European Tour prepares for ambitious tournament schedule in 2021
Ambitious, eh?
There are a few gaps, five tournaments and/or venues still need to be confirmed and the number of Rolex Series events has gone down to four, but the 2021 European Tour schedule, formallyrevealed on Tuesday, contains a minimum of 42 events in 24 countries. As many as 18 tournaments that were either postponed or canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic make welcome returns, although only eight events occupy the three months leading up to the Masters in early April.The good news on the Rolex front is that the three of the four events now under that heading—the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, the Aberdeen Standard Investments Scottish Open and the BMW PGA Championship—will each offer prize funds of $8 million, up by $1 million. But the biggest purse on the Old World circuit outside of the World Golf Championships and the majors will be the season finale. The DP World Tour Championship in Dubai, scheduled for Nov. 18-21, will still pay $3 million to the winner, but the total purse will go up to $9 million, another rise of $1 million.
Pro tip: If your lead sentence begins, "There are a few gaps", perhaps ambitious will trigger too much cognitive dissonance? As the kids said a few years back, Hide the Decline.
Shack is all over the issues in his long post on the press release, beginning with the good news:
The obvious positives? The 2021 European Tour is going to play 42 times, with 18 events lost to the misery that is 2020 returning. Scheduling is designed to reduce travel and the European Tour sounds like it continues to take COVID very seriously.
The other good news, and it bears repeating, is that they are not now nor have they ever been in financial distress... Which is a very good thing, given all the bad news contained herein:
Just four Rolex Series events featuring the PGA Tour-level purses attracting top players, down three from last year’s plan. Low purses dominate and sadly, several events are TBD on the payout front but the tour is touting “increased prize funds” given the slight bumps from 2020.
Those were the events that were to be competitive with the U.S. Tour, and we'll get to the most curious omission in a second. But see if you can detect the whiff of desperation?
Elsewhere on the 11-month schedule that kicks off in Abu Dhabi Jan. 21 (with Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas in the field), some details regarding price money are a little more vague. What is for certain is that new events during April in Tenerife and Gran Canaria, as well as the following Portugal Masters, will all offer €1.5 million purses. The British Masters hosted by former Masters champion Danny Willett is worth €2 million, up from €1.25 million. And both the Irish and Italian Opens prize funds have risen to €3 million.One other promise has been made. The second (and so far unnamed) event on the seven-week summer U.K. Swing (one that clashes with the Olympics in Japan) will be co-sanctioned with the Ladies European Tour and the LPGA.
They're smart to beat Jay to the punch on this, though it's very much the kind of thing we do more because we have to than want to...
Can anyone name those Rolex Cup events that have been lost to the memory hole? Anyone? Bueller?
Fortunately, Alistair Tait can, and it's a cautionary tale:
That wasn’t part of the narrative when France was awarded the match in May 2011. The Ryder Cup was painted as the key to delivering French golf to the land of milk and honey.The French contingent was jubilant in the Wentworth Club Ballroom nine years ago when Francebeat out bids from Germany, Holland, Portugal and Spain. The French bid team could have been forgiven if they’d broken into the "La Marseillaise."Jean Van de Velde was part of the bid team. He was in no doubt about what the match would bring to French golf. The 1999 Ryder Cup player said:
“This will be a huge inspirational factor for French golf. It’s a dream come true for France. There are a lot of good young French kids coming through the French ranks and this will push them harder.”
Fellow Ryder Cupper Thomas Levet was equally ebullient:
“It’s like getting the Olympics for us,” Levet said. “For the development of golf, for all the kids that are playing golf in France, it’s unreal. If we can get one million people playing the game, then I will be so happy.”
As long as you're happy, it's all good. And they only missed it by, holding thumb and index finger an inch apart, by that much:
That one million figure was perhaps a wee bit optimistic. According to KPMG’s Golf Participation Report, there were 410,377 registered golfers (golf club members) in 2010. One year before the match, the same Participation Report showed a slightly lower figure of 410,171. Last year, KPMG reported a French participation figure of 412,726, a 0.62% growth year on year.
Strangely, Mr. Levet, in fact, nailed it. It is remarkably just like the Olympics, each of which produces two new golfers.... At that rate of progress...
