While 72 holes of stroke play is the tried-and-tested format in producing worthy champions across the sport, you can’t beat match play, can you?
It ignites a flame in golfers at all levels. Tour players adopt it in pre-tournament money matches, and you and I play it with friends and family for bragging rights.
We shouldn’t blame PGA Tour boss Brian Rolapp and his various committee members for endeavouring to bring it back in 2028.
That year, the Tour Championship will be two weeks of match play, something never seen before. The top 32 players in the season’s points list will play in eight groups of four in week one. The top two from each group head into week two.
Both weeks will feature two different courses not normally used for tour golf – something that should excite fans and golf course enthusiasts. In week two, players advance through the bracket based on their record, with the two players undefeated at the end facing each other on the final day to be crowned Tour Champion.
Individual player records across the four days will be used to determine the final standings.
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To its credit, the LIV Golf League once adopted a unique match play format at its own season-ending Team Championship. With four players in each team, there’d be a foursomes match and two singles matches to determine who progressed to the next round.
Match play has appeared in many guises, and has produced memorable moments. Sam Burns won the last WGC Match Play on the PGA Tour in 2023, when he beat Cameron Young 6&5 in the final.
I fondly remember watching the WGC Match Play as an impressionable early teen. I immediately associate Dove Mountain in Arizona with that event and remember being genuinely gutted when it moved to its new home in Austin, Texas.
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In recent years, Rory and Scottie reached the semi-finals in 2023, and Scheffler reached the final in 2021 and 2022. Dustin Johnson and Jon Rahm played out a great final in 2017, and you had that classic 23-hole showdown in the desert in 2014 between Jason Day and Victor Dubuisson.
Match play specialists would emerge, like Day, Geoff Ogilvy, Hunter Mahan, and Kevin Kisner. It was a fun betting week, too (when I was of legal age, of course).
But three years ago, the tour decided match play had run its race on the schedule.
Can match play ever work as a tour event and TV product?
Despite my nostalgic love for the tournament, the latter stages needed a Rory, Scottie or Bryson. It was facing an uphill battle for viewership and intrigue otherwise, let alone with just two players on the golf course by the end, and more dead air to fill than usual.
As the old WGC match play went on, obviously fewer and fewer players were left. You waited longer to watch shots, and while I don’t know this for a fact, committing to a week where you might only play two matches on your way to elimination probably didn’t appeal to players.
Now, though, it will essentially be used to determine the best player on tour.
The Tour Championship and the determination of the FedEx Cup winner have taken many shapes and sizes in recent years, and the tour has always searched for a formula that pleases everyone.
We had the staggered start based on FedEx Cup standing position, 72 holes of stroke play and a 30-player field, and soon, it will be two different match play events.
As far as I can tell, the same problems could still exist.
What happens if Rory and Scottie go out in week one? Will people tune into dead rubber matches in week two between beaten players? Will players be motivated to play in dead rubber matches? Will we feel the same old boredom waiting for just two players to hit their next shot?
The interest might hinge on the venues, which promise to be more intimate, on roads less travelled by tour events.
Even so, Rolapp is still relatively new to his role and new to the sport. In 2028, might he too discover why match play can be such a hard sell to broadcasters, fans and players?
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