PONTE VEDRA, Fla. — The PGA Tour’s plans for shaking up its annual playing schedule are starting to take shape, with momentum building for a potential revealing of those plans as soon as the Players Championship next month.
Players Championship executive director Lee Smith gave an update on some of those discussions Thursday at a media preview day for the tournament at TPC Sawgrass.
Playing more tournaments in the largest U.S. markets, “starting the season big,” and “owning the summer” are among the top priorities for PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp and the Future Competition Committee (FCC) that is chaired by Tiger Woods, said Smith.
“I think you’ll see a lot more of that that will come out, especially over the next month or two as that group continues to meet and they continue to focus on what that future model of the PGA Tour looks like,” Smith said.
As the PGA Tour’s flagship event, the week of the Players Championship is often used as an opportune time to announce new initiatives and for the commissioner—or now Rolapp as CEO—to deliver a “state of the tour” address. This year’s Players is March 12–15.
3-Step Plan
The PGA Tour doesn’t currently have annual stops in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., or Boston, which are the Nos. 1, 3, 5, 8, and 9 media markets in the country.
Adding new tournaments in those major metropolitan areas would be a quick way for the PGA Tour to bring in new revenue from Fortune 500 companies and other big corporations that may be interested in paying big bucks to sponsor events and buy hospitality at those premier locations.
In recent years, the PGA Tour season has annually started in January in Hawai‘i. But the FCC has been exploring the idea of moving the season’s start until after the Super Bowl in February.
Popular PGA Tour events already typically played in February include the WM Phoenix Open, AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and the Tiger Woods–hosted Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles.
The PGA Tour’s attempts to “own the summer” would fall in line with previous ideas from Woods, who has said he likes the idea of a leaner schedule to avoid all competition with the NFL and college football. After the NBA and NHL seasons ended in June, the remainder of that month, July, and most of August are quieter periods for professional sports.
Major Debate
Golf pundits, players, and fans have been weighing in for the past week on whether the Players Championship should be considered a major championship—alongside The Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and Open Championship—after the PGA Tour released a promotional video with the tagline “March Is Going to Be Major.”
“I hope you noticed our use of the word that we’ve somewhat shied away from over the last 10 years,” Smith said at Thursday’s event. “This is a signal of the confidence, momentum, and offense that is coming out of our building these days. We’re confident about the qualifications of the Players Championship. We wanted to start a conversation.”
Smith, in a one-on-one conversation with Front Office Sports, said that the new push “says a lot about where the Players could be in the calendar and what it’s going to stand for as a premier event.”
Outside the ropes, Smith said his tournament team’s goal is to “create an experience that’s worthy of the word major.” This year, that will include a concert on the famous 17th island green headlined by rapper Ludacris on the Tuesday night of Players week.
“What is great about a large spectator event—call it the Super Bowl or the Final Four or the Kentucky Derby—is that it’s not just the competition that creates the eyeballs,” Smith told FOS. “It’s parties in the evening, it’s functions the weekend before, it’s extending the week of the event, and extending the days of the event.”
