Rory McIlroy Says PGA Tour's New Enhanced Events Will Not Be a 'Closed Shop'
LOS ANGELES – As the third "designated event" on the PGA Tour schedule is about to take place this week at Riviera Country Club, there is plenty of conjecture as to how these tournaments will look in the future.
The PGA Tour quickly escalated the concept last year with the help of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, instituting a program that saw several events such as this week’s Genesis Invitational get a significant purse increase while requiring the top players in the game to compete in all of the tournaments.
Among the ideas going forward is that some of these tournaments will have smaller fields and no cut, although nothing has apparently been decided.
McIlroy said feedback so far has been mostly what you would expect: the top players are on board, while others who might be struggling to get in the big events are concerned.
"I think the big thing has been is this going to be like a closed shop for the same guys every single week, and it's not," McIlroy said following his pro-am round Wednesday. "This tour was built on meritocracy. This tour was built on if you shoot the scores, you can move up the levels and play the biggest events. That's not going to be taken away.
"It's just about making it more competitive. Ultimately I think that's a good thing. I'm not saying that we're going to have field sizes of 50, it's going to be closer to what you've seen in the past. We're not trying to limit opportunities out here, but we also want to make sure that when people get opportunities, it's the most competitive tournaments and the most competitive product that we can put out there."
The Genesis is one eight designated events that is locked in, with four more that are supposed to rotate. Along with the four majors, the Players Championship and three more of a player’s choosing, that is 20 tournaments. Players who are eligible for the Player Impact Program are required to play 19 of them in order to receive the full payout of the bonus.
This year, five of the events are limited fields with no cuts: the Sentry Tournament of Champions, the WGC-Dell Technologies Championship and the three playoff events: FedEx St. Jude, BMW Championship and Tour Championship.
There has been considerable speculation that a few more tournaments will go to limited fields with no cuts. That has led some pushback, too. The LIV Golf League has nothing but small-field, no-cut events, a source of criticism from the PGA Tour.
“If you look at where we've historically been, whenever the WGCs (World Golf Championship events) were still a thing, we had four of those, we had the two playoff events, now that's went to three, so that's six, then you had the two fall events, CJ and Zozo," McIlroy said. "Historically we've had tournaments that haven't had cuts and really wasn't any grumbling about it before LIV came along.
"So I think you're going to see a mixture of both, to be honest with you. I think some tournaments more than others lend themselves to maybe having cuts and trying to keep some sort of history here, like we're at the old L.A. Open that has a ton of history here. Is this an event that maybe should keep a cut going forward? Potentially, because of the history of it. So we're thinking about all that sort of stuff. There's a ton of conversation around it."