The Players Championship Will Never Be A Major For One Simple Reason

The reason: PGA Tour players themselves don’t consider it a major.

Why the hell am I bringing up the Players Championship in the middle of February?

Don’t blame me—send your hate mail to the Tour and Brandel Chamblee.

It’s been something of a running gag over the years to have this trite debate about whether the Players Championship should be considered a major. I thought we put this thing to bed back before the ice bucket challenge and the Harlem Shake.

The Players is a very fine golf tournament with a deep field on a great golf course but it’s not a major. Never has been, never will be.

I honestly say that less as an insult and more as a compliment. Over the years, it felt like the Players has carved out a cool niche as the next-best tournament among non-majors. Something clearly a rung below the four majors but clearly above everything else.

But suddenly the discourse has regressed back to whether the Players should be considered a major.

Here we go again, I guess

After building up some goodwill over the first few weeks of the year—including getting back Brooks Koepka and the red-hot Patrick Reed from LIV—the Tour made an odd decision to launch its Players Championship marketing campaign with the tagline “March is going to be major.”

Provocative. It gets the people going.

The not-so-subtle ploy has kind of worked as discussion of the “fifth major” has been reignited. That I am here shamefully adding to the discourse is not lost on me.

During Golf Channel’s coverage the WM Phoenix Open, Chamblee launched into a take so brazen and delusional that even I, man of unabashed hot takes, started blushing (Chamblee was probably nudged into such a randomly misguided diatribe, but that is a story for another day).

“In every single way that a metric could be used to measure whether something is a major, the Players, to me, stands alone and above the other four major championship—not just as a major,” Chamblee said. “It is, in my estimation, the best major.”

Oh, my. We zoomed right past debating whether the Players should be a major. Now it’s better than the Masters and the Open Championship.

Jack is at 21 majors now. Tiger is at 17.

That flash-in-the-pan Tom Watson didn’t win a single Players in 26 starts. Ben Hogan didn’t make one start at TPC Sawgrass. These guys were hacks!

In all seriousness, Chamblee said the Players Championship was the best tournament in the world because it’s consistently on the course with the best shot value. The field is “the best in golf” (although the likes of Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau no longer participating puts a pockmark on that). The history is memorable and meaningful. Most of the top modern players have won the event at least once.

Some of these are fair points. And everyone agrees that winning the Players is more meaningful than a standard event or even a typical signature event nowadays.

Had Chamblee said the Players is more of a major than the PGA Championship, he would have cooked. He would have been wrong but it would have been interesting and more debate-worthy.

Calling the Players, which is not a major, the best major? That’s going deep into the playbook.

It’s so insane I have to respect it.

Why the Players will never be a major

I started this article with a one-sentence answer. You could have stopped reading there and maybe most of you have left already. The comments section could be like a weekday Miami Marlins game after Labor Day.

If you’re still with me, I would like to explain in more detail why the Players is permanently stuck without major status—which is how it should be.

Majors are a made-up concept. Golf writers of the Herbert Warren Wind and Grantland Rice ilk were instrumental in deciding what was called a major. Players obviously also had an outsized role as well, the most famous example being Arnold Palmer almost single-handedly revitalizing the Open Championship into bonafide major status in the early 1960s.

The four majors as we know them today were not the original “majors” in golf. Before the PGA of America and Masters Tournament were formed, the U.S. Amateur and British Amateur were considered majors. Over time, the definition of “major” transitioned out of amateur competition and into the professional realm. The Masters wasn’t considered a major until after World War II, more than a decade after the event started.

So, yes, the definition of a major has shifted throughout the history—but the last 65 or so years have been consistent in that there are the same four majors.

Adding another one without subtracting one—and why would any of the current four majors want to bow out?—kind of devalues all majors and puts a weird wrench in the game’s history.

Would we count past Players victories as majors? Is Rickie Fowler a major winner now? He didn’t know it was a major at the time…

Just like there are no five-run homers, there are not five majors in men’s professional golf.

Ultimately, if there is disagreement about whether an event is a major, it’s not a major. Especially if the vast majority of participants believe it’s not a major. There is nothing else to discuss, really.

Say what you want about the PGA Championship slumming it at Bellerive or Valhalla but everyone in the field understands the history that is being played for. There is a certain pressure, a certain gravity.

You remember major winners. Shaun Micheel, Y.E. Yang and Todd Hamilton are remembered for the lightning they captured in a bottle. Any golf fan worth his or her salt could tell you a couple of the particulars around their victories.

Tim Clark, K.J. Choi and Stephen Ames? They won the Players in the not-so-distant past but only true degenerates could tell you anything more than that.

There are other flaws in the Players “major” argument

As I mentioned, the key LIV players are no longer allowed in the Players.

Without Rahm and DeChambeau, it’s hard to say this tournament has the best field in golf.

Sure, the depth of talent for the back half of the field is better than the Masters (limited field), the Open Championship (amateurs/qualifiers), U.S. Open (amateurs/qualifiers) and the PGA Championship (20 club pros). There are probably more players with a chance to win.

But the top of the field is not the same. At least not right now.

And, yes, the golf course does a great job of not discriminating against a certain style of play. It’s democratic. Anyone can win at Sawgrass.

But one could argue the Tour sets up Sawgrass more for entertainment than testing every facet of a player’s game.

The last 16 victors have all reached double-digit under-par totals, typically doing so with ease. Scoring isn’t everything but the Tour has continued to move toward an overwatered, over-seeded golf course that tends to be very soft.

That doesn’t make it a bad golf tournament by any means but it’s hard to compare the Players to, let’s say, the U.S. Open at Shinnecock where players will be fighting for their lives on every shot, being tested mentally and physically on a different level.

Majors don’t necessarily have to be on brutally difficult golf courses but it certainly adds to the weight of the tournament.

But ultimately those two variables (field strength and course setup) aren’t determining factors for whether the Players is a major.

The ultimate factor is that the players themselves don’t feel like it’s a major, there are already four majors on a 65-year run, adding another major slightly devalues all majors and doing so feels rather arbitrary and contrived.

What do you think? Should the Players be considered a major?

Let me know below in the comments.

Top Photo Caption: The Players Champ will never be a major. (GETTY IMAGES/David Cannon)