MORRI: LET'S GIVE THE WORLD NO.1 A HEADSTART ... BRILLIANT!

MORRI: LET'S GIVE THE WORLD NO.1 A HEADSTART ... BRILLIANT!

The handicapped Tour Championship is a stupid idea.

Actually, it is offensive if you believe professional golf should be a competitive pursuit.

Conversely, match play is great, especially when you have the right players.

One can’t help but see there might be a very simple solution to two problems here.

There’s a bunch of reasons professional golf turned its back on the match play format this year though the ultimate culprit – the round robin format – was the result of trying to make it ‘fair’.

Interestingly, that’s the same stupid thinking that delivered us the handicapped Tour Championship.

Apparently, banking US$21,014,342 (through this week’s BMW Championship) isn’t enough ‘reward’ for Scottie Scheffler’s 2023 ‘body of work’.

No, according to the misguided committee that came up with the ‘staggered start’ concept, the World’s No.1 player actually should get a headstart of between two and 10 strokes over the rest of the field at East Lake because, you know, he needs the help.

Similarly, the introduction of the ‘round robin’ format for the WGC Matchplay was an attempt to contrive a final which included big names players to satisfy TV.

But when you remove the chance for Nick O’Hern to take out Tiger Woods in the early rounds (twice), you remove something compelling, and the event is lesser for it.

With only the best performing 30 players of the year in the field there is less of an issue with ‘no name’ matches (for want of a better term).

But trying to cull 30 players down to two via a match play format is still problematic so the easiest solution is to simply have three days of stroke play and the top two finishers face off on the final day.

Yes, this might require a play-off to determine the finalists but like the extra holes for the bronze medal at the Olympics that would only add to the drama.

This format solves the main problem with the handicapped format which is that there is no incentive for the players who start in the bottom five.

You simply cannot spot Scottie Scheffler 10 shots over four days and have a realistic chance of beating him. Not more than once a decade, anyway.

Three days of straight stroke play eliminates that problem plus the odds of getting two of the game’s highest profile players in the final are pretty high.

The PGA Tour has struggled to find sensible ways to spend FedEx’s money from the very inception of the season long ‘race’ in 2007.

But it has always been the final event of the season where the problems have been most obvious.

For years the Tour Championship has been a maths lesson rather than a golf tournament and that has only worsened with the staggered start.

Instead of focussing on the play, every genuine golf fan is busily calculating the standings without the handicap strokes all week, an exercise which is about as interesting as it sounds.

So, let’s eliminate that and instead decide the biggest single cheque of the year ($18 million in 2023) playing proper golf rather than this contrived nonsense.

It would not only be more watchable, but it might actually give the tournament back some of the prestige it deserves. A win/win if ever there was one. #australia #russia #unitedkingdom #unitedstates #usa