Days ago, before the absence of actual golf became the dominant storyline of golf’s “fifth major,” the Players Championship felt like any other event on the PGA Tour, flush with rumor-mongering and speculation about possible announcements from rival circuits. As this week at TPC Sawgrass grinds onward into next week at TPC Sawgrass, not much has changed.
Chatter about a prospective Super League has taken on the feel of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh,” in which a misbegotten band of barflies (like Jimmy Tomorrow) are forever promising progress that never materializes. Unlike the patrons of O’Neill’s saloon, it’s possible—even likely—that the Saudi-financed concept will advance, or at least make noise. Whispers in hallways at the Players Championship persist like herpetic hypothesis: on what players might yet jump, on what Phil Mickelson will do next, on how the Saudis will pivot.
The latest conjecture has the Crown Prince’s coat holders planning to stage a tournament with an enormous purse that could dwarf the $20 million offered at the PGA Tour’s flagship stop in soggy Florida. The goal would be to engineer litigation by inviting Tour members to compete while hoping commissioner Jay Monahan denies the permission required to do so, thereby presenting an opportunity to challenge his control over where members play, or to at least jeopardize the Tour’s tax-exempt status as a 501c organization.
This rumor is kin to dozens that preceded it, plausible on paper but unseen in reality. Years into their scheming, the only positive contribution the Saudis can claim is having relieved the tedium of days-long rain delays with a fresh supply of gossip (though many guys in the locker room would pat them on the back for dismantling Phil’s facade, albeit accidentally).
We wait on another front too, for the drama at the Players to get underway in earnest around the time it was supposed to be concluding. A winner will be identified here, no matter how long it takes. The PGA Tour won’t reduce its premier event to 54 holes, just as the Super League won’t extend its non-existent tournaments beyond that. (Surely they jest in hiring a front man who, if majors were conducted thus, would have won a grand slam in 1986, and a few others besides.)
As this week’s Players Championship becomes next week’s, it has not been entirely joyless. No matter how many suns set between the first and final rounds, it shouldn’t be remembered for the high winds, high scores and high blood pressure of its competitors, but for what happened before a shot was struck or a horn sounded., when Tiger Woods was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the PGA Tour’s new ‘Global Home,’ an architectural marvel whose diaphanous design suggests a transparency that belies its occupant.
Woods’ extemporaneous remarks Wednesday evening offered a rare glimpse of the man behind the public figure. He didn’t mention the many accomplishments for which he was being inducted, focusing instead on the people, lessons and experiences that had signposted his journey. Woods evidenced familiar traits—flashes of humor, determination, resentment at slights—but also some only more recently obvious, like genuine appreciation for those around him and unfiltered emotion when talking about how much they mean to him.
For those few minutes in an otherwise drab week, golf was again a stage upon which great actors perform and are celebrated, not a hotbed of in-fighting, intrigue, prevarications, persuasion, arm-twisting, money-grubbing, lies and litmus tests of loyalty. That atmosphere, like this tournament, has lasted for an awfully long time. We should expect more of the same, since Greg Norman is armed with more of someone else’s money than with sense of his own.
It’s the nature of the PGA Tour that we do it all again next week, and that has never been truer: same players, same tournament, same venue, same goal—crowning a champion at the Players. The Tour’s putative rival will do it all again next week too, whether in public or private, promising progress, vowing major announcements, pledging boots on the ground. As one of O’Neill’s ‘foolosophers’ observed of his ragtag drinking companions, “They’ve all a touching credulity concerning tomorrows.”
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