With the Open Championship set to end Major season in just three weeks’ time, it seems like only yesterday we were giddy with excitement for the Masters Tournament at the beginning of April.
Do we really want Major season to be over in just 98 days – the amount of time between the first day of the Masters and the final day of The Open – I certainly don’t.
Obviously, we still have the golf competition at the Olympic Games to look forward to this year, as well as the FedExCup play-offs and the new DP World Tour Play-Offs in the UAE, but the four Majors are the benchmark of the sport and ultimately how players’ careers are defined.
They should each have a spot in the calendar where they are the highlight of that time of the year rather than jam-packed together in four short months. To think, after The Open we’ve got eight long months until players take on Augusta National again. It’s far too long.
If one good thing did come out of covid-19 pandemic, it was the way the Majors adapted to fit their events into the schedule. We may have missed out on The Open Championship for a year, which was a real shame, but the Masters, U.S. Open and PGA Championship all moved to different slots of the year to ensure we didn’t fully go without Major golf.
Who would say no to the U.S. Open being held in September again? Okay, maybe that wouldn’t work as well in a Ryder Cup year, but what’s to stop them having in October?
Imagine a Major season that begun with The Masters in April, followed by the PGA Championship in June, Open Championship in August and U.S. Open in October. Four Majors stretched out over seven months.
This would surely help bolster the falling TV ratings as well. Have those in charge of the game ever stopped to think that they might be overloading fans with golf’s greatest contests in such a short span of time?
We all want to see how Rory McIlroy fares in his next Major outing after his devasting crumble at the U.S. Open last week. But if that storyline lasted a few months instead of a few short weeks, surely that would drive more interest in the game.
Obviously, the biggest hiccup to spacing Majors out could potentially be a clash with the end of season play-off events across the world, but surely the main Tours and the four Major Championships could come together to make a collective schedule that suits everybody and allows fans to enjoy Major golf all year round.
