If you had been thinking September was awfully early in the calendar year to wind down the PGA Tour season, you’ll probably change your tune come a year and three days from now.
At that time, the 2013-2014 TOUR Championship will have concluded at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, capping off a season that will have begun just under 11 months prior, at the Frys.com Open in Silicon Valley.
Anyone who may have thought the PGA Tour season was growing too much like a sprint will be pleased to look back on the coming season as more of a marathon.
The Tour has released the 2013-14 schedule, which will see a single season take place in two calendar years for the first time in the modern era of professional golf. The upcoming offseason will be one of the shortest in professional sport—a grand total of 14 days. For many, there won’t be time to put down the clubs for even a week, much less take a bit of a sabbatical and recharge their physical and emotional batteries.
The aforementioned Frys.com Open begins less than a month from now, on Oct. 10, at CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, Calif. It won’t be as pat an opening to the season as the Hyundai Tournament of Champions in Hawaii—a purse-fattening event open to all winners of Tour events the previous season—but that may prove a welcome change. As beautiful as the Hawaiian scenery is, especially on HD televisions, the laid-back nature of the Hyundai Tournament of Champions has always made for a bit of a sleepy start because every player in the field will have full Tour status for the entire year anyway.
Not so under the new Tour schedule. From the first shot on Thursday at the Frys.com, the race to capture career-saving victories, maiden triumphs and a generally positive frame of competitive mind will be on in earnest. Five of the first six tournaments of the year should see fields that, while sometimes lacking in the bigger names, will produce plenty of high-quality golf. Many of the key figures in these events will have either just earned their chance on the PGA Tour or eked out a top-125 money list finish to keep their cards. Either way, the late-season pressure will be fresh in their minds and they will be doing all they can to ensure they will avoid it this time around.
Some other items of interest about the new schedule:
The new schedule takes the best players in the world to some exotic locales early in the year. Note the CIMB Classic, the third event of the year, to be played at Kuala Lumpur Golf & Country Club in Malaysia’s capital city. The following week, the World Golf Championships – HSBC Champions will be contested in China, at Shanghai’s Sheshan International Golf Club.
The newly-named OHL Classic at Mayakoba receives its own date after being shifted from the shortened 2013 season to the beginning of the 2013-2014 schedule: November 11-14. Previously, the event had been played on the same dates as the World Golf Championships – Accenture Match Play Championship. With its own place on the schedule, the popular event should attract an even better field.
The World Cup of Golf, a two-man team event where each team represents a different country, will be played at the incomparable Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Australia, which drew rave reviews while hosting the 2011 Presidents Cup. Due to the time difference, the live telecast will run from 10:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. ET, but it will be well worth staying up past one’s normal bedtime just to gawk at Alister Mackenzie’s masterpiece.
Players feeling the fatigue of a stressful end-of-season followed nearly immediately by the beginning of a new one will benefit from a more significant break, which will run from Thanksgiving up to New Years. Wisely, the PGA Tour is not going to compete with college and professional football for a significant chunk of the late fall and early winter. This time away will allow players to freshen up and allow fans to build up excitement for the 2014 portion of the schedule.
As has happened with the FedEx Cup, it will take a few years to grow accustomed to the new schedule. With 45 total events, the PGA Tour schedule will be an exercise in pacing for both players and fans who will all be hoping to keep burnout to a minimum.
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