Yes. It called THE PLAYERS. And for the second time: It’s a Major.
Finally, The PGA TOUR has gone out on a small limb and declared their flagship event a Major. I went out on a golfwriter’s limb about 25-some-odd years ago and declared it a Major then.
Some people think that was nuts. But I’d already been to many majors. I’d been to all four that qualify. I knew what it took to stage them. What ingredients were necessary. It seemed to me that, objectively, THE PLAYERS had all the right stuff.
It has the field. In fact, it has the best field in golf every year. BEST. Don’t let anybody try to talk you out of that. It’s the top players because they play on The PGA TOUR. And even those from other countries try to join The PGA TOUR to be able to play here because it’s the best competition and they can make the most money on The PGA TOUR. And the field just got more elite with only 120 of the best instead of 144.
The PGA Championship has 20 Club professionals. Nothing wrong with that. If they were good enough to play on The PGA TOUR, they would. Anybody would. So having the Club pros diminishes the strength of field for the PGA. Everybody in golf knows it.
The U.S. Open and British Open (aka The Open Championship) have qualifiers. A.I. tells us that the U.S. Open has between 50 and 70 qualifiers every year. Now, some of those qualifiers are PGA TOUR players or former PGA TOUR players, and that’s fine, but having qualifiers does not equal having all PGA TOUR players. There are also some spots held for winners of certain amateur events. They also allow winners of certain PGA TOUR events or FedEx point earners exemptions.
The British Open has 20 spots available through qualifying. Because their days are so long in the summer, they have no problem playing 156 guys, which is the size of the field. That means that 136 spots are from other Open categories that they have decided to include, which in some instances are amateurs. There are 27 categories of qualifying exemptions.
And so, just based on the field alone, THE PLAYERS is a lot tougher to win. It’s the championship of The PGA TOUR. It has the toughest field in golf.
Majors traditionally have tough tests of golf. As Cameron Young said on Sunday about the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass, “It's a great test of will, a test of patience and obviously a test of hitting some good shots.”
Then, he added some more: “It's absolutely exhausting. This place has had my number the last few years. I've never really had a good finish here. And yeah, it is incredibly taxing. Every shot all day long you can get yourself into trouble. There’s no easy ones. There’s no givens. And you’re going to make mistakes.”
So, best field. Hard, hard course. So hard, most pros don’t like playing it.
Then there are the intangibles like sold out tickets and horrible traffic. We had that this year, but honestly, on Sunday, I don’t think everybody showed up because they knew it was going to rain. They just didn’t know when.
Traffic? We have too much traffic on A1A on a Wednesday at 11 a.m. Never mind during THE PLAYERS. Well, I kind of take that back. I was out early Tuesday and already the cars were lined up beyond the curve in the road on JTB, and AIA was bumper-to-bumper. When we get flying cars, we’ll have something!
So, by any measure used by the “old” majors, THE PLAYERS is already a Major. Nobody wears USGA blue blazers to all the functions or anything because we aren’t stuffy enough.
Now, the list of majors was originally devised by Arnold Palmer on a trip across the Atlantic when he went to play in the British Open in 1960. Palmer had already won the Masters and the British Open that year and asked his travel buddy, Bob Drum, who was a writer for a Pittsburgh newspaper, what it would be if he, Palmer, also won the British Open and the PGA.
Drum replied it would the equivalent of Bobby Jones Grand Slam. So up in the air, over the Atlantic Ocean, Arnold Palmer invented the Modern Grand Slam, and it’s been that way since 1960. Drum told me this story in the 1990s. He also told it to Golf Channel for the three-part series on Arnold Palmer, so if you don’t believe me here, maybe you’ll believe that!
Arnold Palmer was pragmatic enough to make room for a championship belonging to The PGA TOUR. After all, he and Jack Nicklaus basically invented The PGA TOUR. Why wouldn’t they want to include its championship in a list of majors? I can’t think of a reason at all.
