Golf's major season ends too soon

Yahoo

2 days ago

There's nothing quite like the Open Championship — or the British Open, if you're America-centric — on the golf calendar. It's a weeklong exercise in coffee golf, awakening in the small hours of the morning (or staying up late, if you're on the West Coast) to watch the world's best fight through howling wind, sideways rain and brown British food while you sprawl out on the couch half-awake. It's glorious, and the only downside is that it marks the end of major-championship golf for almost nine full months.
One hundred and one days. That's it. That's how long it will be from the moment that Jack Nicklaus hit his ceremonial tee shot to begin this year's Masters to the moment the final putt drops on Sunday to herald the end of the Open Championship. One hundred and one days. Fourteen weeks. Barely three months. Doesn't seem quite right, does it?
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Golf's major season is a flurry of some of the finest drama and narrative the sports world can conjure — the majesty of the Masters, the chaos of the PGA Championship, the brawn of the U.S. Open, the elegance of the Open Championship — that vanishes just as you've settled into its rhythms.
In baseball, 101 days from Opening Day doesn't even get you to the All-Star break. In the NFL, the 101st day after this year's initial regular-season game falls the day before Week 15. It's not a perfect juxtaposition, since golf does have other events outside of the majors, of course. The Ryder Cup every two years, the Olympics every four years, the Players and FedEx Cup playoffs every year — each has its merits, each is memorable in its own way, but none of them quite match up to the majors on the scale of historic weight.
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Golf's most apples-to-apples comparison is with tennis, which — coincidentally enough — also has four majors: Wimbledon, plus the Australian, French and U.S. Opens. (The golf equivalents: Australian Open = PGA Championship, French Open = Open Championship, Wimbledon = The Masters, U.S. Open = U.S. Open.) However, unlike golf, tennis' Grand Slam events stretch over eight months, from mid-January to September.
The majors' compact schedule means it's difficult to appreciate the historical resonance of a career-defining win. Players don't get a Super Bowl champion parade; they get on a plane and head to their next tournament. Days after he won the U.S. Open, J.J. Spaun played in the Travelers Championship. (He finished T14.) Rory McIlroy took a couple weeks off but still seems shellshocked in the wake of his seismic Masters win. In the months since his PGA win, Scottie Scheffler has … placed in the top 7 of every tournament he's played, winning one. OK, bad example there.
The point is, golf's calendar doesn't allow much of a slow build of anticipation. It's the sports equivalent of bingeing all episodes of a TV show at once … and then waiting through a long, cold winter for the next go-round. The tennis model would be nice, allowing for golf to extend its major season from winter all the way through late summer, from an American perspective. Nice, but also unrealistic.
The problem is, there's not really much of an option to alter the golf calendar without doing something truly drastic — or, alternately, pushing around the PGA Championship. Granted, it's been done before; over the course of its 107 contests, the PGA has been played in nine different months — February, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December.
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But thanks to football's massive footprint and block-out-the-sun shadow, those last four months are off the table. The U.S. and British Opens have claimed June and July. The PGA moved from August back in 2019 because May is far more hospitable for far more courses than August, and because the PGA got tired of relocating for the Olympics every few years.
A move back to February, combined with something exotic — match play, perhaps? — is interesting to contemplate, but the longest of long shots to consider. Alternately, the PGA could move back to August and potentially go international … but again, that requires the PGA to shoulder the burden of extending golf's calendar while the other three majors sit comfortably ensconced in their long-claimed months.
So the reality is, now and for the foreseeable future, we have just four days of major championship golf remaining in the season. Yes, the Ryder Cup and the playoffs await, but there's just one more chance this year for a player to claim, or cement, his legacy. Put the coffee on, you won't want to miss this one … because it's a long time until the azaleas bloom again.