This week, the new CEO of the PGA Tour, Brian Rolapp, made his media debut at the Tour Championship, and he said he was open to all kinds of new ideas for tournaments that might come from the new competition committee, which will be headed up by Tiger Woods.
So, what should the 2026 Tour Championship look like, and what could it look like and still be successful? No one said there wouldn’t BE a Tour Championship in the future, and that’s probably a good thing. There’s been one since 1987.
Right away, match-play aficionados showed up saying that format was the best way to go. It had to be match play.
People seem to flock toward match play because the Ryder Cup is now soooo exciting, and the Presidents Cup is becoming more exciting, and because they are both match play. Therefore, they believe, match play would make the Tour Championship even more exciting.
But no one really thinks through what it means for a golf tournament to be contested at match play. No one considers the struggles the PGA Tour as well as TV networks have had in making match play finals between two players.
It's so boring that they toss in a consolation match because they have to show something while the finalists are walking. Making that final match successful, in actual fact, is a lot harder than fans and proponents of match play believe.
In the world of facts, match play was tried for three years in the 1980s as a season-ending event. Season Ending Event. CAPS!!!
Tom Watson won the first version, defeating Gil Morgan in 1984. Everyone was happy because Tom Watson was one of the best, if not the best player, in those days. Then, Jim Thorpe won two years in a row, defeating Jack Renner in 1985 and Scott Simpson in 1986. Presumably, everyone wanted Tom Watson to win in those next two years, but he didn’t get to the final.
Watson played all three years. However, he lost in the quarterfinal in 1985 to Mac O'Grady and lost to David Edwards in the first round in 1986.
Jack Renner won the Hawaiian Open in 1984, his last of three Tour victories. Scott Simpson would go on to win a U.S. Open at Olympic Club the next season, defeating Tom Watson, but in 1986, he wasn’t a “name” player.
Thorpe was a three-time winner on the PGA Tour who was known for hitting his drives long distances. On the PGA Tour Champions circuit, he went on to win 11 times, including the Charles Schwab Cup Championship three times and the Tradition, a Champions Tour major. But he wasn’t Tom Watson.
The WGC-Match Play fared better and lasted much longer, but it, too, had to be made not real match play, tweaked to keep the stars around longer. Often, the big names didn’t make it to the weekend.
The first time the WGC-Match Play was held, Andrew Magee was defeated by Jeff Maggert in 38 holes. The second time, Tiger Woods made it to the finals, but Darren Clarke beat him.
Sure, Woods won the event three times between 1999 and 2015, but most often, he lost in earlier rounds, thereby defeating the much-ballyhooed concept of Tiger versus his current challenger in the final match on Sunday, which was what everyone wanted.
In fact, little known Nick O'Hern beat Woods early on twice, in the second round in 2005 and in the third round in 2007. Many years later, O'Hern confessed that the reason he won was that he never once looked at Woods during the rounds.
David Toms and Charles Howell III defeated Woods in the first round. Peter O’Malley, the lowest-ranked player in the field, defeated Woods in the first round in 2002. In 2019, Lucas Bjerregaard was another world beater, taking down Woods in the quarterfinals. These are the things you can't have in a season-ender.
And that’s not to mention the years when the finals were Kevin Sutherland vs. Scott McCarron or Steve Stricker v. Pierre Fulke or Matt Kuchar v. Hunter Mahan or Ian Poulter v. Paul Casey. You may say great! But most golf fans don’t say great unless the players in the final are completely famous people, like Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy or Scottie Scheffler. And in match play, that can’t be guaranteed. Sure, anybody can win, but that’s the problem. Anybody can win.
So, what does that mean for the Tour Championship?
What it means is we are confronted with stroke play as the best way to identify the best golfers over more than 18 holes, because, as the results of the various match play events demonstrated, anybody can win over 18 holes. Over four rounds, the cream tends to rise to the top. It doesn’t always happen, but most often it does, and for a season-long champion, you want to crown the cream and maybe put a cherry on top.
The Tour’s new CEO said on Wednesday of this week that simplicity was a key in understanding what was being played was the best way forward. The Tour Championship, as a FedEx Cup finale, has been anything but simple to understand.
So, nix the ridiculous whiteboards, even though it was the only way to keep track of what was happening -- sorry, Steve Sands. It was a valiant effort! And thankfully, they scrapped the starting strokes, although that concept at least made some sense.
Hopefully, the competition committee will look in the golf mirror and ask it how to determine who is the best golfer of them all and come up with what has taken nearly 20 years to realize: points are great for deciding who are the top 70 golfers and top 50 golfers and top 30 golfers all season long, but when it comes to crowning a season-long champ, nothing beats stroke play.
Match play, while fine for some tournaments, just doesn’t work for such a big title. Certainly not for a Tour Championship.