Can there be too much golf?
The question came to mind Tuesday morning at East Lake while PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan was trumpeting his league’s 2017-18 schedule that includes 49 FedEx Cup tournaments. That’s two more than this season, which seemed to stretch from last October’s Safeway Open to infinity.
The new schedule adds one event in Korea and promotes a former Web.com tournament in the Dominican Republic to major league status. There is an ever-increasing global flavor to this Tour, which next season will include stops in six nations outside the U.S., as well as a swing through Puerto Rico.
In whatever language, that’s a whole bunch of golf, the kind of schedule even the most fortunate Florida retiree would be hard-pressed to keep.
With the schedule wrapping from one year to the next, there is no such thing as an off-season built into the program. Professional golf is a perpetual motion machine, which means it overlaps every other sport – most notably football now – sometimes to its detriment.
Sympathy for the players may be difficult to find. After all they’re only doing for a living what we would do, if only we could.
Besides, players make their own off-season. As Jordan Spieth noted Tuesday, “Most of the players this week will have quite a bit of time off in the fall.”
The bigger question involves those fans of golf – both avid and tepid – who might well have reached the saturation point. Sure, the Golf Channel needs the programming. But how much of it can any sane soul watch? There are more rounds of golf in a PGA Tour season than games in a Major League season, and you know how impossible it is to maintain interest in every swing of the American Pastime.
Fans, one supposes, also make their own off-season by the choices they make with their viewing habits. You just don’t want that clicking to another channel to become a part of their muscle memory.
And, honestly, the PGA Tour is far more concerned about maximizing the earnings for itself and its various levels of players than about establishing any kind of rhythm to its season.
“I find the discussion about an offseason to be interesting because you go back to 1967, there were 47 events on our schedule. The schedule started the first week in January, ended the second week in December. You go back 60 years ago there were 48 events on our schedule. So, this schedule's been pretty consistent for a long period of time and I expect it to be that way going forward,” Monahan said Tuesday. (The main difference now, of course, being the fans’ increased exposure to all those events).
Added the commissioner, “We think it's our job to maximize playing and financial opportunities. We're going to continue to focus on that and do it in the interest of the fan.”
So, no, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing as too much golf.
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