Every year since 2004, when the Tour Championship dropped anchor at Bobby Jones’ East Lake golfing incubator, a tournament that is an important community event and one meant to sound the crescendo of a PGA Tour season has been faced with a sticky problem of timing and culture.
For it is almost impossible to hear the sound of big putts dropping over the clash of pads and helmets.
Stuck as it has been in mid- to late September – with some of the earliest events here happening as late as November – the Tour Championship necessarily intrudes on Atlanta’s passion of choice, college football. And now that the Falcons are legit, the NFL is closing fast as Option 1A.
The choices again this weekend are thorny for the well-rounded Atlanta sports fan.
On Saturday, do you focus on Georgia Tech’s ACC opener at home? Or on what has become a surprisingly monstrous game for Georgia that evening against Mississippi State? What do you have left for the third round of Jason and Justin and Dustin never so much as throwing a single chop block?
And, Sunday, are you sucked into the NFL’s embrace by the Falcons playing at equally undefeated Detroit that afternoon? Can you spare a moment for what might be a highly charged Tour Championship finish? Last year’s close by Rory McIlroy was about as good as golf gets short of employing a Vegas chorus line and tigers. Or does your fantasy team, like a hothouse orchid, require your unbroken attention?
There is a remedy for all this. One that involves a startlingly simple strategy: Just move the Tour Championship out of the path of the football bullet train.
Golf’s schedulers already have knocked over the first few dominoes that eventually could lead to such a fix.
Beginning in 2019, the PGA Tour will shuffle some important events to earlier on the calendar – the Players Championship from May to pre-Masters March, and the PGA Championship from August to May. And while in the mood to rearrange the furniture, they could then alter their season-ending playoff format to end in Atlanta a couple of weeks earlier. That’s the scuttlebutt.
They would get no argument from the Tour Championship people. A parade, maybe.
“We’ve not been told anything different than (the speculation that’s) been printed. We’re obviously making a big pitch to move this to before Labor Day,” Tom Clark, the Tour Championship’s executive director, said. “I think that would really help us as far as the activity here around Atlanta. Like it or not, this is a phenomenal football area. That is what the talk of the town is.”
New PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said Tuesday that there was nothing to announce yet on other changes to that distant schedule. But it was fairly evident where his heart sided on this matter.
“Well, I think we've been fairly public about this and it's something that we're taking a hard look at,” he said when asked about moving golf’s big finish out of a prime football-watching slot.
“Whether or not we accomplish that goal, I think this event has and will continue to perform extremely well.
“I think that you look at our schedule now and you look at the strength of the NFL and you look at the strength of our playoffs, if we had a scenario where we could culminate our FedEx Cup playoffs in the strongest manner possible – that's the direction we're going to head.”
To the credit of those running the Tour Championship, they have not tried to ignore the realities of the setting. They do not put on blinders and insist that you should pay attention to their tournament and the battle for the extra $10 million FedEx Cup bonus just because they say you should.
Instead, attempting to co-exist with football, they attempt to incorporate it into the weekend at East Lake. They encourage players to wear their school colors on the college football Saturday. They pair with Chick-fil-A to create a “college corner” on the course, a hospitality area with a tailgate feel and televisions tuned to the big game of the moment. TVs elsewhere around the course are likewise football-friendly.
“We’re not afraid to put a football game on and let them watch it. It’s exciting. It allows people to come out and do more than watch golf,” Clark said.
Having made all those accommodations, there’s little else now to do but to just get out of football’s way.
“I think it would help the game of golf, help more people come out, grow the game, keep kids out here,” Clark said.
“Sunday before Labor Day would be ideal.”
That’s a notion seconded by this week’s FedEx Cup points leader.
“I think everybody's in agreement that (moving up the Tour Championship) would help the ratings,” Jordan Spieth said. “If you can get the biggest tournaments in the right spots that don't conflict with other major sports or at least a limited number, then I think it's better for everybody.”
For this year and next the status quo seems fixed in place.
At least this year, the tournament doesn’t have to move up its Saturday tee times to clear the way for NBC’s broadcast of an afternoon Notre Dame football game. That was the rather humbling scenario a year ago. This year the Saturday times actually will be adjusted to a bit later to lead into a night game for the Fighting Irish.
And you can look at the unique format of this event as providing a better window for wider viewing options.
“On the positive side of having only 30 players is that the competition itself is not from 7 in the morning to 6 at night,” Clark said.
Still, for the time being, until the schedule makers make a final peace with the insurmountable, Atlanta sports fans face a familiar quandary. Can they can temper their thirst for football long enough to swing by East Lake for a bit or at the very least keep the previous channel button on the remote set to golf?
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