Look, if you’re reading this website you already likely know the stakes of the Tour Championship. Thirty of the game’s best golfers are meeting at East Lake Golf Club to play for several wheelbarrow’s worth of cold hard cash (shoutout FedEx).
But that’s not why we like to watch pro golf — not really. We’re here for the intrigue, far beyond the basic nuts and bolts of the PGA Tour finale. We’re here for the hidden storylines, subplots, weird meta-dramas. Good news: there are plenty of those on tap this weekend. Allow me to present 13 delightful subplots for this week’s Tour Championship:
1. Rory McIlroy, Competitive Dad
Rory McIlroy didn’t play his best golf as an expecting father. Since the PGA Tour’s restart, McIlroy hasn’t been able to crack the top 10 in eight tries and has slipped from World No. 1 to World No. 4. (Before the restart, for comparison, he’d logged six consecutive top 5s.) But after the birth of his daughter Poppy earlier this week, McIlroy sounded like a man who was wholly content, delighted to be a father and generally excited about his station in life.
Now, we’re not here to make any determinations about correlations, causations, coincidence, vibes or juju. If McIlroy rallies to win this week, we’ll have no way to know if it’s because he’s a new father, because he has fond memories from winning tens of millions of dollars at East Lake or just because he’s damn talented and he’s due. But we’ll watch eagerly just the same.
2. Dustin Johnson, lead-holder
Sometimes when Dustin Johnson has the lead in big events, things go bad in particularly memorable ways. There was the three-shot lead at the 2010 U.S. Open. The final-hole penalty at Whistling Straits. The three-putt on the final hole at Chambers Bay in 2015. You know these.
But there’s also currently nobody in the game who’s better at taking the lead, running and hiding. Harris English recalled earlier this week that when Johnson took the lead at TPC Boston, his focus quickly shifted from just trying to win the golf tournament to chasing history.
“He wasn’t just trying to win the tournament, he was trying to set records … we were walking up No. 17, and he was like, ‘Yeah, the whole day I was trying to get to 30-under,'” English remembered.
Sure enough, Johnson birdied 18 in the rain and the darkness to post 30 under. Nobody wins big quite like D.J., either. He’ll be well worth watching this week, for better or worse.
3. Big money putts
I can guarantee that nobody is going to be feeling sorry for this week’s second-place finisher, who will cart home $5 million. But there’s a good chance that we’ll see some sort of photo finish where a shot or two on No. 18 will mean the difference between winning a $15 million first-place bonanza and slipping to, say, T4 and a paltry $2.5 million. We’re likely to see putts worth millions of dollars down the stretch, which is intrigue enough — and really is also the entire point of this new FedEx Cup format.
4. Last round of the season!
The PGA Tour always has strange offseasons, to the point where it feels like there’s not offseason at all. We’ve got the U.S. Open in two weeks, after all, and there are just two days off (!) between the end of the 2019-20 season at East Lake and the beginning of the 2020-21 season at the Safeway Open next Thursday. Still, the playoffs are fun, and the structure of it all helps us make sense of players’ seasons, and, well, Napa Valley just doesn’t quite have the same juice as a field of the 30 hottest players. Soak it in!
5. The random charger
East Lake yields a lot of birdies, and there are a lot of talented golfers in the field, and as a result there’s going to be at least one moment this weekend where you think to yourself, “Wow, Sebastian Munoz really could be the FedEx Cup champion,” and that possibility alone makes the entire weekend well worth watching.
6. The under-25 division
With apologies to Matthew Wolff and Rasmus Hojgaard, the Tour Championship has turned into something of a young guns summit. Yes, some of your favorite young golfers have somehow aged out of the U-25 category (Jon Rahm and even Cameron Champ have now turned 25) but there’s still quite the squad at East Lake.
Collin Morikawa (22) might be the Tour’s Player of the Year. Sungjae Im (22) got off to a hot start Friday. Joaquin Niemann (21) charged up the standings to qualify for this week’s field. We mustn’t forget about Viktor Hovland (22). And Scottie Scheffler (24) is one of the hottest golfers on the planet. The kids, as they say, are alright.
