Night Night for the Presidents Cup?

We debate the Players Championship’s “major” status every March, and we’ve now come to the biennial exercise of pondering if the Presidents Cup should persist. For a couple decades now, every two years, you could set your watch to a media narrative at the start of the week that “the Internationals really need to win this one for the health and future of the Presidents Cup.” And nothing ever changes, but we sure had fun discussing that, right? Let’s do it again in two years!

This year, however (I know, roll your eyes, but stick with me) it does not appear to be a question to fill airtime and column space but more of an existential quandary. This is in large part to a new PGA Tour regime hellbent on hastening its plans for overhauls.

Brian Rolapp is here, and so are his for-profit Enterprises funders. In an era where business entanglements can break up some of the strongest of historical sports pillars like a USC-Notre Dame rivalry, this relatively uncompetitive and nascent contest seems ripe for the picking. This new product-first, business-oriented Tour seems less interested in preserving traditions or practices simply because “that’s what we’ve always done.”

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Rolapp has been driven to restructure a Tour boasting clarity, with events that connect to each other and circuits with stakes that ladder up and down. How does an every-other-year match play event, one that’s denigrated as “the Ryder Cup warm-up,” actually connect to the current plans? It’s floating out there on its own.

That’s before we even get to the competitiveness problem. By this point, we all know the ugly record numbers, and more recently, the alarming dwindling of top-of-the-world-ranking talent on the International side. That last trend seems especially problematic beyond whatever result may come at Medinah. The Internationals lack historical success and current star power. Does winning just one of these actually save it?

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The International side has made great progress in creating a professional operation, becoming more connected and invested under a logo shield. They’ve done this mostly on their own with headstrong captains like Ernie Els, Trevor Immelman, and now Geoff Ogilvy, who continued the refrain, often uttered by Els, that the PGA Tour “owning” both sides of the cup from Ponte Vedra Beach undercuts the International side. But how does an alternative even work? Maybe the PGA Tour gives away International operations to LIV 2.0! But more seriously, does space, to use Ogilvy’s word, from PGA Tour management actually fix anything long-term?

The Presidents Cup may not be on the immediate chopping block, but what seems clear is that the current state of puttering along and existing just to exist is not acceptable. Team match play can be golf’s most compelling TV product. This Medinah venue is big and brawny with great championship history. We’re in one of the great markets in the country. Instead, what should be a major global flex teeming with anticipation so far feels more like a convention trying to find alternative treatments or end-of-life care for a diseased patient.