Count Stewart Cink amongst these but to be satisfied by the brand new “signature events” collection on the PGA Tour.
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Stewart Cink has been across the skilled golf block.
A 29-year pro, Cink has witnessed the PGA Tour remodel from a medium-sized league to an expert sports activities behemoth — after which watched once more as that behemoth grew large enough to grow to be the goal of a rival league funded by a overseas autocracy. Those developments have introduced with them no scarcity of change, and that change has affected Cink’s backside line greater than as soon as.
Still, by no means has a professional golf change been fairly as sudden because the developments of the final 12 months, a time when the PGA Tour each crafted and ratified a brand new system of competitors that promised to stratify the sport in a manner it by no means had been earlier than.
By now concerning the signature occasions collection, a circuit of eight big-money PGA Tour occasions, a lot of which characteristic restricted fields and no cuts. The collection was made primarily to assist the PGA Tour stymie the specter of LIV defections by permitting its greatest gamers to compete towards each other extra usually for bigger paychecks. The draw back of that shift, nevertheless, was what it did to the Tour’s so-called “working class.” Those gamers, who rank exterior of the highest 50 within the FedEx Cup rankings, aren’t assured entrance into the signature occasions collection, a improvement that leaves them in a significantly weaker monetary place than their top-50 counterparts.
In principle, the signature occasions modifications have been made to enhance the aggressive integrity of the Tour — shoring up the product to be extra reliably attention-grabbing and star-driven. But that’s exactly why the modifications have rankled Stewart Cink, who voiced a few of his issues about them throughout a post-round presser on the Sony Open on Friday.
“If I was in the top 50 I would really like it, but I’m not, so I don’t like it,” Cink stated. “Unfortunately I do think it’s probably the right thing to do for golf fans. If all the players play in those and we get great fields playing for a lot of money then it’s great. It’s just I don’t think it serves everybody, and PGA Tour kind of has been about doing the best for everybody, for all the pros and members.”
Cink says he understands the market forces that led to Tour being the way in which it now’s, and he was cautious to not level his criticism within the course of Tour management for making one of the best of a really tough scenario. But he echoed a grievance we’ve heard from a collection of professionals exterior the highest 50 over the past 9 months: the Tour modifications create a closed system, making it tough for many who fall exterior the top-50 from ever making it in.
“To me, it’s a little bit out of balance. I understand where it all came from. We had to do something because we had a competing venture out there trying to swallow our players up,” Cink stated. “We had to give our players a reason to stay, so I get it. It’s not easy, but where I’m sitting I don’t really love it.”
Fortunately, the Tour enacted some particular modifications to handle these issues, blockading 10 slots in every of the signature occasions for gamers who compete effectively over a sure stretch within the Tour season. But Cink says the issue isn’t that there are no alternatives — simply that there are too few of them.
“To honor [good] finishes with a chance to move up into these Signature Events, I think it’s good,” He stated. ” One factor that personally I’m not for is I performed within the first yr of the elevated tournaments — they have been principally full-field tournaments with cuts and all the highest gamers performed — I assumed they have been simply completely good. It’s exhausting to persuade me and plenty of the gamers that aren’t in these fields why being a small discipline issues. That’s the place I stand on it.”
In Cink’s eyes, discipline dimension is the largest difficulty introduced by the brand new lifestyle. Not simply from a little-guy standpoint, however from an leisure standpoint, too.
“I’m just not convinced why an 80-man field is more elite than a 156-man field,” he stated. “I don’t get it.”
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