DALLAS — Ultimately the 2022 golf season will be remembered for chaos, confusion, the exit of top players and important personalities to LIV Golf and the PGA Tour’s response — made emphatically by Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan Wednesday — to a changing landscape.
Along with that, it can still be Scottie Scheffler’s year, too. The Highland Park and University of Texas product won’t get to battle his former Dallas junior golf rival because Will Zalatoris, ranked third in the Fed Ex points, has withdrawn from the Tour Championship due to two herniated discs in his back. But Scheffler will have ample competition starting Thursday at the familiar East Lake course in Atlanta in what is now a 29-man chase for the title.
If the entire golf season was weighted more evenly, the championship would already be Scheffler’s. He is the only four-time winner, having captured the Waste Management Phoenix Open, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Dell Match Play tournament in Austin and the Masters in a two-month span from February through April. There are three three-time winners, but the steadiness of Scheffler’s overall play (he was second at Colonial, second at the U.S. Open and third at last week’s BMW Championship) has him nearly $4 million ahead of Cameron Smith and close to $7 million ahead of Xander Schauffele and Sam Burns.
“If we had (the format) like it was before, Scottie would have won the Fed Ex Cup months ago,’’ Schauffele said in Atlanta. “I’m sure Scottie would like it in the old system, and it would be hard to argue that he doesn’t deserve it. At the end of the day, we play golf and we’re entertainers, so we need to create an entertaining sport.’’
For that reason, all of Scheffler’s hard work gives him just a two-stroke lead on Patrick Cantlay at the start of the this week’s tournament. Not much of an advantage over 72 holes given that Cantlay won last week, won the Tour Championship last year and that there are plenty of other hot golfers in the field. Schauffele starts the tournament four shots back, Burns is five back and Smith is six shots behind. A hot putter can push any of those players right into the hunt, and who’s to say that Jordan Spieth, eight shots behind at 2-under par, can’t make himself a factor on the weekend?
Scheffler did not have a PGA Tour victory when the season began, and like just about everything else, the closing FedEx format feels new to him.
“This is the only week of the year where you actually get strokes on the field,’’ Scheffler said, “but I think I’ll be best suited if I just ignore that and just go out and play my game and do my best.’’
If not for the strokes, Scheffler would not be the solid favorite. Although he has played well often enough, he has no wins since the Masters and others have kicked their game up a notch. It’s hard to pick against Smith, even with the 6-shot deficit, given how he ran down Rory McIlroy from four behind on a Sunday to win the British Open. Smith and McIlroy are paired together Thursday because of their place in the standings, which is interesting since it is rumored that Smith is bound for LIV Golf while McIlroy has become the leading spokesman for the enduring power of the PGA Tour.
“We’re all sort of independent businesses that compete against each other,’’ McIlroy said, “and for the first time, we said let’s try to be business partners and help the entire Tour and help each other basically.’’
The PGA Tour announced dramatic changes for 2023 Wednesday including not just more mega-millions for the players, which was necessary to prevent more LIV defections. For the golf fan, it was a big day because starting next year the game’s top players will commit to 20 events with the result that there will be many more weekends beyond the majors in which the best golfers are going at it rather than taking the week off.
And if you think 20 isn’t much, consider that Tiger Woods never played 20 Tour events beyond the 2005 season even though he remained the world’s No. 1 golfer for years into 2014. Woods did not invent the shortened schedule. Jack Nicklaus’ focus on winning major championships was such that he never played 20 PGA Tour events after 1969 when he was 29 years old.
As a result of the battle that LIV has waged, poaching Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and a dozen other very familiar faces, the PGA Tour will present an altered field of competition in 2023. That’s next year. Before we get there, Scottie Scheffler has one more opportunity to remind folks that 2022 is all his.