7. Shirt wars
This is some deep-cut golf nerd stuff, but there was a real run the last couple years of Nike golfers winning big-time events. In 2018, Patrick Reed, Brooks Koepka (2x) and Francesco Molinari swept the majors for the swoosh, and Tiger Woods and Koepka won the first two majors of 2019 to make it six Nike winners in a row (you can toss in Rory McIlroy’s win at the 2019 Players if you want, too). Adidas, despite its talented roster, hadn’t adorned a major champ since Sergio Garcia at the 2017 Masters.
Now? The tables have turned. Adidas’ three stripes have been everywhere atop leaderboards since the PGA Tour’s restart. Adidas now has the top two players in the world (Dustin Johnson and Jon Rahm) plus four more in the top 15 (Morikawa, Xander Schauffele, Daniel Berger, Tyrrell Hatton) and its players have claimed seven victories in 12 weeks since the restart, including Morikawa’s win at the PGA Championship.
Add in Niemann and Adidas has several frontmen at this week’s Tour Championship. The pressure falls on Rory McIlroy, Cameron Champ, Tony Finau and Patrick Reed to defend the FedEx Cup for Nike — but either way, we’ll be seeing plenty of logo subplots on the weekend.
Adidas gear
8. The battle for Low Cameron
The PGA Tour’s Sean Martin rightly pointed out that Ryan Palmer, 43, is the Tour Championship’s oldest player by seven years, adding that there are more players in the field named Cameron (Champ and Smith) than there are forty-somethings.
So who goes home the week’s low Cameron?
9. Bryson going full send, still
Sure, Bryson DeChambeau hasn’t finished inside the top 5 in two tournaments, but East Lake is a brawny golf course, one that favors bombers who can find the fairway. (Sidenote: every golf course favors bombers who can find the fairway. But still.)
DeChambeau got off to a rocky start to Friday’s first round at East Lake, so he’ll be in need of a weekend charge. But let’s not forget that watching DeChambeau do his thing has been some of the best entertainment all year long. Let’s hope he and his missiles can work their way into the mix.
10. Bottom-of-the-leaderboard strangeness
We know just how much cash is being doled out at East Lake, and just how crucial those putts will be down the stretch — like the aforementioned $10 million difference between first and second. But one thing that’s strange is just how little difference there is between, say, 20th and 30th.
The lucky No. 20 finisher this week will receive a year-end FedEx payout of $505,000, which is enough to get a nice steak dinner and still have some left over to tip the valet. But whoever finishes in last place this week, No. 30, will get $395,000. It’s hard to know if we’ll see these guys grinding it out over an extra $10 or $20k, but the weirdness of watching the bottom of the leaderboard adds some tiny intrigue, like last year’s T-29 showings from Lucas Glover and Dustin Johnson, who each finished at 10 over par.
11. DJ vs. Rahm
Okay, this one’s a bit more substantive than No. 10. Dustin Johnson and Jon Rahm, the top two players in the entire world, gave us the joy of a ridiculous bomb-trading playoff at last week’s BMW. They’re paired together for Friday’s first round at the Tour Championship, too. There’s a good chance that by the end of the weekend, they’ll be the two atop the leaderboard, too. You won’t find me complaining if they are.
12. Player of the Year drama
Quick, first instinct — who’s the player of the year? Dustin Johnson? Jon Rahm? Justin Thomas? Collin Morikawa? Webb Simpson? Brendon Todd?
Rahm had clearly thought about it, reeling off a list of contenders and their respective resumes before settling on a simple conclusion:
“I think it comes down to if any one of us wins this week,” he said. Johnson echoed those sentiments.
“I think this week could help solidify Player of the Year,” he said.
Morikawa tried his best to play it cool. “I wouldn’t mind if that happened, for sure,” he said.
Justin Thomas had the best reaction of all. Asked for his player of the year vote, he had a simple one-word answer: “Me.”
Time for him to help make it happen.
13. Monday finish
Look, it’s a Labor Day Weekend unlike any other. Your annual barbecue is missing some of its usual luster, if it’s happening at all. There are no preseason NFL games, no college football kickoffs. This summer may not have quite gone how you imagined — and now it’s coming to a close. But the golf season? That has been worth celebrating. Hopefully you’ve been part of the uptick in play in recent months, for one thing. And the PGA Tour has provided plenty of entertainment over the last three months, when we could all use a diversion. And now we get it on a Monday afternoon, too?
Big Monday golf! Big money golf! See you on the couch.