Stakes brutally, compellingly clear in survive-and-advance golf

Justin Thomas fell to the turf in agony.

This was at the Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield Country Club last year, when he’d come to the 72nd hole needing birdie to crack the top 70 in the FedExCup standings and advance to the FedExCup Playoffs. He had sprayed his tee shot left but hit a miraculous recovery shot out of the trees, the ball hooking hard and trundling to a stop just in front of the 18th green.

Alas, his last-ditch birdie chip had clanked off the flagstick, staying out, and Thomas dropped like a sack of rice splayed out on his back. It was great theater.

“I remember watching it on my phone for a bit,” Jordan Spieth, FedExCup No. 62, said from the Wyndham Championship at Sedgefield on Tuesday. “And I think as it got close, I got to a TV kind of for the finish. He had that chip on 18. You know, I mean, it was an off year for him, but to still battle it out like that was pretty exciting.”

Stephen King and other storytellers will tell you that the stakes are everything. If we can feel what’s in play, and how much it means, then we’re all in. There’s the usual binary component, with one winner and the rest, well, not winners. But the other lines of demarcation can be just as interesting, if not more so, than the quest for the trophy.

Consider the Olympics, where the scramble was for not just one win but three: gold (Scottie Scheffler), silver (Tommy Fleetwood) and bronze (Hideki Matsuyama) medals.

Or consider Round 2 at The Open Championship at Royal Troon, where Max Homa jarred a 30-foot birdie on 18 to make the cut. Homa screamed as the fans erupted in kind, the moment going off like a loud, exhilarating feedback loop, a sort of Caesar’s Fountain of noise around the green.

“An out-of-body experience,” Homa called it.

And, so, we come to the end game in the PGA TOUR’s race for the FedExCup, a survive-and-advance bake-off in which the field will go from 156 players this week all the way to one FedExCup winner. The stakes couldn’t be more clear in this arduous climb to reach what has been described as the hardest trophy to win in all of sports.

Like last year, only the top 70 in the FedExCup standings after the Wyndham, the 36th and last tournament of the Regular Season, will make it to the Playoffs. Only the top 50 after next week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind in Memphis will advance to the BMW Championship at Castle Pines outside Denver. (Those 50 will get into the Signature Events, with their elevated points and money, in 2025.) And only the top 30 from the BMW will play for the FedExCup itself at the TOUR Championship at East Lake in Atlanta.

The next four weeks are a Russian nesting doll of watchability – four stories within a larger narrative, each with clearly defined stakes. Trophies? Huge. Also, not everything.

“There's going to be a tournament to win and that will be a focus,” Spieth said from Sedgefield, where he was runner-up in 2013. “But you almost get to have double the excitement on some of the things, guys making the Playoffs, guys kind of getting in the top 125 or making a big push to where they can get their jobs back through the rest of the fall.

“There's a lot at stake here,” he added, “and I think this event will just continue to get better and better, which is good because it deserves to be.”

To Spieth’s point, the TOUR Championship, which will crown the FedExCup champion, will then give way to a fifth story, the FedExCup Fall, where players will jockey to finish in the top 125 by season’s end (The RSM Classic) in order to keep their TOUR cards for 2025.

There’s a sixth storyline to follow, as well. The Wyndham Championship also finalizes the Comcast Business TOUR TOP 10, the top 10 players in the FedExCup Regular Season standings who will earn bonuses for their excellent seasons. Shane Lowry, the highest-ranked player in the field, begins the Wyndham at No. 10 in the FedExCup.

“This is probably going to be one of the best chances I'll have to actually win the FedExCup,” said Lowry, who won the Zurich Classic of New Orleans with partner Rory McIlroy and has never reached the TOUR Championship. “Every point might count at the end of the day as well, not only for Comcast, and if I can make a hundred FedExCup points or more (at the Wyndham), it's certainly going to help me along the way.

“At the end of the day I have goal in my head where I want to be going into Atlanta,” he added.

He’s not the only one.

For FedExCup No. 70 Victor Perez, coming off a fourth-place finish at the Olympics, job one is to hold his position, or improve it, to reach the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis. For Spieth, the goal is to move up enough to make it to Denver. For Lowry, Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and others, it’s to win it all for the first time.

Whenever either the Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup rolls around each year, it’s often said that match play stakes are clear: win, lose, draw. But survive-and-advance golf, while stroke play in format, works for a similar reason. You can see and feel every exhilarating escape and brutal near-miss.

Justin Thomas, incidentally, is guaranteed to be back in the Playoffs, for he is FedExCup No. 19. After last year’s Wyndham drama, he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and has fashioned a solid season with five top-10 finishes. This week, at least, someone else will wear the grass strains on his pants.