ATLANTA – Not since 1962 has the PGA Tour had 50 official tournaments in one season, much less six majors.
On Wednesday, when the tour announced its 2020-21 schedule – a packed slate that includes two Masters in a span of five months, two U.S. Opens on opposite ends of the country and a tournament in the Dominican Republic that will be played twice in the same season – commissioner Jay Monahan called it “a dream season.”
It starts next Thursday, Sept. 10, in Napa, California, and ends Sept. 4, 2021, in Atlanta, which is where the PGA Tour is this week for the 30-player Tour Championship that concludes the 2019-20 season. That tournament, which tees off Friday at East Lake Golf Club, includes Baylor School graduate Harris English in the top quarter of the points standings.
The 50 events offering official money next season do not include the tournament at the Olympics, which were postponed until 2021 in Tokyo and will be held two weeks after the British Open and the week before a World Golf Championship – the FedEx St. Jude Invitational at TPC Southwind in Memphis. None of this would have happened if not for the PGA Tour going dark from mid-March to mid-June as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down sports around the world and led to three tournaments being rescheduled for after this year’s FedEx Cup playoffs: the Masters, the U.S. Open and the Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship.
The latter, which is played in the Dominican Republic, originally was canceled, then rescheduled until Sept. 24-27, the same weekend of the Ryder Cup, which subsequently was postponed from this year to next. The Dominican tourney will return to its regular spot on the schedule in March, opposite the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play. It will offer full FedEx Cup points – and presumably an invitation to the Masters to the winner – in September, and then reduced points and no Masters Invitation available in March.