The last tournament of the PGA Tour season ended on a chilly week in the suburbs in Atlanta, Georgia, bereft of the competitive tension and championship climax that fuel so many other sports.
Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson even skipped the Tour Championship, the season finale last month. Those absences overshadowed every drive, chip and putt hit during the tournament.
"You look at the end of the year, it was pretty miserable by all accounts," Joe Ogilvie, a PGA Tour player and policy board member, said last week. "I just think golf has always ended in kind of a yawner, and that's been our problem."
Starting Jan. 4 at the Mercedes-Benz Championship, the tour's effort to address that problem will begin with a revamped and shortened schedule, highlighted by the FedEx Cup, a new playoff system.
The format will allot points to players based on finishes throughout the year and will conclude with a four-tournament playoff, culminating in a US$10 million prize for the points leader after the Tour Championship in September.
Besides creating a new way of tracking the sport, the format could pit the world's best golfers against one another at the end of the season, a time when many of them in past years have opted for time away from the game.
If Woods and Mickelson embrace the FedEx Cup -- and each has said that he would -- the new format could mimic the success of NASCAR's Nextel Cup, a model on which the new PGA Tour system is partly based.
With the Masters in April, the US Open in June, the British Open in July, the PGA Championship in August and the Tour Championship in September, the competitive tension of the season may not wane as drastically as it has in the past.
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