NORTH BERWICK, Scotland – Times are changing in pro golf. You’ve heard all about it, how the status quo at the top of the game has gone from Elevated Events to Designated Events to Signature Events to … the Championship Series and Challenger Series. All of that in about four confusing years.
Yes, the future of the PGA Tour has been difficult to pin down for a while, but it feels about 80% baked now. Only a smattering of — though still very significant — detail still needs to be ironed out. To create a simpler-than-ever, more-lucrative-than-ever, more-watched-than-ever television product, the PGA Tour will split into two tiers, stratified with rigid boundaries, predictable schedules and fields.
But how’s this for a question: Which of those tiers gets the Scottish Open? Or rather, does either get the Scottish Open?
This week’s event does everything that PGA Tour executives want its future, biggest events to do. It’s located just outside a major metro in Edinburgh. It’s played at a recognizable (and increasingly appreciated) golf course. That property is big, which is to say, it has lots of room for parking.
And not just parking — there are a bunch of cottages on-site (and at the neighboring Archerfield Estate) that house players and their families comfortably. And those players not lucky enough to stay at Renaissance, well, they’re probably enjoying themselves even more down the road, at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick, with one of the best courses in the world in the backyard, free to play all week long. PGA Tour players are happy when they’re here.
The Scottish has the calendar, too — regularly hosted the week before the Open Championship — which plays into the Tour’s idea of “the future.” The Championship Series is all about getting the top players to play in two- or three-week chunks of consecutive tournaments, drawing importance to those strings of events between the weeks that matter most (the majors) and then taking a well-deserved break before doing it again a month later.
The event itself is big, too. It’s been growing, bit by bit, over the years, thanks to a committed sponsor in Genesis. This year the course was rerouted for excitement, and it’s working. The build-out of stands has grown. The fan village is alive each night, with concerts and performers offering a little extra to the golf-goers — not unlike what they do at the big events in the States.
Then there’s the crowd. The smartest golf crowd in the world, they say. The Scots, who, in the chilly temps and fog, showed up in droves and were largely wearing shorts because, well, winter in Scotland is so bleak that when summer comes around, you have no reasonable excuse to miss it. Tournament organizers have even done as their American counterparts do, adding an extra hospitality section this year. If crowding around spectators and stumbling over the dunes and fescue isn’t your way of watching golf, there’s a new experience for you called the Thistle Club.
There are plenty of great tournaments across the current Tour schedule, but almost all of them leave some box unchecked — maybe the sponsor wants out, maybe the course isn’t memorable, maybe the spot on the calendar is too crowded — which puts them at risk of not being included in the prized Championship Series. As for the Scottish, it seems to check every box. But what happens with the Scottish Open is not entirely up to the PGA Tour. This is a co-sanctioned event, run chiefly by the DP World Tour, featuring prominently on its own schedule and enlisting a great deal of its membership. These two tours have their mutually beneficial strategic alliance, but how far does that agreement stretch when a highly-coveted event is up for discussion?
Half this week’s field is filled by players who play predominantly outside the United States — golfers like Nacho Elvira, Bernd Wiesberger and Alejandro Del Rey, among plenty of others with varying levels of name recognition. The PGA Tour half, simply put, features more star power. According to the Official World Golf Ranking, the highest-ranked player to enter via the DP World Tour (excluding LIV golfers like Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton) is Marco Penge, ranked 48th in the world. Again, excluding Rahm and Hatton, the top 29 players in the field are here via the PGA Tour.
The PGA Tour co-sanctioning this tournament is a major reason why fans show up, why there’s greater media coverage and a huge reason why this tournament — even in its currently great form — still holds potential to be something greater. A Scottish Open under the Championship Series model would likely draw an even bigger crowd, would absolutely increase its field strength and would likely grow its operating budget.
But would anything be lost in that process?
It’s a conversation worth having, and one that has simmered in the background all week. This country’s favorite golfer, Bob MacIntyre, ended his pre-tournament press conference with a bit of a waffling belief that all will be fine.
“I think The Scottish Open has got to be before The Open,” he said, calling for exceptions to the Championship/Challengers rule. “I think it will be. I think there will be exceptions. I don’t know. I have not spoken to anybody about it.”
MacIntyre won this event in 2024, further ascending into stardom in the process. He won the Canadian Open a month earlier that summer, and reminded reporters that that tournament may have to look for similar exceptions, too. The current Championship Series proposal says players in the top track of tournaments cannot drop down to play one-off events on the Challenger Series, a dilemma that Canadians like Corey Conners and Nick Taylor would find displeasing.
Then there’s the history of these tournaments. How they’ve been played, where they’ve been played, who has been playing. Rory McIlroy called the Scottish “the blueprint” of national opens — the kind of tournament locals grow up aspiring to compete in. The kind of international tournaments the PGA Tour insists it is interested in doing business with, too. So long as they can meet in the middle — with the correct governing bodies, like the DP World Tour — to determine who gets to play. This week’s Scottish Open has six Scottish players in the field. If it were trimmed down to those only in the proposed Championship Series, only one Scot would remain: Bob Mac. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’ll finish much higher than any of his fellow countrymen this week.)
MacIntyre and McIlroy were the correct pros to ask about this event’s future status because they care about it as much as anyone. They’ve each contended for it multiple times, and they each offered additional insights into why it matters. McIlroy called it “a perfect lead-in” to next week’s Open Championship. In other words, so long as the Scottish is played the week before the year’s final major, McIlroy will almost certainly be here. MacIntyre will absolutely be here. But he’s just not sure what they should be playing for.
“I personally think The Scottish Open is going to be totally fine, if I’m being honest with you,” MacIntyre said, before offering the rarest of thoughts: a pro golfer suggesting a more modest purse.
“I don’t see it being a 20 million event. I see it being a Rolex Series/European Tour, like high-end European Tour event. I don’t see it — I think it would be a bit mad to put a $20 million event in Scotland with the world we live in today. I mean, it’s not the same as America, do you know what I mean?”
There were no follow-up questions to that quote. But there probably should have been.
The author welcomes your feedback at sean.zak@golf.com.
