FexEx Cup 2007
In fact, some events were lost, but that might have had more to do with the Great Recession than anything else. There were 48 tournaments in 2006 the last year before the FedEx Cup and there are 47 this year, but two domestic events have been replaced by stops in Malaysia and Shanghai, a move that hurts rank-and-file players.
“I don’t like [the idea of changing the schedule],” Mark Calcavecchia said when he heard about the FedEx Cup. “There’s nothing wrong with the amount of tournaments we have. Play if you want to play and don’t play if you don’t want to play. We have enough majors and World Golf Championship events for all the big shots to play against each other.”
Originally called “The Quest for the Card” and then the “Fall Series,” those post-Tour Championship events actually emerge as stronger since every tournament is now part of the FedEx Cup series under the 12-month schedule. The carrot at the end of the stick looms even larger now: Play tournaments and get points so you can get into the playoffs and have a shot at $10 million.
The first two years were a bumpy beginning for the FedEx Cup. From the start it was over-hyped by the PGA Tour. And moving away from the money listlong the barometer of success on the PGA Tourand going to a points system confused the fans, as well as some of the players. No one really understood how the whole thing worked.
The other flaw
The other flaw in FedEx Cup thinking was the use of the word “playoffs.” It implies that the series of four tournaments after a season-long points race determines the champion golfer of the year. It doesn’t. What it does do is identify the winner of a really cool eventand $10 million.
“I think what we’re trying to do here is not at all change a player’s focus on winning a particular tournament or a major championship,” Finchem said in 2005. “It is, however, to create more balance in the sport between the import of the season and the import of some of the individual tournaments we have.”
What it might have inadvertently done is more clearly identify “second-tier” events, a term that Finchem bristled at for many years. The multi-layered PGA Tour schedule now includes the four majors, the three World Golf Championship events and the four FedEx Cup playoff events. Throw in the Players Championship and most tour members have filled out two-thirds of their dance card for the year and have 12 of the minimum 15 tour events they need.
“I’ve heard a lot of media say, ‘Do you guys really care about it?’ ” says Stewart Cink, the 2009 British Open champion. “Yeah, we care about it. Of course, no one would realistically say I would rather win the FedEx Cup than a major championship. I don’t think the tour really wants us to say that. The idea is, we want to get the players playing together against each other more often at the end of the year, and that’s what it’s doing.”