The road from PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, where the newly rebranded Cognizant Classic will be played this week on that beast of a golf course, to Augusta National Golf Club is 530 miles, give or take a detour into Buc-ee’s.
The Masters is six weeks away, but when the PGA Tour arrives in Florida, about the time the daffodils are sprouting in Georgia, there is an almost magnetic tug toward the year’s first major championship (though to be fair, the 50th playing of the Players Championship next month is a milestone moment, too).
For all the talk about signature events, world-ranking points, a potential global tour, private-equity investment and the eternal speculation about Tiger Woods’ next start, professional golf is built around the four major championships and, specifically, the Masters.
Each sport has its defining event. Take your pick from the World Cup, the World Series, Wimbledon, the Super Bowl, the Final Four or one of multiple world pickleball championships. Take all of them, if you like.
In golf, it’s the Masters.
As the game lurches toward another April in Augusta, it still feels uneasy and uncertain.
And, among its many charms is the way it arrives at just the right time.
As the game lurches toward another April in Augusta, it still feels uneasy and uncertain. The PGA Tour’s signature events are successful, but a week such as last week’s Mexico Open demonstrates the two-tiered nature of the new PGA Tour, likely a preview of the tour’s future.
Even when Wyndham Clark shoots 60 at Pebble Beach or Hideki Matsuyama shoots 62 on Sunday at Riviera, the golf itself struggles to escape the money matters that dominate the sport the way Jack and Arnie did in the 1960s.
It will remain that way until the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund resolve their skeptical dance with each other. Some say an agreement is close; others say otherwise.
Somewhere in all of this, what’s truly best for the game may be addressed, but it falls somewhere in line between money and power and who gets how much of both.
Even the best-case scenario at this point – the PGA Tour and the PIF strike a deal that brings some form of reunification – will be a disappointment to many who view the Saudis’ human-rights record and their willingness to try and buy their way into the world’s good graces as something to be kept at arm’s length rather than embraced.
The Masters did the right thing recently when it announced it was giving Joaquín Niemann an exemption, something he deserved based on his performance. Some may view it as an olive branch, a gesture intended to move the negotiating process along, but it felt more like a recognition of Niemann himself.
Niemann won the 2018 Latin America Amateur, and that resonates at Augusta National, which created the event. Niemann also won the Australian Open in December, another significant achievement. What the Official World Golf Ranking might not show, Augusta National was able to rely on the eyeball test.
The game eventually may get to a global tour – it’s a good idea though a logistical challenge – but until then, the majors are a condensed version. As such, the Masters owns a unique place in the game, because of what it is, where it is and when it is.
To this point, the PGA Tour has given us good stories – the personal struggles overcome by Chris Kirk and Grayson Murray, Nick Dunlap’s amateur achievement, Clark’s weather-beaten win at Pebble Beach – but no theme has emerged.
The plot and the main characters are not yet clear.
The most striking takeaway to this point may be the fact that only one player ranked in the top 10 – Clark – has won this year. Granted, it’s still a small sample size, but the game’s stars haven’t delivered yet.
The Florida Swing, like the recently completed West Coast Swing, is almost an entity to itself.
The Scottie Scheffler story is familiar – the most consistent ball-striker in the game and the 138th-best putter on the PGA Tour in terms of strokes gained metrics. It doesn’t take a math professor to know that’s a lousy equation.
Rory McIlroy dominated Dubai in January but has posted a T66 and T24 on the PGA Tour (winning the most skins in The Match doesn’t count).
Jon Rahm has a team win on LIV, Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay are winning money but not trophies, Max Homa has gone flat, Matt Fitzpatrick does not have a top-10 finish in five starts and Brian Harman has more finishes outside the top 40 than inside it to this point.
The Florida Swing, like the recently completed West Coast Swing, is almost an entity to itself. The golf courses (with the exception of the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass) aren’t as good as the ones played out west, but it’s a tournament stretch that, because it has the benefit of bumping up near the Masters, has its own chapter in the season.
The same could be said for Florida itself, which beats to its own unique drum.
Florida promises sunshine and good times (and more than its share of crazy happenings).
It has arrived, right on time.