Random Professional Golfers' Association Tour Events

So the tool gave you a PGA Tour event

You wanted a PGA Tour event and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. These are tournaments rather than players, which makes this a slightly unusual generator, and a genuinely useful one if you follow the sport, because the golf calendar is a confusing thing that almost nobody outside it understands.

The tool is the simple part. What is worth knowing is why some of these tournaments are the biggest weeks in the sport and others are, politely, a nice payday in the summer.

Not all tournaments are equal

Golf runs a tournament almost every week of the year, and if you tuned in cold you would struggle to tell which one mattered. They look identical on television. The truth is that they sit in a strict hierarchy, and knowing it changes how you watch.

At the very top sit the four majors: the Masters, the PGA Championship, the US Open and the Open Championship. Those four are what careers are measured in, and, a quirk worth knowing, they are not actually run by the PGA Tour at all. Each is organised by a different body, which is why they carry their own traditions and their own field of players. Below them come a small number of huge, invitation-heavy events with the strongest fields and the biggest purses, tournaments like the Memorial, hosted by Jack Nicklaus, and the Arnold Palmer Invitational, hosted by the man himself for as long as he lived. And then come the ordinary weeks of the tour, still worth millions, still contested by fine players, but rarely featuring the very best. When the tool draws you a name, that is the first question: where does this one sit?

The Players, and the argument about a fifth major

One event on this list has a permanent chip on its shoulder. The Players Championship is the PGA Tour's own flagship, with the deepest field in golf, the largest prize fund, and a stage nobody could invent: the seventeenth green at Sawgrass, a small island surrounded by water, where the world's best golfers dunk balls into the lake on a Sunday afternoon in front of a baying crowd.

People have argued for decades that it deserves to be called a fifth major, and the tour would love that. It has never quite stuck, partly because the majors are old and the Players is not, and partly because you cannot simply declare something a major. Prestige has to accrue. Still, if a random pull hands you the Players, understand that you have drawn the biggest tournament in golf that is not one of the four. The Pebble Beach Pro-Am has a claim of its own on charm rather than status, played on one of the most beautiful pieces of coastline in the world, with amateurs and celebrities playing alongside the professionals.

The season has a finish line now

Golf used to have a problem: the season just sort of stopped. The majors ended in July and the rest of the year drifted. So the tour invented the FedEx Cup, a season-long points race that ends in a short run of playoff events, the BMW Championship and then the Tour Championship, where a small field of the year's best players compete for an enormous bonus and the title of champion of the whole season.

It is a very American solution, borrowed from the playoff structures of the other US sports, and golf purists grumbled about it for years. But it works, in that the year now has a proper climax rather than a fade. Several of the names on this list are those playoff events. Draw one and you have drawn a week where only the best of the season are playing, and where the whole year is on the line.

A schedule that keeps changing

Here is the honest caveat, and it applies to any list of golf tournaments. The names move constantly. Sponsors change, so a tournament you knew for twenty years suddenly has a new corporate name attached to it. Events get shuffled around the calendar, dropped, revived. And the last few years have been the most turbulent in the sport's modern history: an entire tier of events called the World Golf Championships, which for two decades were among the biggest weeks outside the majors, no longer exists at all, abolished when the tour restructured its season in the face of the breakaway LIV Golf circuit.

So treat any pull from this tool as a tour through the tournaments that have shaped modern golf rather than a live entry list for this season. Some of them are running this year under a new sponsor's name. A few are history. That is the nature of a sport where the calendar belongs to whoever is paying for it.

What a random PGA Tour event is good for

• Learning the golf calendar. Draw an event and go read what it is, where it is played, and who has won it. There is no better way to make sense of the season.
• Quiz and trivia prep. A random tournament is a strong question. Most casual fans can name the four majors and nothing else.
• Golf video games and sims. A quick way to pick which tournament to play, and which course to load.
• Planning a trip. Pull an event and look at where it is played. Some of these courses are on the finest land in golf.
• Settling a debate. Pull two events and argue which is the better tournament, and whether the Players deserves to be a major.

PGA Tour questions

Which events are the majors?

The Masters, the PGA Championship, the US Open and the Open Championship. They are the four most important tournaments in golf, and each is run by a different organisation rather than by the PGA Tour itself.

Is the Players Championship a major?

No, though it is often called the unofficial fifth major. It is the PGA Tour's flagship event, with the strongest field and the biggest purse in golf, and it is famous for the island green at the seventeenth hole at Sawgrass.

What is the FedEx Cup?

A season-long points competition that culminates in a short series of playoff events, ending at the Tour Championship. It gives the golf season a proper finish, with a large bonus for the winner.

Can I pull several events, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. PGA Tour, schedule. pgatour.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, golf. britannica.com