ATLANTA — The list of Great Moments in Tour Championship history is long and keeps getting longer.
Justin Thomas added another item from the tournament’s 2020 edition.
“I was playing a practice round, walking down 18 and FaceTiming Tiger because he didn’t qualify and wasn’t here,” Thomas said. (That’s Tiger as in Tiger Woods, in case you and Sherlock Holmes somehow failed to make that connection.) “I was showing Tiger how the course was and how great it was to be here. Then he acted like his phone cut out. He called me back two minutes later with his green jacket on.
“It was just a typical conversation with Tiger, thinking I have some kind of upper edge. And then I get shut down and put in my place pretty quickly.”
You heard it here first: Tiger does not like losing.
Maybe this week’s Tour Championship will expand the Great Moments list, no matter who wins or how, because this is the year when the PGA Tour finally, finally, got the tournament’s format correct.
Surely you remember last year’s starting-strokes format, which gave Scottie Scheffler the pre-tournament lead. It was like handicaps for tour players only in reverse. Scheffler began the tournament at 10 under par before he hit his opening tee shot. Rory McIlroy, ranked second in FedEx Cup points, started at 8 under par. The margin of strokes behind Scheffler gradually got bigger until the players ranked from 26th to 30th started at even par, 10 shots behind Scheffler. That’s the equivalent of boxing against Rocky Balboa with one hand tied behind your back.
Starting strokes accomplished one thing, however. It simplified scoring and once the tournament began, fans, media and players could see where everyone stood in the race to the FedEx Cup. Before that, we had continual updates about the points standings because they changed faster than you could say “Hideki Matsuyama.” That gave us broadcaster Steve Sands doing calculations on national TV, proving he hadn’t lost any of his addition and subtraction math skills.
Even before that, we had a complex points format in which Vijay Singh once won the third of the four FedEx Cup playoff events and private-jetted his way out of St. Louis before anyone, including Singh, knew his playoff run was so dominant that he had already clinched the Cup and—oops!—made the finale at East Lake Golf Club irrelevant. That outcome did not make for good TV.
It is the new simplicity that makes this week’s Tour Championship a Great Moment nominee. No gimmicks, no points, no complaints. Just 30 PGA Tour players battling over 72 holes for a crack at the $10 million first prize. The chase for a victory and the pot of gold at the end should be drama enough.
Who isn’t rooting to see a player stand over a putt worth $10 million? One of those Tour Championship Great Moments will always be Jim Furyk, who had a three-foot par-saving putt on the final green for the victory. It was raining, he had his cap on backwards to keep the water from dripping off the brim onto his ball as he prepared to putt. Furyk holed the putt, earning the $10 million first prize with a putter he had bought for $39.
Watching the game’s best players perform under intense pressure is the best kind of golf entertainment, whether it’s trying to win a major championship down the stretch or striving to make the cut to play on the weekend or winning what could be a potentially life-changing amount of money.
You’d think Scottie Scheffler must have loved that starting strokes format because he had that pre-tournament edge in each of the last three years. While Scheffler cashed in last year, he didn’t win in 2022 or 2023 despite the advantage. Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland took those titles.
Scheffler recalled how his caddie, Ted Scott, told him before last year’s tournament that it’s tough to sleep on a lead and “You’ve been sleeping on the lead for this golf tournament since February.” Excellent point. Scheffler had a year-long stranglehold on first place in the FedEx Cup points list.
“It was a challenging week, it was stressful,” Scheffler said. “I was leading the entire year and it all comes down to a four-day tournament on a golf course I hadn’t really played great on. It was one of the hardest tournaments I had to play.”
Scheffler’s seven-shot lead dwindled to two at one point during the final round, and he also overcame an early (pardon the offensive golf language) shank.
“I was not a fan of that format,” Scheffler added. “I don’t think starting strokes was the best way to crown a season-long champion. I’m much more happy with this format. Having a good tournament on a really good course to finish our season is extremely important. It’s a golf tournament that is hard to qualify for, it’s a great reward for guys who had tremendous seasons and now we all have an opportunity to go win the FedEx Cup.”
McIlroy, who handed Scheffler a tough loss here in 2022, admitted he was probably in the minority of players who thought the system had some merit.
“I didn’t hate the starting strokes,” McIlroy said. “I thought the player who played the best during the course of the season should have an advantage coming in here. I was on the Players Advisory Committee when we made that change and it really was just a way to simplify the advantage the top players had instead of Steve Sands doing calculations on a whiteboard.
“But you could also argue if it was starting strokes this week and Scottie has a two-shot lead, it probably isn't enough considering what he's done this year.”
Steve Sands isn’t available here but let’s try the math without him. With five wins, including a PGA Championship title, Scheffler amassed 7,456 FedEx Cup points. McIlroy ranked a distant second at 3,687. So the size of Scheffler’s lead was 3,769 points, which was more than McIlroy’s entire season-long total. To correctly adjust Scheffler’s starting strokes advantage to make it resemble his level of dominance in 2025, he’d probably tee off Thursday with at least an eight-shot lead, maybe more. (Marge, hand me the remote—you want to want more Murder, She Wrote reruns or Walker, Texas Ranger?)
Suggestions have been made over the years for many different ways to finish the tour season, including match play. But TV networks hate match play because they never know when a match might end and nothing scares them more than having to fill 45 minutes of dead air. McIlroy said the match play talk has been shelved for now.
“I think it was hard for players to reconcile that we play stroke play every week but then the season-ending tournament would be decided by match play,” he said. “Maybe that will be on the table again, who knows? Look, this is a 72-hole stroke-play event and that’s what we play week in and week out. I don’t know if it’s the best format but it’s the one we have for this week.”
McIlroy is half right. Maybe a standard 72-hole stroke-play format tournament isn’t the sexiest, splashiest conclusion to a golf season but it’s the best Tour Championship format so far.
Ten million bucks doesn’t go as far as it used to. Figure a $1 million payday to the winning caddie and the remainder in the IRS 37% tax bracket and you’ve got take-home pay of $5.7 million. Not bad but the real first prize is actually priceless, of course.
“Just the satisfaction that these are the 30 best players on the PGA Tour and you won the final event,” said Harris English, who captured this year’s Farmers Insurance Open and has already qualified for the U.S. Ryder Cup. “I like how I’m not giving Scottie Scheffler however-many strokes. I like everybody starting at zero, just go get it.”
It sounds like a recipe for another great moment.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Tour Championship Hasn’t Started, but the PGA Tour Is Already a Winner.
