Ray Kowalczyk called me Sunday night to ask if the Players Championship was a major now or if we were still pretending to argue about it. I told him we were still pretending. He said good, because he had ten dollars on it not being one and he wanted to know who he was supposed to collect from.
The Players starts Thursday at TPC Sawgrass, which is a golf course built on a swamp by a commissioner who wanted his own tournament and got one. The purse this year is $25 million. The winner gets $4.5 million and a trophy that looks like a man in slacks reaching for something he dropped. CBS will spend four days speaking about it in the hushed voice usually reserved for funerals and the back nine at Augusta, and by Sunday evening they will have used the phrase “fifth major” enough times that a generation of children will simply grow up believing it.
Golf is the only sport on Earth where you can just declare a thing a major and then keep saying it on television until the saying is the proof. Imagine if the NFL announced that the Pro Bowl was the second Super Bowl. Imagine if Major League Baseball said the All-Star Game counts as a pennant now. They’d be laughed into the sea. But put a man in a navy quarter-zip in front of an island green and have him whisper about “a championship test of golf” and somehow we all just nod.
The 17th hole at Sawgrass is the famous one, the par-three over water to a green the size of my kitchen. It is a perfectly fine hole. It is also the only hole in professional golf that has its own merchandise tent, its own camera angle, and what NBC’s lead analyst Bryson Halliwell once called “a spiritual quality you can only really feel in person, or on the broadcast, or via the official app.” The official app, as far as I can tell, is mostly an invitation to bet a parlay on which Korean player will three-putt first.
My old coach, Coach DiMaggio, played golf the way he did everything else, which is to say angrily and with a cigarette. He would have hated the Players. He would have hated the bunkers raked into corduroy. He would have hated the man with the boom mic crouching ten feet from a player’s backswing. He would have especially hated the part where the leaderboard graphic spins and chimes like a slot machine every time somebody makes par. Coach DiMaggio believed par was the baseline expectation of a competent adult and did not require musical accompaniment.
I went down to Sawgrass once, in 2003, for reasons I no longer remember and a per diem I definitely do. What I remember is that everybody on the grounds was selling something. The clubs were selling clubs. The shoes were selling shoes. The water bottles had a sponsor. The sponsor had a sponsor. There was a man near the seventh fairway whose entire job was to hold up a sign that said QUIET, and I swear to you the sign had a logo on it. You cannot make a religion out of a thing that is also trying to sell you a Lexus during the backswing.
What bothers me, and I’ll cop to being an old man about this, is that the Players Championship doesn’t need to be a major. It is already a very good golf tournament. The best players in the world show up. The course chews most of them up. Somebody usually wins it in the rain. That’s plenty. The need to call it a fifth major is the same disease that gave us the College Football Playoff growing into a twelve-team buffet and the NBA inventing an in-season tournament with a court the color of a dentist’s pamphlet. Nobody can let a good thing be the size that it is.
The four real majors, by the way, became majors by accident. Nobody sat in a boardroom and decided. The Masters started as a buddy’s invitational. The U.S. Open is older than indoor plumbing. The British Open is older than the country that named it. They earned the title by being around long enough that nobody remembered when they weren’t. The Players Championship started in 1974, which is the same year Petey Corrigan went to prom in a powder-blue tuxedo, and it is asking for the same respect.
Watch it anyway. The 17th will eat somebody alive on Sunday and it will be tremendous. Just don’t let the broadcast convince you you’re watching scripture. You’re watching a very expensive Thursday at a very wet golf course, and that’s a wonderful thing to be without needing to be anything more.
Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast hosted by a man who used to caddie. I have not asked follow-up questions.