Over the last two seasons the easiest shot in golf has been any directed at the FedEx Cup, the PGA Tour's extravagant new invention that sportswriters love to hate. Agreed, the eight months of hype leading up to last year's inaugural FedEx playoffs was more than a little over the top, but the quartet of tournaments delivered, among other things, an epic Tiger-Phil shootout, won by Mickelson, and two vintage Woods blowouts that sealed the first FedEx title. With Woods on the disabled list this year, many in the golf literati had declared this year's Cup over before it even began, but those obits turned out to have been premature. The second Cup has, thankfully, come with a more muted preamble, but it has the potential to provide even better theater, thanks to a retooled points system and some riveting Ryder Cup subplots.
The action during last week's lid-lifting Barclays at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., wasn't too shabby either, featuring a bang-bang finish between two of the best players in the game, Sergio Garcia and Vijay Singh. Each birdied the 71st hole to propel himself into a three-man playoff. On the first extra hole they traded birdie bombs, Singh's 26-footer coming moments after Garcia's 27-footer had tumbled into the hole. It was a stunning display from two famously dysfunctional putters. The giddy fun ended on the next hole when Singh closed out his 33rd career victory with two mighty blows on the 594-yard par-5 17th. The walk-off two-putt birdie put Singh atop the FedEx Cup standings, while the star-crossed Garcia moved from 12th to second. (The playoff's forgotten man, Kevin Sutherland, bowed out on the first extra hole but still zoomed from 57th to third.)
Singh has never been one to look down on any of the victories in his Hall of Fame career. While other stars increasingly consolidate their schedules around the short list of big-time events, he has rolled up wins everywhere from Disney to John Deere to the 84 Lumber Classic. (To be fair, he has also won three majors and 22 international events.) So while someone like Woods doesn't even pretend to care about the FedEx Cup — he famously refused to kiss the victor's trophy last year, despite the beseeching of Tour commissioner Tim Finchem — Singh was positively ebullient (at least for him) to be in a position to win his first.
"Everybody who is playing the FedEx Cup wants to win [it]," said Singh. "I have to go out there and do it. That's what I'm looking forward to."
Singh's late-game birdie binge was hardly the week's only memorable outcome. At the outset of last year's playoffs only 13 of the 144 players had a realistic shot of winning the FedEx Cup, a rich-get-richer scenario that sucked most of the intrigue out of the weekly field reductions: to 120 for the Deutsche Bank Championship, then to 70 for the BMW and finally to 30 for the Tour Championship. Sharp criticism in the media and among players helped persuade the Tour to make changes, so this time around the points distribution was tweaked — to borrow one of last week's most overused verbs — in hopes of creating more volatility, to cite the other buzzword du jour. Rain Man would have trouble keeping track of all the numbers, but the bottom line is that players were more tightly bunched for the postseason reset, and the weekly allotments of points have been increased, meaning players will be flying up and down the standings with dizzying uncertainty.
One upshot is that making the cut at Ridgewood became vital, creating on Friday the survive-and-advance mentality that characterizes the early rounds of March Madness. Last year, among the players ranked 121-144 entering the Barclays, only two played their way into the Deutsche Bank. This year 15 clawed their way into this week's second round. Among them was Glen Day, the amiable veteran with a Southern drawl as thick as U.S. Open rough. He came into the Barclays 143rd in points, and on Friday made four birdies on the front nine to offset four bogeys on the back, scratching out an even-par 71 to make the cut by three strokes. Day went on to finish 24th and move to 111th in the FedEx standings. "Nobody really understands how the numbers work," says Day, "but the math gets a whole lot easier if you make a bunch of birdies."
){kind=link}