What does this have to do with the French Open? Good question, but I would have thought Ryder Cup success would have had companies queueing up to sponsor the French Open. Thetournament, one of the oldest on the European Tour calendar, wasn’t played this year for obvious reasons. Perhaps it’s not surprising it isn’t on the 2021 schedule considering its fall down the European pecking order last year.After two years as a $7 million Rolex Series tournament, it came with a $1.78 million prize fund last year. The 2018 French Open featured Justin Thomas, Jon Rahm, Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Graeme McDowell, Tommy Fleetwood, Rafa Cabrera Bello, Matt Wallace, Lee Westwood and winner Alex Noren. It had a strength of field rating of 288, fifth strongest European event outside the majors and WGCs. Last year that rating fell to 51, joint sixth lowest on the schedule, as Nicolas Colsaerts won in a field short name players.
Completely unfair, as the only reason they played in 2018 was the Ryder Cup scheduled for that Autumn, but that just makes all the promises all the more laughable, not that we didn't know that at the time.
Yes, the event has a modicum of history, but Alistair seems to be overly upset, likely because he made the classic mistake of believing their nonsense:
Maybe so. However, it’s sad day when a great tournament dating back to 1906 with illustrious winners like Arnaud Massy, J.H. Taylor, James Braid, Walter Hagen, Sir Henry Cotton, Bobby Locke, Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Sandy Lyle, Sir Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer, Colin Montgomerie, Jose Maria Olazabal, McDowell, Fleetwood and Noren drops off the European Tour schedule.
So much for France’s Ryder Cup legacy.
We'll just consider it the Maginot Line of golf... But the check cleared, which is pretty much the whole point.
The other point worth repeating is that the Euro Tour is not in distress. But one ironic aspect of this Tour remaining vibrant and viable, is that the only asset that seems to have value to potential investors was that ownership of one-halve of the Ryder Cup. As I note often, the existential angst that permeates Fortress Ponte Vedra Beach comes from the premiere world golf tour having no control of the four and one-half events each year that actually matter. The good news is that Jay Monahan has made progress there, obtaining a beneficial interest in one of those events, though ironically on the wrong side.
Scenes From the Class Struggle, Distaff Edition - The ladies are playing their version of the inane FedEx Cup this week, which features much...what's the word, oh, inanity. But first, we had some speculation about the TV ratings for their uncontested U.S. Open. In a nutshell, there were none, though I've been unable to find any data on the ratings for that Monday final round.
Geoff has the skinny (that being all too apt a descriptor)
Beth Ann Nichols thought that the event would be lit without the big Tour as competition, which is misguided in the extreme. Not least because on Friday there was limited coverage of the ladies due to Golf Cannel's commitment to, and this will sting, that QBE Shark Shootout...Hey, the Shark Shootout is practically a major...
Shack won't make many friends with these harsh comments:
The rescheduled U.S. Women’s Open ratings reality was obvious to everyone but, apparently, those behind last week’s ill-timed “Women Worth Watching” campaign.2020 has taught us that sports fans just aren’t into championship golf outside of their normal playing windows. So even though we’ve seen declines for all of the rescheduled majors—with the Masters and U.S. Open taking the biggest plunges—it did not take a doctorate to know that 2020 U.S. Women’s Open ratings would set record lows due to the timing, competition and overall trends.Not the year to tell everyone Women are worth watching when nothing could reverse the trend. Which made the suffocating rollout of a “brand campaign” perplexing, particularly knowing how many meetings and dollars are spent to orchestrate the pretend-to-be-natural “content” (aka paid filler). The relentless hashtags, paid influencer endorsements, and force integration of the campaign even by media covering the event was all a really cool new thing back in 2018. But in 2020? It came off as desperate and ill-timed. At best. With 3000 Americans dying a day from COVID-19 last week, this would have been a good year for the USGA to remain quiet in the branding onslaught department.
By way of comparison, those viewership numbers above (and I'm not sure which coverage window they capture, as for Saturday that 11:00 a.m. time was the Golf Channel window, but might include the NBC window as well) compare to these from 2019:
New record-low for US Women’s OpenThe final round was no match for the corresponding days of the inaugural Augusta National Women’s Amateur (0.9, 1.36M) or last year’s Women’s British Open (0.7, 964K).
Third round action last Saturday had a 0.45 and 609,000, up 15% in ratings and 12% in viewership from rainout coverage last year (0.39, 543K), but down 6% and 7% respectively from 2017 (0.48, 653K).
It's apples and oranges for sure, but they seem to have lost more than half their audience, that was already a record low. What Ian Faith would refer to as their appeal becoming more selective.
