Is it 2014 Already?

The PGA Tour’s 2014 FedEx Cup race has already started

Jon Levy

So, it’s October 22, 2013, and Webb Simpson (above) just won the second event of the PGA Tour’s 2014 season, the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open.

The race for the 2014 FedEx Cup is on!

Huh? Didn’t Henrik Stenson just win it?

Welcome to the PGA Tour’s new wrap-around schedule.

 

The New PGA Tour Schedule

The PGA Tour has long launched each season right after the New Year with the winners-only Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii—a fun, get-your-season-off-to-a-good-start-with-a-guaranteed-check event we love watching from our snowed-in houses on the mainland.

But now there is no start to the season because there is no off-season.

That’s because, even with all its charitable initiatives, the PGA Tour is a for-profit business. And when a for-profit business—operating in an economy that guarantees vitality for virtually no company—gets a shot in the arm with two big-time fall events in Asia (the CIMB Classic and World Golf Championships–HSBC Champions) and feels that marketing its product, the FedEx Cup, before the holidays can enhance its security (read, profit), the schedule change becomes a no-brainer.

Take the two Asian events: Partnering with the world’s other major professional golf tours (five, in all) to create a WGC event in Shanghai and then adding another event in Malaysia with the Asian Tour – in two markets now seeing significant growth in the game (again, profit for the PGA Tour from a new fan base)—speaks volumes to the Big Show protecting itself by preparing for the future. It’s just good business.

So, while we’ve regularly watched the pros in Vegas as a bush-league wind-down to the end of the season—with the only real intrigue being which players would keep their cards—we’ll now watch them rack up points for next year’s FedEx Cup. 

But who cares? For those of us who are only vaguely interested in FedEx Cup standings, wrapping our minds around the new “wrap-around PGA Tour” schedule is shopping in a Christmas store on your summer vacation. But those shops seem to do well—as will the PGA Tour.

Think of the schedule as operating on a fiscal year instead of a calendar year. It’s only appropriate. After all, that’s what the PGA Tour does.

 

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