YOU WANT A PLAYOFF -- HAVE A PLAYOFF
Of all the repugnant things that corporate gluttony has done to sport, nothing quite compares to what the FedEx Corporation, in association with Tim Finchem of the PGA, have done to “the greatest gemme” of golf.
With the introduction of “The FedEx Cup,” the sport of gentlemen has been reduced to a kind of year-end Chicken Ranch pageant that might as well be called “Dirty Dancing With The Stars” for the sake of the be-all and end-all of American life in the early 21st century -- “television ratings…”
I’d go into the Kafka-esque absurdities of a “system” that combines incomprehensible point tallies that result in standings with negative numbers at the end of a season of blood, sweat, and tears, or the crowning of a non-winner in a fashion worthy only of Caligula, but all this has been “covered” by the very process that has delivered this abomination to the grid -- the media and its telephone party-game gossip mongers…
Instead, a bit of simple logic, if it might still be permitted.
PLAYOFFS work in only one situation: when a sport’s season consists of a set number of scheduled games between two opponents at a time, the result of which is a win or a loss, with the W’s and L’s being totaled to produce a simple listing of final standing at the end of that season.
The original American pastime of baseball was first to catch on to the possibility of then adding a season ending tournament that would produce an exciting, satisfying denouement to an already completed season, and the resulting “Fall Classic” of the World Series was so successful that other sports soon followed -- especially when mass market television made sporting spectacle into a license to print money -- i.e., “The Super Bowl.”
SO when you have a sport which consists of two teams playing against each other for a win or a loss, you can have a playoff.
But in a sport like golf, where you have hundreds of individuals playing various tours around the globe for tournament prizes of trophy, prestige, and professional level money, there can be no “playoff” at the end of it all that doesn’t contradict or diminish all that comes before it.
No matter how many motivated minds apply tunnel vision to systemizing the behavior of cats, you’re never going to get a group of four legged felines into a ring so you can have one final “race” to determine “best cat.”
Cats don’t race.
And golf is not a team elimination sport.
ALL that said, if you do want to concoct a television spectacle for the sake of pitting gladiators against one another for cold hard cash, and you don’t want to call it what that would be in golf -- a glorified skins game -- then just admit what you’re doing and do it on a simple level that Joe Sixpack can understand (and bet on).
4 weeks. Regular 4-round, 4-day format. Stroke play.
Week-1: 128 players, seeded by money rankings to reward winning play during the year, No.1 vs No.128, 2 vs 127, and so on.
Week-2: 64 players, same format.
Week-3: 32 players, same format.
And for the final Week-4: 16 players on Day 1, 8 players on Day 2, 4 players on Day 3, and on the final day, just 2 players playing 18 holes, stroke play, for the championship and the loot.
You want ratings? Week-4 would produce ratings that golf has never seen -- especially if it was timed to be held the week before the NFL season started…
AND then golf being what it really is -- which is to say, golfers being who they really are -- you’d end up with yesterday being Tiger vs. Phil, Joe Sixpack screaming and yelling and putting money down all over his living room and Las Vegas, and at the end when the 10-gazillion dollar check was presented to Phil -- as it should have been yesterday -- he probably would have turned around and donated it to breast cancer research so that lovers of “the greatest gemme” everywhere could still look themselves in the eye in the mirror come morning and smile.
That, to “the greatest gemme,” would be a “playoff.”
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Richard Lees is on The Board of Directors of The Shivas Irons Society, and President of Richard Lees Capital Management in Los Angeles ( www.RichardLees.com ). STREAMERS attempts to reveal bits and pieces of one golfer's ”fascination.” As Shivas Irons puts it, “Gowf is a place to practice fascination, and as fascination is practiced, a capacity develops to put forth streamers of heart power for the ball to fly on."