Of interest to your humble blogger is how the LPGA keeps shooting itself in the foot. First, as I've noted previously, Mike Whan's network coverage fetish seems sill given the number of eyeballs he can deliver, especially in view of the audience that one shed every time you make them change channels. Of course when you make them switch to a streaming service to which they don't subscribe, you kiss those viewers goodbye...
But perhaps of greater import, they keep undermining their product, this being the latest:
Natalie Gulbis excited for sponsor invitation to CME Group Tour Championship
Who? It turns out that the pointy-breasted one is still technically an LPGA member, and completely deserving, as this attests:
Who says modern players are inconsistent?
Just a reminder that this is a tournament intended to reward season-long achievement, to for which there really shouldn't be sponsors' exemptions. But they picked the right girl, because.... well, really how do you justify this
The selection of Gulbis, 37, and CME ambassador Sarah Kemp as sponsor invitations resulted insome controversy and some columnists taking the tournament to task for not giving one to Sophia Popov, who came out of nowhere to win the 2020 AIG Women’s British Open and also calls Naples home.
And she would have been in the tournament if her points from winning the British Open had counted in the Race to the CME Globe, but she wasn’t a member of the LPGA then.
Gulbis said she was unaware that Popov was not in the field, but she said she still would have accepted the sponsor invite.
She's excited, and isn't that really all that matters?
But Eamon Lynch has the most curious of takes on this imbroglio:
Lynch: Sophia Popov's exclusion from CME isn't Natalie Gulbis' fault; it's 'technically' her own
Technically? That seems an admission against interest, but here's Eamon's description of that technicality:
Let’s try explaining this over the din of muskets being loaded on Twitter.
In a typical year, the top 60 point-earners on the LPGA tour qualify for the season finale. In this most atypical year, the field for the tournament was expanded to 72 players. For the first (and apparently last) time, two of those spots were reserved for sponsor’s exemptions. Since Popov wasn’t an LPGA Tour member when she won the Open, her points from Troon didn’t count. So she didn’t make the top 60. Or the top 70. Nor did she receive one of those exemptions.
Does Eamon think this helps? We can all understand that technical issue will arise when the world is torn asunder, but apparently said rules are inviolable. Except that this is an organization that throws the rules aside when it suits them, not least with that fifth major.
We've previously covered some of the Golf Digest nominees for Newsmaker of the Year, the most recent iteration of which is here. Ranked No. 10, which just happens to be the top ranking of anythingrelated to the women's game, is this young lady:
No. 10: SOPHIA POPOV
There isn’t a story from 2020 that more exemplifies why we love sports than Sophia Popov’s win at the AIG Women’s British Open. A player no one had ever heard of, who wasn’t a member of the LPGA Tour, who was on the cusp of quitting the game a year ago, who struggled with weight
loss and other complications as she battled Lyme disease for years, plays her way to a two-shot win over the best players in the world. It’s hard not to root for that story every time. Popov wasn’t even supposed to be in the field at Royal Troon. The 27-year-old had been bouncing around tours since graduating from USC in 2014. She lost her LPGA Tour card in 2019 and was going to be spending 2020 on the Symetra Tour—likely 2021, too, once the pandemic hit, limiting the number of spots Symetra Tour graduates would get on the LPGA Tour for 2021. But LPGA Tour players not wanting to travel during the pandemic opened up some extra spots in the early tournaments when play resumed. Popov caddied in the first event back and then got a start the next week at the Marathon LPGA Classic. She took full advantage, finishing T-9. It was enough to get her into the field at Royal Troon. With her boyfriend on the bag, she started out with a 70, good enough for T-2. At that point, she was just a name near the lead no one had really heard of, the kind of player who has one good round in a major and then falls away. But Popov didn’t go away. She shot 72 on Friday, staying in the T-2 position. A 67 on Saturday gave her a three-shot lead. She remained unflappable on Sunday, winning by two to become the first German woman to win a major championship. She also earned full LPGA Tour status. No more Symetra Tour events, no more considering giving up all together. Popov had finally, officially arrived. —Keely Levins
And yet they wonder why no one watches... We saw this both at the Dinah Shore and now at the year-end event, and it seems a two-level failure. Mike Whan seems not to grasp that his job is to surmount those technical issues and present the ladies' events in the best light possible, which logically includes having the strongest field and including those notable players whose recent performance obviously argues for their inclusion. As for the CME folks who think Natalie Gulbis adds luster to their event, she's a little older now and their beginning to sag....
One parting shot. Also not qualifying and snubbed for those sponsor exemptions? A Lim Kim. But what has she done lately?
