According to the Golf Channel, Scottie Scheffler, the world’s leading golfer, pocketed US$62.2 million (NZ$100 million) in winnings from the 19 tournaments he played in 2024. In round figures that’s about US$3.25 million per tournament. Breaking it down even further, that’s just over US$800,000 for every round he played in this year.
And oh… he also won the Gold Medal at the Paris Olympics… for which the poor thing didn’t receive as much as a cent.
All up Scheffler won 8 tournaments this year, 7 on the USPGA Tour and the Olympics.
His 7 wins in a single season is the most by a golfer in one year since a guy called Eldrick Woods won 9 in 2007.
Yet Scheffler, one of the most likeable guys on the US Tour, wasn’t entirely happy with the FedEx Cup series format despite the windfall that spilled his way.
He liked the old format better, where the big end-of-season purse went to the best player over the entire year, not to the player who just happened to win the finale off the back off a generous handicap.
I kind of agree with Scheffler, except I have an even bigger gripe with the FedEx Cup format and that’s the absolute folly of using handicaps as the basis of the scoring for the finale.
Handicaps are a wonderful thing… in amateur golf, because they level out playing ability between golfers. It means my mate who might play off a 24 handicap in theory could play Scottie Scheffler over 18 holes and the winner might only be discovered with the last putt on the last hole. But handicaps I’m sorry have absolutely no place in professional golf or any professional sport for that matter. When a code goes professional, the only thing that counts is money and every competitor starts from scratch in every contest.
Yet in this, the richest tournament of the year, every player was given a handicap, ranging from -10 for the best player down to -4 for the poor bloke who happened to be ranked last on the FedEx Cup points table. Of course that’s the exact opposite of how handicaps work in amateur golf - the more you improve your golf the lower your handicap becomes.
However here for the FedEx Cup, the brains of the USPGA did quite the opposite. The best player ie Scheffler was given the highest handicap and started the final with his score at -10 before he’d even hit a ball. The second-best player on the points table, Xander Schauffele, was given a -7 handicap so he began the tournament 3 shots behind the best player in the world, Scheffler, and so on it went down through the whole field. How on earth can that be seen as fair?
Or put another way, imagine if the English Football Association (the FA) followed the FedEx Cup format and decided say for this season’s FA Cup final that Manchester City, as the best team across the season, would start the final against their opponents with a 2-1 advantage even before the match kicked off. It’s like something out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
So back to the FedEx Cup, was it any wonder then with a generous starting handicap advantage over the rest of the field that Scheffler won the tournament by a handy 4 shot margin? But if it had been a traditional 72-hole stroke event he would not have won. The title and possibly that big cheque would have gone to Collin Morikawa who finished 22 under par - off the stick 2 shots better than Scheffler’s 4 round score of 20 under.
Anyone for tennis?
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