Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour’s still-new CEO, understands a stubborn truth about the sport he now runs: the Tour doesn’t own golf’s most precious real estate. The Masters belongs to Augusta National. The Ryder Cup belongs to everyone and no one. The British Open, U.S. Open and PGA Championship have histories and custodians far older than the modern Tour.
| Brandel Chamblee |
What the Tour does own is the Players Championship — born as the Tournament Players Championship in 1974 and permanently housed at TPC Sawgrass since 1982. If the Tour has a signature event, this is it. And if the Tour had its way, winning the Players would be celebrated on the same plane as winning a major.
That push was on full display again this week at the WM Phoenix Open, where Brandel Chamblee said, “The Players, to me, stands alone and above the other four major championships as not just a major — it is, in my estimation, the best major.”
Chamblee has been making some version of this argument for years. Context matters. He played the event a dozen times. He has covered it annually for Golf Channel since 2004. Golf Channel, of course, is contractually tied to the PGA Tour through 2030 and serves as the Tour’s primary Thursday–Friday broadcast partner. None of that makes Chamblee a mouthpiece — his career has been defined by independent thinking — but it does make him human. Human nature is undefeated.
His latest comments arrived neatly alongside the Tour’s new promotional push for the Players, which runs March 12–15. As my colleague Dylan Dethier noted, the Tour’s slick new 30-second ad closes with a bold proclamation in all caps: “MARCH IS GOING TO BE MAJOR.” The soundtrack is a pulsing 2016 club hit — an aesthetic more at home in Ibiza than in Ponte Vedra Beach.
Marketing can elevate an event’s vibe. It cannot manufacture its meaning.
Meaning comes from memory. Tiger Woods made Torrey Pines sacred in 2008 because of what that U.S. Open demanded of him — and what he gave back. You can’t quantify that kind of resonance. There’s no metric for it, no algorithm to reverse-engineer it. It simply accumulates, over decades, through moments that lodge themselves in our collective imagination.
Some players do buy the Tour’s argument. Michael Kim responded on X to Dylan’s story by saying he’d “honestly be prouder of winning the Players over the PGA.” I don’t doubt his sincerity. The Players purse now dwarfs the PGA Championship’s — Rory McIlroy earned $1 million more for winning at Sawgrass last year than Scottie Scheffler did for winning the PGA.
But would Scheffler trade titles with McIlroy? Not for a second. He’s chasing history, the same way Tiger, Jack, Phil, Rory, Watson, Seve and every other all-time great chased it. And history still lives with the majors — all four of them.
You can argue, if you like, that men’s golf really has only three Grand Slam events: the Masters and the two Opens. The math gets uncomfortable fast. Jack Nicklaus won five PGAs, often against fields filled with club professionals. Tiger Woods won four, against deeper fields on more demanding courses. Remove the PGA from the ledger and Nicklaus drops from 18 majors to 13. Woods from 15 to 11. Tom Watson stays at eight; Arnold Palmer stays at seven.
That accounting will never stick — not because it’s illogical, but because it’s impossible. Too many players, too many places, too much memory stand in the way. You don’t casually demote Hogan at Oakland Hills or Koepka at Bethpage. You don’t reclassify Pebble Beach or Olympic Club with a press release.
If the PGA Championship truly wanted to separate itself from the other majors, it would need radical imagination — say, an annual Pebble Beach home with a 54-hole stroke-play qualifier followed by a weekend match-play finish at Cypress Point. That’s a fight for another decade.
For now, the Players remains what it has always been: the Tour’s crown jewel, its richest prize, its most polished product — and not a major.
Which begs a response to Chamblee’s claim that the Players is the first of five majors: Have you ever met a kid on a sunburned August afternoon, standing over a five-footer on a beat-up practice green, whispering to himself, “This is for the Players”?