Has The Chevron Run Out Of Gas?

Golf’s major championships. They are the crowning achievements in a professional golfer’s career. They’re historic. They’re glorious events that will define the legacy of all that win, even one. They are also rare birds. In the men’s professional game there are only four. Players like Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods would attempt to have their game peak during the majors. Jack won eighteen of them, Tiger fifteen. Famously, just a couple of weeks ago, Rory McIlroy claimed his fifth major championship and with it, the career grand slam when he won the Masters.

Women’s professional golf also has their major championships. There are five of those. For decades the first major championship on the women’s circuit was, like the Masters, played on the same venue and at the same time of the year, in fact, played the weekend before the Masters.

In the last few years, since COVID, some things have begun to change. Augusta National had created the Augusta National Women’s Amateur and that created a problem for the best amateurs in the game. Do they, as they traditionally had done, play in Palm Springs in the women’s first major, or do they come to Augusta to try and win this new prize? That problem caused the LPGA to blink. Four years ago, the tour, with a brand-new sponsor in tow, Chevron, moved the first major championship from its beautiful home in the desert to Houston and the corporate headquarters of Chevron. It made sense, after all they were ponying up one of the biggest purses in the women’s game and the LPGA promised to go out of their way to make the golfers in the field forget all about those wonderful contests at Mission Hills. They would even keep the tradition of the winner taking a dunk, no longer in Poppy’s Pond, but another body of water just off the eighteenth green at the Woodlands.

It started off innocuous enough with two popular winners, Lila Vu and Nelly Korda. This year however was a little different. Despite the fact that all of the participants were given courtesy cars, former winners got Bentley’s, and a champions dinner on Monday night, not much went well after that. There were weather issues, unavoidable. There were apparently promotional issues which were self-inflicted wounds and resulted in very sparse crowds for the entire week. Imagine if there were no crowds to fight to get one of those gnomes at the Masters. The optics were horrible on TV. Then there was the leaderboard. This has been a sore topic on the LPGA Tour for years, but it doesn’t make it any less true. If there are little to no American players on the leaderboard, players that fans recognize, there’s a problem. No matter how global the game has become, the LPGA has had a very hard time getting traction for the international players. Not so much in the men’s game. Remember, an Irish kid won the Masters.

There was drama at the finish Sunday, with Aryia Jutanugarn flubbing a chip shot on the seventy second hole, failing to win outright and finding herself in a playing with Mao Saigo, Ruoning Yin, Hyo Joo Kim, and Lindy Duncan, the lone American. Not a household name among them. In the end, Mao Saigo won with a birdie on the first playoff hole. Very few people were there to see it.

These issues are not lost on the tour and/or Chevron. There’s talk about moving the tournament about a month earlier, after The Players but before The Masters, hopefully raising its profile in the sporting landscape. There’s also talk of the fall, but there’s no way they want to compete with football. Even the PGA Tour has learned that lesson. So, talks will continue, and we’ll see what comes of them. Something has to change.

Oh, one more thing. Remember the tradition of the winner jumping into the lake? Mao Saigo and her caddie and team did that. There was still a problem with that. Mao can’t swim.

Imagine if Rory McIlroy had looked at Chairman Ridley in Butler Cabin and was unable to put the green jacket on due to his allergy to wool.

That’s essentially where the Chevron is today.