The beautiful thing about sports is that it seems that almost every month allows fans to focus their time and energy on a different event.
March has “March Madness”. October is widely known for the Major League Baseball Playoffs.
August marks the beginning of a lesser-known golf tournament that started in 2007, the FedEx Cup. The FedEx Cup is golf’s form of a four-tournament playoff featuring the top 125 players in the FedEx Cup standings.
How Does the FedEx Cup Work?
The points are given throughout the year based on how players finish in the field at a given tournament, and the degree of difficulty faced in the field during that specific tournament. After each event, the field gets cut down. After the first tournament the field goes from 125 players to 100 players, down to 70 players after the second tournament, and finally only 30 players get to finish the playoffs and play in the final event, the tour championship.
Will Tiger Woods win the FedEx Cup?
It seems to be an unwritten rule when writing a golf blog that you must talk about Tiger Woods in your first article. So why don’t we just get this out of the way now…Tiger Wood’s is not back.
Yes, he has won three tournaments, the most on the tour. Yes, he is the No. 1 seed going into the playoffs, which he has won twice in his career, both times going in as the top seed. Yes, he is atop the money list this year.
But he is not back until he wins Number 15.
Until Tiger Woods wins his next major championship, he will not be “back”. He needs to find “weekend Tiger”: the Tiger Woods who dominated the sport so long that fans still get so excited that they still scream “get in the hole” after every swing.
The good news for all the Tiger Woods fans out there is that in the six years that this playoff system has been around Tiger Woods has won twice, and both times he won he was the No. 1 seed.
In addition, Tiger has had a lot of success on two of the four courses that will be played. The third course, or BMW championship, is being played here in Carmel, Indiana. The reason to like this course for Tiger is because the famous Pete Dye whose courses are loved by Tiger Woods designed it. Overall, Mr. Woods will have a good opportunity during these playoffs to try and find “weekend Tiger” once again.
Challenges presented by the first course
The Barclay’s will be played at the Bethpage State Park in Farmingdale, New York. This week’s weather is supposed to be fairly nice and dry, which means that the course should be a little bit quicker. This is going to make the greens very fast.
The rough is currently set at 3.5 inches, which is long enough to cause a lot of problems for players struggling to keep it on the fairway. According to Andrew Wilson, the head groundskeeper told PGA Tour.com, “We will probably cut it one more time. For us, it’s nice and think right now and we’re pretty happy with it.”
The final two changes that pose a challenge are the seventh and 13th holes. Both holes were pushed back to long par-5 holes. The 13th hole plays at 585 yards, while the seventh hole plays a little over 550 yards. This can cause problems for someone like Tiger Woods who seems to have lost all confidence in his driver this year.
Who would the sport of Golf benefit most from winning the FedEx Cup this year?
Believe it or not, the answer is not Tiger Woods. He needs to focus all of his energy into winning his 15th major.
The best thing he can do now for golf is to catch Jack Nicklaus in career major victories. The best thing for golf now is to have Tiger Woods get a new rival, and who better than Rory McIlroy?
MciIroy recently won hi second major at the PGA Championship. McIlroy has been widely considered to be the next Tiger Woods – now especially after winning his second major at the age of 23 – and has the same killer instinct. He also is known for calling out Tiger Woods during the last Ryder Cup, saying that he would love to have the chance to play Tiger in a one-on-one match.
The two are in the same pairing Thursday and Friday, along with Zach Johnson, and this should be a good preview to a possibly historic rivalry.
