Calendar year for the PGA Tour will return.

The first day of golf is here. That is, the PGA Tour’s Opening Day, which is this Thursday at Kapalua in Hawaii. The Sentry will be the first event of the 2024 season.

For the first time in ten years, the calendar marks the start of the schedule. In the past, the PGA Tour’s wraparound schedule meant that the new season started just a few weeks after the end of the old one at the Tour Championship in Atlanta.

The Tour hasn’t had a lot of excitement to start a new season like other sports do with their first events because of neither method. Thanks to the many golf events that happen all over the world, the game is always being played somewhere.

But going back to a calendar-year plan reminds people all over the world how divisive the old system was. Some people think it made it harder for local tours like the European Tour or the Australasian Tour to do well. It made players stay in the US longer, which hurt golf around the world. That’s how the idea works.

“It didn’t help at all,” said Mike Clayton, an Australian who used to play on the European Tour and the Australian circuit before he became a course planner. “Before that, all of our best players would finish their cards for the next season.” Not having to get off to a good start was nice.

A lot of them went home.Some guys, like Aaron Baddeley, Greg Chalmers, and Cam Davis, never came home. A lot of golfers who play in America couldn’t or wouldn’t come back because they needed to get off to a good start by playing on the PGA Tour in the autumn. It was important to find a job for the next year because you don’t want to be in Hawaii in the middle of January and not have any money.

Clayton, 66, has won six times on the PGA Tour of Australasia and once on the European Tour. He remembers a time when it was easier for players to move around the world because of breaks in the scheduling of different tours.

The Australian Open was once called the “fifth major” by Jack Nicklaus. Arnold Palmer and Gary Player would often play in the national open and other Australian games.

Clayton said that they did it because of the endorsements, but it helped their tour in a way that isn’t seen today. A lot of the time, there were up to 15 events planned from the summer in Australia through February.

It took longer in Europe too, he said. “Back in the 1980s, our tour began when we got back from Europe in September.” Europe (the DP World Tour, which now goes all the way around the world) also didn’t help.

A lot of the noise in the golf wars since the LIV Golf League was formed comes from outside the United States, if you’ve been paying attention. People feel a range of emotions, from total dislike for the PGA Tour to just disappointment. They think that the Tour’s rise came at the cost of everyone else.

Even though that’s a very simple view, it does help to explain why some people are so excited about the PGA Tour’s supposed flaws as the LIV Golf story has played out. The PGA Tour is seen by some as an evil power that controls golf around the world. LIV Golf is thought to be there to save the game.

Many of the best players on the DP World Tour have left for the PGA Tour, which upsets fans of the tour. In fact, there is now a way for the top 10 players in the Race to Dubai to directly get PGA Tour cards. Some people don’t see how that is good for European golf.

There are even worse things going on in places like Australia. The Australian PGA Championship, which Min Woo Lee won, and the Australian Open, which Joaquin Niemann won, were the two biggest events. Each had a prize of $2 million, which is about the same as a Korn Ferry Tour event. Every bag costs less than $500,000. The Heritage Classic, which is next week, has a $400,000 prize pool.

“A lot has happened,” mentioned Clayton. “There were changes on TV, the PGA Tour had a wraparound season, and guys stayed longer in Europe.” Greg Norman quit the team, and no one took his place. Adam Scott and Geoff Ogilvy had played here before, but none of them were going to take his place. Greg wasn’t anyone. Greg played as Seve Ballesteros and Tiger Woods. You don’t change those guys. It takes many generations. In the US, it was Arnold, then Jack, then Tiger. The tour here is not what it used to be.

Clay thinks that Woods’s rise hurt golf around the world in a way that wasn’t his fault. The PGA Tour made more money from sponsorships and TV deals. That brought in more money and made the Tour stronger. Professional golfers who made it to the PGA Tour didn’t really need to go outside.

That’s not really the PGA Tour’s fault either. Before the new change that has made the PGA Tour take better care of its stars, it was always about getting chances to play. People thought, “If there’s going to be golf, why not have a PGA Tour event?”

The Tour did try to go to places other than the United States. It has played in Canada and Mexico every year and was planning to play in Asia with a swing of three games, one of which was the World Golf Championships.

There was also the idea that the WGCs would move around the world, but that didn’t happen. In the end, events that were played in places like Australia, England, or Japan were only held in the United States. “Where is the World in WGC?” became a popular question, which made people outside of the U.S. angry. But to be fair to the PGA Tour, it went where there was the most money in sponsorships and TV attention.

For some of these reasons, LIV Golf has a lot more fans outside of the United States. People in other parts of the world don’t get to see Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, and Cam Smith play golf like we do. The Adelaide event in Australia was a huge hit, so the state paid for it. It was also one of LIV’s few events that made a lot of money.

Clayton agreed that it was popular in his country. He said, “LIV was huge.” “It’s a party, and it wasn’t a normal golf crowd, which is what they sell.” It wasn’t like any other event Australia has ever had. The same thing would happen if they held a LIV event in every state in Australia. There would be a lot of people at all five events, so why don’t they?”

Some people, like Dustin Johnson, might not like the idea of going to Australia for a month.
But the point is that there is a market for golf around the world that we don’t often think about here in the United States, where we have a lot of golf wealth.

It’s not clear what the “framework agreement” between the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and the Public Investment Fund will look like yet. There are many parts that need to be put together to make a new object.

“If we can create a perfect golf calendar, what would it look like?” He said this at his season-ending event in Dubai. “And I don’t think it would like the way it looks now. I believe that changes would be made.