Stop Trying to Make the Players Championship a Major

Welp, here we go again. In its latest marketing effort, the PGA Tour asserts that this year’s Players Championship is “going to be major,” a playful nod to its long-standing ambition of elevating the event’s status. Shortly thereafter, we received a strong early submission for most asinine take of the year, when Brandel Chamblee – live from the Golf Channel set in Phoenix – suggested that the Players Championship isn’t just a major already, but the best major. Yes, he really did say that. Naturally, Phil Mickelson chimed in.

We don’t need to linger too long on Chamblee’s comments. If his Players stance ages anything like his views on the equipment rollback, we’re about two to four years from him saying it was never a major and never should be.

The Players Championship is a phenomenal tournament on an iconic, exacting golf course with an exceptional list of champions. It can simply exist as that. There is no need to inflate its status or manufacture justifications for why it should be bigger than it already is, a movement that purely stands to serve the PGA Tour’s agenda. Leaving aside the glaring issue that a true major championship doesn’t exclude a handful of the best players in the world because they play for a rival tour, redefining major status diminishes the accomplishments of those who built the sport long before TPC Sawgrass even existed.

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Handing additional “majors” to both Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, for example, wouldn’t just misrepresent history. It would also disrespect the legacies of players like Seve Ballesteros and Peter Thomson, who would consequently slide down the list of all-time major champions. Down the line, McIlroy’s decade-long drought that culminated last April in one of the greatest major championships of all time gets obscured when you retroactively insert two extra major wins into that window.

Sure, major championships have always been an imperfect construct, and retroactive edits to the record book aren’t unprecedented. But at the risk of taking all of this a little bit too seriously, shouldn’t there be some level of commitment to preserving the historical record accurately, regardless of what’s happened in the past?

Maybe someday there will be good reason to redefine what constitutes a major championship, but appeasing the Strategic Sports Group isn’t a compelling enough reason to distort the truth.