PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is totally reinventing the tour.
At the Travelers Championship, Rolapp unveiled his plans for a new PGA Tour schedule, which will look drastically different from the current one. There will be promotion and relegation between two tiers, matchplay at the Tour Championship, and a new start date to the season.
Getting this new schedule over the line was a long, exhaustive process. Rolapp had to win over sponsors, fans, TV partners, and players in order to bring his vision to fruition, but amazingly, it looks like everyone is on board.
The players approved these changes and, for the most part, are incredibly positive about them. But Tommy Fleetwood named one challenge that players must be wary of.
Tommy Fleetwood shares concerns about injuries with new PGA Tour schedule
Part of Rolapp’s vision is to start the main part of the PGA Tour season after the Super Bowl in order to get more eyes on golf from start to finish. To do this, he’s shaving down the season to just over 20 events to take the load off the players.
Still, this schedule is designed to get players to play on the tour more often, and with the season being so condensed, Fleetwood said that players must be conscious of the toll that is taking on their bodies.
Speaking before the Traveler’s Championship, he said, “I think over the last few years the schedule has been getting more and more condensed. One of the great things about it is you have a pretty much all the best players or the majority of the best players playing all at the same time.
“So that’s obviously a great thing from a fan perspective and playing perspective, you get to play against each other all the time.
“Yeah, of course it comes with its challenges and I think for all of us we, you know, you continue to learn at how your game goes throughout the year, how your body reacts. I think you get to this time of year and I think over the last couple of years you can definitely see it’s easy to start feeling tired.
“I think niggles start to happen in the body and stuff like that. I think mentally it can have its strains. But we’re having opportunity to learn from that and then put that into the following season as well.
“So I think, yeah, seeing how the schedule continues to evolve, how much golf we’ll play in that period of time, and then looking at how we can best manage that. I think it’s really, really important, but like I say, it does have its benefits.
“ I think for us as European golfers we’ve had the opportunity the last few years to play over in Europe from that period of September through to November, December. I think that’s great for us. So that’s worked really, really well. But, yeah, like for sure there’s a lot of golf, a lot of intensity, and you just have to keep learning how to manage that as best as possible.”
Tommy Fleetwood says how many events he’d like to play in a season
The biggest sticking point for PGA Tour players with the new schedule is the number of events they must play. The players insisted that they should still be able to pick and choose when they play, and Rolapp has protected their right to do so.
Players have different approaches to the season. Justin Thomas, for example, is focused on not playing too many events in a row, and peaking for the major championship.
Fleetwood said he’s got an ideal number of events that he likes to play in a season: “I think as in overall? I think last few years I’ve maybe played like 27, 28. So I would say that’s probably like max number.
“I’m not going to sit and complain about playing too much golf. I mean, it’s like a dream for everyone, right, to play golf as a job, so playing a couple too many tournaments isn’t really a problem.
“But, yeah, I think you have your ideal number and then you try and work around that and hopefully that’s the thing, you know, that’s an ideal number, that means you made it all the way through the playoffs, it means you played a Ryder Cup and in a Ryder Cup year. So on those ideas, the more golf you play is better in a way.”
The beauty of this new schedule for the players is they won’t have to change this approach. The schedule is designed for them to want to play, but it doesn’t force them, and that’s all the players really wanted.
