| Brandel Chamblee |
What the Tour does own is the Players Championship – born as the Tournament Players Championship in 1974 and permanently housed at TPC Sawgrass since 1982. If the Tour has a signature event, this is it. And if the Tour had its way, winning the Players would be celebrated on the same level as winning a major.That push was on full display again this week at the WM Phoenix Open, where Brandel Chamblee said: “The Players stands alone and above the other four major championships for me as not just a major – it is, in my opinion, the best major.”
Chamblee has been making a version of this argument for years. Context is important. He played the event a dozen times. He has reported on it annually for Golf Channel since 2004. Golf Channel is, of course, contractually bound to the PGA Tour through 2030 and serves as the Tour’s primary broadcast partner from Thursday through Friday. None of this makes Chamblee a mouthpiece – his career has been defined by independent thinking – but it does make him human. Human nature is undefeated.
His latest comments coincided neatly with the Tour’s new promotional campaign for players, which runs from March 12 to 15. As my colleague Dylan Dethier noted, the Tour’s slick new 30-second ad closes with a bold all-caps proclamation: “MARCH IS GOING TO BE MAJOR.” The soundtrack is a pulsating club hit from 2016 – an aesthetic that belongs more in Ibiza than on the beach of Ponte Vedra.
Marketing can take the atmosphere of an event to a higher level. It cannot manufacture its meaning.
Meaning comes from memory. Tiger Woods canonized Torrey Pines in 2008 because of what the US Open demanded of him – and what he gave back. You can’t quantify that kind of resonance. There is no benchmark for it, no algorithm to reverse engineer it. It simply accumulates, over decades, through moments that lodge in our collective imagination.
Some players believe the Tour’s argument. Michael Kim responded to X about Dylan’s story by saying that he would “honestly be more proud of the players winning through the PGA.” I have no doubts about his sincerity. The players’ pocketbooks are now dwarfed by those of the PGA Championship. Rory McIlroy earned $1 million more from his Sawgrass win last year than Scottie Scheffler did from his PGA win.
But would Scheffler trade titles with McIlroy? Not for a second. He chases history the same way Tiger, Jack, Phil, Rory, Watson, Seve and all the other all-time greats chased it. And the history still lives on in the majors – all four of them.
You can argue, if you like, that men’s golf really only has three Grand Slam events: the Masters and the two Opens. The math gets awkward quickly. Jack Nicklaus won five PGAs, often against fields full of club professionals. Tiger Woods won four, against deeper fields on more demanding courses. Remove the PGA from the ledger and Nicklaus drops from 18 majors to 13. Woods from 15 to 11. Tom Watson remains at eight; Arnold Palmer remains at seven.
That accounting will never hold up – not because it is illogical, but because it is impossible. Too many players, too many places and too much memory get in the way. You don’t just demote Hogan in Oakland Hills or Koepka in Bethpage. You don’t reclassify Pebble Beach or Olympic Club with a press release.
If the PGA Championship really wants to stand out from the other majors, it would need a radical imagination — say, an annual Pebble Beach house with a 54-hole stroke play qualifier followed by a weekend match play finish at Cypress Point. That’s a fight for another decade.
For now, the Players remain what they always have been: the crown jewel of the Tour, the richest prize, the most polished product – and not a major.
Which prompts a response to Chamblee’s claim that the Players is the first of five majors: Have you ever met a kid on a sunburnt August afternoon, standing five feet over a worn practice green, whispering to himself, “This is for the players”?
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