Scenes From the Class Struggle, TV Edition - Am I the only one shocked at Comcast defenestrating Golf Channel? It seemed to be a success, but they're pretty much tearing it to the ground.
It's 1 minutes that you'll never get back, but Brandel Chamblee posts this last wistful tour of the Golf Channel Orlando studios, including that named for The King, before heading to...well, Stamford, CT:
Full disclosure: I've not watched it, so you're on your own.
I'll just throw in this tweet from Eamon Lynch which seems awfully well-timed given the snow currently on the ground:
Flashing back to March 2018 in NYC, when @chambleebrandel decided to take a few practice swings between bar stops in Tribeca. He thought that couple of inches was a huge blizzard. His upcoming first winter in Connecticut will be educational. 😂 pic.twitter.com/uA59wUJSRf
— Eamon Lynch (@eamonlynch) December 17, 2020
Someday I'll learn how to center embedded tweets... Anyone have a teenager to loan me?
One might have thought that the channel's Morning Drive feature would survive the trip North, but you'd be mistaken:
Golf Channel has a new face and a new program debuting in January.NBC Sports and Golf Channel announced in a news release on Wednesday that a new show "GolfToday," will replace "Morning Drive" on Jan. 4. “Morning Drive” had been the channel’s featured morning programming for a decade. Joining the NBC/Golf Channel team as a co-anchor is Shane Bacon, who formerly served as a host of Fox Sports’ golf coverage. Others in the studio will be previous “Morning Drive” contributors Damon Hack, Jimmy Roberts and Anna Whiteley.
The news release did not specify a time slot for “Golf Today,” though it appears that the program won’t start as early as the previous 7 a.m. ET "Morning Drive" start. Golf Channel executive producer Molly Solomon hinted that a later slot would allow for more live tournament updates and guest interviews to be part of the show. “At midday, we can lead the daily golf conversation with access to newsmakers in all time zones. Tour players on the range preparing for upcoming tournaments and live press conferences,” Solomon said in the press release.
They seem awfully quick to toss that bath water...
One of the truly curious bits about this obvious downsizing is their cluelessness about their own operation. I'm far from the perfect tour guide here, but there's a baby in that bath water. At least there was:
There was a game within the game, one centered around a seemingly simple question that proved to have a surprisingly elusive answer: Who is Tiger Tracker?
This social media thing is above my pay grade, but this is an interesting take on what's called the most influential social media account in golf. The account had gone silent, but then enjoyed a brief renaissance during the Masters, only to once again go dark. This sums up the current state of play:
“It’s very much still a clusterfuck,” Tracker said about the handle’s fate remaining in limbo. “They sort of want it but they don’t want to be responsible for it. And nobody wants to do the work. These are people who, at the executive level, never fully appreciated it in the first place and were never fully aware of how it works, how much time went into it, never allowed us to monetize it. ”
As Joni said, we don't know what we have until it's gone...
As long as we're on Tiger, this will likely be my last post before Charlie has his coming out party, which no doubt will lead my Weekend Wrap post on Monday. Have you put any thought into who should caddie for Charlie? Somebody has, and it's perfect:
If you follow golf, you know the name Joe LaCava.
He’s the caddie for Tiger Woods, and has been on the 15-time major champion’s bag for almost a decade. Apparently looping runs in the LaCava bloodline.
This week when Tiger and his 11-year-old son, Charlie, tee it up at the PNC Championship at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando, LaCava’s son, Joe Jr., will also there. On the bag for Charlie.“There is one fun nugget that Tiger mentioned to me a number of months ago when he was kind of debating whether or not they would play in the PNC this year,” said VP of TGR Ventures Rob McNamara to Golf Digest. “He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if I had Joe LaCava Jr. caddie for Charlie?’”
Has it really been a decade? It should be fun, so one more thing to enjoy over the weekend.
