As professional sports become more and more successful, their seasons, perversely, seem to lose shape and significance to all but the most dedicated fans. Golf is no exception; its season is stretched so far that it encompasses the entire year and is becoming almost incoherent.
Before elaborating, let's look at some other sports for comparison. I remember a hockey season that was 60 games long and ran only until mid-April, when spring arrived along with baseball and golf. That made sense. Now hockey is 84 games long and meanders on to June.It's the same with baseball, when there is a full season, that is. Division winners in each league used to meet each other in a playoff. The winners went to the World Series. Baseball's new wild-card arrangement requires more attention than I would imagine your average sports fan wants to give.
This is also the case in golf, where followers are losing touch with the shapeless season. There are too many special tournaments: the World Cup, the Franklin Funds Shark Shoot-Out, Skins Games galore, the new Diners Club Matches, Presidents Cup and Sarazen World Open Championship, the Dunhill Cup, the Johnnie Walker World Championship, Wendy's Three-Tour Challenge, the Solheim Cup.
These events exist because sponsors like golf's demographics. Commercial interests generate these tournaments and continue them if they are successful.
This is not to say that some new events do not make golf sense as opposed to economic sense alone. The Presidents Cup, which ended Sunday, may develop a place for itself because it is reasonable that international golfers ineligible for the Ryder Cup should compete at match play against a U.S. PGA Tour team. And the Solheim Cup, a Ryder Cup for women, also makes sense.
But the other tournaments are all over the map when it comes to being legitimate. The concept of a season-ending championship has merit, but nobody yet accepts the Johnnie Walker tournament in December as a "world championship."
This limited-field event that began in 1991 has had trouble attracting all the top players. Nick Price, for one, has yet to play because he and his family spend December visiting family in Zimbabwe. He said during the Canadian Open that the sponsor is encouraging his participation and being courteous about doing so. But when asked if he would play this December Price answered, "not this year."
Case closed, or so his declaration implied. What's a "world championship" without Price?
Now along comes the Sarazen World Open Championship, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 6 at the Legends at Chateau Elan near Atlanta. Press releases are full of effusive exclamations of a company sponsoring an "official car," of an "international advisory board."
USA Today International has even signed on in the "official newspaper category." Its purpose is to "promote the Sarazen through a fully integrated program, including full- and partial-page ads, sports `windows' and hotlines, as well as through features focusing on the open golf championships from around the world." This begs the question as to whether the paper will publish critical commentary on the event.
It's unfair to condemn this tournament that is for winners of national Open championships or others before they get off the ground. Gene Sarazen's reputation is impeccable, and maybe there is a place for a tournament that gathers Open champions.
But the season is becoming so amorphous that one is hard-pressed to understand it as a season at all. There is only a tiresome, year-long run of events. This is clearly because golf is inexorably becoming another form of what David Guterson calls "Moneyball" in his essay about the relentless promotion of pro sports. The article appears in the September issue of Harper's magazine and is worth reading far more than the self-serving fluffball that Sports Illustrated has out now on its Top 40 people in sports the past 40 years.
Guterson writes: "When I look at the slogans and icons of business now pasted everywhere across the fields and screens of play, I am more than just merely irritated. For me they mar the aesthetic of games, subvert the clean lines of the unfolding ice dance (in hockey), draw my eye from the breaking curve of a pitch, and generally destroy most of my pleasure."
Golf fans are suffering from commercial overexposure to a simple sport burdened with too many weak-link tournaments. As Guterson says, "sport's endless season binds fans upon a wheel where the end is always merely the beginning, one championship but a prelude to the next."
He could have been talking about golf's long-season journey into meaninglessness.