For more than 20 years, the World Golf Championships have occupied their own corner of the PGA Tour world, events that were not quite major-championship quality but were something more than regular tour events.
Their distinction – built on limited fields, bigger purses and a designated cachet granted at their arrival in 1999 – separated the World Golf Championships, a velvet rope of sorts in a long season of events.
The recitation of Tiger Woods’ colossal career achievements typically goes something like this: Winner of 15 major championships among 82 PGA Tour events including 18 World Golf Championships.
Woods put an emphasis on the WGCs – Dustin Johnson’s six wins in the select events is the closest any player came to matching Woods – and thereby granted them an elevated relevance.
Times change, however, and the final World Golf Championship, the Dell Technologies Match Play, is being played at Austin Country Club. By Sunday afternoon, one player will have emerged from the field of 64 and, cast against the backdrop of the Pennybacker Bridge that frames the entertaining golf course, the winner will help bring down the curtain on a distinctive chapter in tour history.
As the PGA Tour moves into its new designated tournament era, the WGCs will become part of its past, gradually fading away more than the victim of a hard stop.
“They evolved but they didn’t evolve at the same rate as the PGA Tour was evolving and increasing purses,” said Adam Scott, winner of two WGC titles.
“They were once an aspirational thing to get in and certainly for a long period in my career, sat as the level just under a major to (becoming) take ‘em or leave ‘em. Some things evolve like that, and that may have been on purpose or not. I don’t know who was pulling strings, but they became just like any other event.”
It’s worth noting that the WGCs, whether directly or indirectly, were hatched not long after Greg Norman tried to start a series of global events, only to be rebuffed by the PGA Tour. Norman felt the tour took his idea and developed the WGCs. He never forgave them.
All these years later, the tour and Greg Norman are still tugging in different directions.
Many years, there were four WGC events – a match play that bounced around from Australia to Arizona, ultimately landing in Texas for its final seven years; the WGC Championship with various title sponsors that was most often played at Doral and in Mexico; the WGC Invitational, played 19 times at Firestone where Woods won eight times; and the Champions event in China that hasn’t been played since before the pandemic began.
Last year, the match play event was the only WGC and it’s the only one this year.
Despite their aspirational foundation, the WGCs suffered because field sizes varied as did the qualification systems.
“If you go back and you look at them and look at how they have evolved, and you look at field composition, I think depending upon which of the four events that you choose, you had field sizes anywhere in the high 40s up into the low 70s, and anywhere between 20 percent and 35 percent of those players were not PGA Tour members,” commissioner Jay Monahan said.
“They’re very different from what we’re presenting here with designated events going forward. … The criteria is very well understood. It will be consistent. That was not the case with the World Golf Championships in the past.”
“WGCs were like an additive program, which I thought was cool, and obviously Tiger dominated them which made them even cooler than they were on paper, when Tiger goes out and wins 18 of them.” – Max Homa
The designated events in 2024 – the Players Championship, the three FedEx Cup playoff events and eight as yet unnamed other tournaments – can be seen as an evolutionary step. Each of those events will have purses of at least $20 million and are at the core of the new tour model along with the four major championships.
“WGCs were like an additive program, which I thought was cool, and obviously Tiger dominated them which made them even cooler than they were on paper, when Tiger goes out and wins 18 of them,” Max Homa said.
“There was a little left to be desired in the quality of the season so now, as some have coined the designated events as the new WGCs, they aren’t additive, they are a part of the season that everybody will be playing and qualifying for if you’re in the top 50. It is a stark improvement while maintaining this elevated feeling of slightly closer to a major without being a major.”
At present, there are no plans to continue with a match-play event on the PGA Tour. It’s a compelling competition but, perhaps more than typical stroke-play events, there is a wild card element. As an example, the first WGC Match Play concluded with Jeff Maggert defeating Andrew Magee for the title, not exactly the glittering finale many had imagined.
Eventually, the format was changed from a single-elimination (remember Nick O’Hern bumping off Woods in the early rounds in 2005 and 2007?) to include a round-robin group format to assure the top players all teed it up at least three times.
The champion Sunday at Austin Country Club can claim to be the last man standing, at least in a World Golf Championship event.
It will be enough to assure a spot in the designated events for the foreseeable future.
“The World Golf Championships for 25 years have been a strong portfolio. We’ve had great events and great champions,” Monahan said.
“But the business evolves, and it adapts. That’s not a knock on the World Golf Championships; that’s more about where we are and how we think the tour can get stronger in the years ahead.”