Scenes From the Class Struggle, 2020 Edition - From that Golf Digest Newsmakers feature, they've gotten as far as No.2, who'd your humble blogger would have pegged to take the gold:
No. 2: BRYSON DECHAMBEAU
Where do we begin? There’s so much to talk about with Bryson DeChambeau that we created a separate list of 101 things that happened to him in 2020. But first and foremost, Bryson became one of the game’s biggest stars. Literally. A process of putting on pounds that began in 2019 revved up even more during quarantine, and when DeChambeau returned, he was some 40
pounds heavier than the previous year. And the gains were apparent in places other than the scale. DeChambeau overpowered golf courses—and even driving ranges—in ways we hadn’t quite seen before. The 27-year-old wound up leading the PGA Tour in driving distance in the 2019-’20 season and, more importantly, strokes gained/off the tee. But Bryson didn’t just drive for show, he also putted for some serious dough by improving to a career-best 10th in strokes gained/putting. Not surprisingly, that dangerous combination eventually led to a pair of wins, first at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in July and then his maiden major title at the U.S. Open in September. Winged Foot’s treacherous rough was supposed to be this golf zealot’s kryptonite, but it proved to be no problem for mighty Bryson as he swatted driver after driver on his way to a dominant six-shot victory. And in doing so, he may have ushered in a new era in which extreme length isn’t just an advantage, but a necessity. “What he’s done in the gym has been incredible,” Tiger Woods said at the Masters in November. “What he’s done on the range and what he’s done with his entire team to be able to optimize that one club [driver] and transform his game and the ability to hit the ball as far as he has and in as short a span as he has, it’s never been done before.” Beyond all the results, though, was Bryson’s knack for creating buzz. From those booming drives to his crazy diet to an aggressive shirtless photo to run-ins with rules officials to continued run-ins with Brooks Koepka, DeChambeau was constantly in the news. And whether you’re a fan or not, this overpowering and analytical golfer isn’t going anywhere. In fact, there will undoubtedly be a lot more like him to follow. —Alex Myers
Upon further review, that makes complete sense... Given how many times his behavior begged comparisons to, yanno, No 2.
Of course the top spot will now go to Covid or something equally stupid. And how did that Chainsmokers concert not grab a slot?
Alex Myers has done a deep dive into that pile of No. 2, in the unlikely event you find yourself wanting more:
101 things that happened to Bryson DeChambeau in 2020
You're on your own there, kids, as the year has been sufficiently tedious already.
This by far is the most curious Year-in-Review piece, at least yet, which starts like any run-of-the-mill golf item:
Professional golf was at the mercy of evolution in 2020
Punctuated Equilibrium (n) — the hypothesis that evolutionary development is marked by isolated episodes of rapid speciation between long periods of little or no changeThe idea of punctuated equilibrium, which Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge first posited in 1972, is that evolution, in fact, does not happen steadily on some uniform, predictable trajectory. The theory answered some lingering questions, such as why the fossil record doesn’t seem to support Charles Darwin’s notion of gradualism—a reality that puzzled Darwin in his lifetime as well. In fact, Gould and Eldredge argued that stasis is the natural order of the world, and evolution as we understand it only happens in rare cases. And when it happens, it happens fast.It’s safe to say that when their influential paper was published, they were not thinking about the sport of golf. And yet, how else can you explain 2020 on the PGA Tour if not by punctuated equilibrium? How else can you explain a year where so much happened, and so quickly?
I actually don't agree with his premise, but the terminology will get confusing. Here's his basic argument:
When we talk about agents of change, it starts with Bryson DeChambeau. The revolution he instigated in 2020 is about more than just becoming a bigger version of himself. It’s about more than his diet, or his workout regimen, or the clever techniques he’s used to become one of the longest hitters in the sport with an impressively improving short game. These are all examples of the changes he’s ushered in, and they are examples that may persist or may become outmoded when someone else has a better idea.DeChambeau’s true contribution is how he changed the paradigm. With one fell swoop, he changed not just how he approached the sport, but how everyone must now approach the sport. Speed training wasn’t quite a thing until Bryson made it a thing. He already has a legion of imitators (and a legion of detractors, of course), and they’ll be following his example in more than just lifting weights. DeChambeau’s lasting legacy, even if he quit golf tomorrow, is that he has changed the way that a professional golfer must think about the game. It wasn’t just about gaining more distance, but how to gain that distance in integrated manner that allows for sustained results and improvement beyond what many thought possible. He’s willing to try anything to achieve the ultimate goal of shooting low scores, and what seemed radical and perhaps even gimmicky at first now just seems necessary.
The premise is a take on evolution, but Shane actually considers Bryson revolutionary, which is the source of our disagreement. I've previously characterized Bryson as evolutionary, largely because of the limited magnitude of his distance gains over the field. Really the only real change from the pack is that this is the first direct linkage of weight gain to distance. While we've seen too many players bulk up, we never before had direct correlation to substantial increases in distance...
This brings us to the conclusion of this week's blogging. Get out and play in the snow, enjoy your weekend and we'll catch up on Monday.
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