5 minute read
Post Game
A look back on pro golf 2024 globally and here at home — interesting to say the least
BY TONY DEAR • CG EDITOR
As expected, 2024 was full of incredible golf, much of it played by Scottie Scheffler, whose year may have been tainted by a trip to a Kentucky jailhouse during PGA Championship week but who also won a second Players Championship, a second Masters, a bunch of other signature events on the PGA Tour, the FedEx Cup and, in August, an Olympic Gold Medal.
The world No. 1 shot a back-nine 29 in the final round at Le Golf National in Paris to push Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama into second and Great Britain’s Tommy Fleetwood into third. Scheffler also finished the FedEx Cup season 5.8 points clear of Xander Schauffele in the Official Golf World Ranking.
Bryson DeChambeau won his second U.S. Open after a thrilling final round at Pinehurst No. 2. Rory McIlroy had looked the likely winner but a sensational up-and-down from the front bunker at the 18th hole saw the American win by a single stroke.
Schauffele took the other two majors, winning the PGA Championship at Valhalla, then the Open Championship at Royal Troon two months later, making him the only real threat to Scheffler for PGA Tour Player of the Year honors.
The question of whose year they’d rather have — Scheffler’s or Schauffele’s — was something PGA Tour players had to ask themselves before voting. The choice between Nelly Korda and Lydia Ko would have been equally as tough for LPGA members had the Tour not decided to adopt a points system to identify its winner. Korda won six times to virtually guarantee the POY award before the end of May, while Ko claimed the AIG Women’s Open at St. Andrews and the women’s Olympic title in Paris.
U.S. teams won both the Presidents and Solheim Cups with Keegan Bradley claiming the wining point at Royal Montreal and Lilia Vu birdieing the last two holes to give the U.S. its first victory in the women’s team match since 2017.
In less exciting and, frankly, tedious news, the men’s pro game continued its unseemly and self-absorbed unravelling throughout 2024 with the PGA Tour and LIV unable to make good on their June 2023 Framework Agreement. Nearly a year has elapsed since their deadline to cooperate passed and the pro game isn’t any closer to being the unified entity that promised to benefit fans, sponsors and players.
A limited number of players certainly have benefitted from massive monetary input both from Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Strategic Sports Group (SSG), which invested $3 billion into the PGA Tour in January. But sponsors appear unconvinced by the disconnect and continued absence of some star power from their fields (Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, DeChambeau, etc.) while fans rightly feel ignored. The PGA of America’s recent pricing of 2025 Ryder Cup tickets ($750 per person on each of the three competition days) is a pretty good indication of where in its list of priorities it places John E. Golf Fan.
It seems the only good thing that has resulted from two years of insatiable greed, sour dialogue and political infighting, for us anyway, has been a very short-lived mastery of legal and financial terms largely unfamiliar to non-lawyers/economists such as ‘anti-trust’, ‘discovery’, ‘deposition’, ‘market cap’, and ‘private equity.’
Between all the courtroom malarkey and disingenuous press statements ensuring us recent talks involving the opposing factions were ‘constructive’ or ‘encouraging’, could it be that golf fans are losing interest in pro tournaments that aren’t major championships? McIlroy and Tiger Woods’s TGL indoor golf league, beginning in January at the SoFi Center in Palm Beach, Fla., is promising certainly, but it won’t be easy getting the attention of an audience that’s growing somewhat indifferent.
Closer to home, Korea’s Amy Yang won the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at Sahalee by three, Canada’s Stephen Ames earned a second successive Boeing Classic title at Snoqualmie Ridge, and, in September, Australia’s Nadine Gole beat Canadian Shelly Stouffer 3 & 2 in the final of the U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur Championship at Broadmoor GC.
It was the Seattle club’s fifth USGA event and, in June, Chambers Bay was selected to host its sixth with the U.S. Amateur Fourball returning in 2028 (it will host its fifth in 2027 — the 79th U.S. Junior Amateur).
In August, the University Place links was chosen by Cascade Golfer readers as the state’s best public course, making it three wins in a row in our biennial contest. The chances are good it will hold on to the top spot in two years’ time but, with Scarecrow at Gamble Sands just about ready to open, its 379-point lead could well be reduced. Assuming it doesn’t disappear altogether.
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