wraps up this week, but, at the risk of sounding like a one-note opera, there is not enough wrapping paper to make the final product look pretty.
This weekend at the Tour Championship in Atlanta a handful of top players finish a stretch in which they teed it up seven times in nine weeks in some of the most important events of the season. After a week off, many will then play in the Ryder Cup.
Take a new, 10-and-a-half-month season and back load it with some of the biggest events of the year, played in rapid succession under searing summer heat, and elite-level grousing and grumbling predictably ensues.
If the best defence is a good offence, commissioner Tim Finchem this week began spinning the seasonal reviews before he could be grilled about the increasing player complaints.
“We like the wraparound year,” Finchem said. “We have a good break at Christmas. Players figure out their own schedules. They’re not under any requirement to play any particular schedule, and they’re all different in the way they approach it.”
With the first year in the books, they will be approaching the future warily. After moving to the new schedule for 2013/14, the off-season now consists of a six-week break in December.
“You’re going to start seeing some of the best players rarely between next week and March,” Australian star Geoff Ogilvy said.Some have bailed already.
Citing fatigue, Phil Mickelson withdrew after two rounds of last week’s FedEx Cup event, though it was unlikely he would have advanced to the so-called “play-off” finale, anyway.
Tiger Woods missed the past few weeks because of injury, leaving the Atlanta season finale without its two biggest draw cards for the first time since 2006.
The crescendo turned diminuendo. The FedEx series, four successive events offering US$8 million (Dh29.4m) purses and $25m in bonus money, was crushed in the American television ratings by US Open tennis and the Little League World Series.
Players are burnt out. Reigning FedEx champion Henrik Stenson was eliminated from play-off contention on Sunday and will not defend his title in Atlanta this week. Inconsolable, he was not.
“I’m in desperate need of some rest,” Stenson said. “I was in a win-win situation in that sense.”
Mickelson was carved up by critics for withdrawing and logged into a popular golf chat room after returning home to California where he wrote: “My mistake was playing the FedEx Cup at all. I won’t make that mistake again.”
That is the sound of tournament sponsors cringing.
It could get worse. In 2016, the Olympics also will be crammed into the same late-season time frame.
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