Are you ready for the … FedEx Cup playoffs?
Doesn’t quite have that ring of authenticity to it, does it?
That’s because golf’s playoffs are, let’s face it, a contrivance; a nifty bit of marketing from Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner whose great talent is in parting corporations from their sponsorship dollars.
The Tour owns none of the five biggest money-spinners in golf, the four majors and the Ryder Cup, so in order to cash big checks, Finchem has needed to extend fan interest beyond the PGA Championship. To be fair, the four individual tournaments that make up the playoffs have been mostly compelling these past three years, helped obviously by the presence of big name players, good host cities and strong courses.
But the overall experiment’s hardly been a runaway success. Most of that’s due to the fact that after August, this is a football nation.
Down at Tour HQ in Ponte Vedra Beach, I’m sure they’re consoling themselves with the fact that even Pete Rozelle had to force feed the Super Bowl to America. If you buy that analogy, I’ve got some prime Florida real estate for sale.
To make it worse, there are still serious structural problems with the playoffs. If we’re to believe they’re designed to identify the best player in the world — isn’t that what playoffs do? — then why is it that three of this year’s major champions, Graeme McDowell, Louis Oosthuizen and Martin Kaymer, aren’t in the field?
Their crime is not being PGA Tour members. So they got stiffed, along with Arjun Atwal. He wrote a Cinderella story on Sunday in North Carolina, becoming the first Monday qualifier to win a Tour event since 1986 — and the first Indian-born winner — but won’t be going to the ball in New Jersey this week because he didn’t hold a Tour card.
All of that said, while I can’t claim to have contracted FedEx Cup fever — that’s just a blister on my lip — I’m more interested in this incarnation of the playoffs than ever before.
In 2007, Tiger Woods won the inagural Cup and everyone knew he would, even if no one this side of MIT’s math department had any clue how the thing worked. In 2008, Woods didn’t play because of knee reconstruction surgery, and consequently, sports fans changed the channel.
Those few die-hards who paid attention saw Vijay Singh anticlimactically win by merely launching his opening drive at the Tour Championship in Atlanta.
Last year the system was again tweaked so the overall winner needed to play well at East Lake, but it led to the strangest of presentation ceremonies, in which Woods got the Cup, and the $10 million prize money, after having been beaten earlier in the afternoon by Phil Mickelson.
This year’s playoffs, which start Thursday at venerable Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., have piqued my interest because I’ll be fascinated to see how far Woods can go.
After the 37th and final qualifying tournament ended Sunday, Woods sat in 112th place on the points list. That means he gets into the field for The Barclays at Ridgewood, but needs to finish probably inside the top 50 just to move on to the next event, over the Labor Day long weekend at TPC Boston.
Given that Ridgewood, which Woods never has played before, has tree-lined fairways that demand accurate tee shots, there are no guarantees he’ll get to the Deutsche Bank tournament, where ironically his foundation is the major charitable beneficiary, making him an unofficial tournament host of sorts. How odd it would be if he finished outside the top 100 after the Barclays and had to show up at TPC Boston to press the bankers’ flesh in civilian clothes.
From there, the field is culled to 70 as the playoffs move to Chicago’s Cog Hill, a course Woods loves and where he won in a canter last season. After the BMW Championship, the top 30 move on to East Lake.
Significantly, only five of the Tour Championship field from last year came from outside the top 30 at the start of the playoffs. That means Woods will have an uphill climb. He’ll have to not just play well, but play consistently well over a condensed period of time, which he hasn‘t been able to do all year. Only two of his last 20 rounds have been in the 60s.
Woods did, however, show signs of a recovery at Whistling Straits. Even though he was last in the field in fairways hit and finished ahead of only three players in greens hit in regulation for the week, he scratched and clawed his way to finish in a tie for 28th.
He played as if he cared, and that’s not always been the case, particularly at the Bridgestone Invitational earlier this month, where Woods mailed it in and finished second from last.
The question now is whether he got himself up for competing at Whistling Straits because it was his last shot at a major this year or whether he’s really turned a corner.
