The 2021 Fortinet Championship (the event previously known as the Safeway Championship) was a successful tournament, and Fortinet, the Silicon Valley online-security company, did an admirable job of stepping up and taking over as presenting sponsor when Safeway stepped away from the role after the 2020 event. Back for 2022, with a few minor changes in the entertainment and hospitality aspects of the event, the Fortinet Championship is set, once again, to open the 2022-2023 PGA Tour season and the race to the FedEx Cup—but what about the future?
This event is no stranger to change. First staged in 2007 as the Fry’s Electronics Open at the Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Arizona, it was renamed the Frys.com Open in 2008, was moved to the CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, California in 2010, and moved again, to its current location at the Silverado Resort and Spa, in October 2014. In 2016 Safeway Inc. took over the event, which was played as the Safeway Open through 2020, and in 2021 Fortinet took up the mantle.
Starting in 2024 the PGA Tour is going back to a calendar-year schedule, ending the nine-year run, starting in 2013, of the oddball wraparound season that elevated the then-Frys.com Open from the first event of the post-Tour Championship fall schedule to the opening gun in the race for FedEx Cup points. The coming change in schedule means that the 2023 Fortinet Championship may once again be relegated to a position as the first event in a second-tier fall schedule that will lack the presence of the big guns of the PGA Tour, who are likely to be resting up after the money chase of the FedEx Cup finals.
Back in the days before the 2013 advent of the wrap-around PGA Tour season, the late-season Fall Series tournament consisted of four events played after the conclusion of the FedEx Cup Tour Championship series. That “Fall Series” was definitely the low season for the PGA Tour; it mostly drew players from near the bottom of the money list—both veterans and newbies—who were looking to bolster their dollar count and strengthen their position for the next season.
Under the PGA Tour’s coming new calendar-year schedule, those players who are outside of the FedEx-Cup-eligible top-70 at the end of the regular season will compete in a “compelling, consequential final stretch” of fall events that will determine their status for the following season, while the top 50 players will be eligible for a new Fall Series of up to three international events played after the Tour Championship. These new, limited-field, no-cut (AKA “money-grab”) events will represent a chance for the top players to pad their bank accounts some more, if they so desire, and still have the “off season” that so many of the already-pampered stars of the game are complaining that they lack.
The old pre-wraparound Fall Series may have lacked the star power and tension of the race for the FedEx Cup, but it carried some drama because of the make-or-break storylines that it engendered. At least, that’s the way many people saw it, myself included—but after I asked Jim Overbeck, Fortinet’s Senior Vice President of Marketing for North America, about the company’s reaction to the scheduling change, I got the feeling that the folks at Fortinet don’t feel the same way.
The talk from the dais at the 2022 Fortinet Championship Media Day press conference on July 14th was almost all about the business-networking opportunities that the tournament represents, giving the distinct impression that the golf tournament was viewed as a jolly good excuse to get together and talk network security against a backdrop of beautiful Napa Valley scenery, amongst rolling, vine-covered hills, while enjoying world-class wine and food.
Overbeck’s initial response to my question was, “If there’s one question I saw coming, that was the question.”
He continued, saying “We made a six-year commitment to the PGA Tour as a partner to have the Fortinet Championship, and the concept was we would be the first event of the season, and kick off the FedEx Cup points. That’s changed.”
The return to a calendar-year season means “our product changes a little bit.” Citing his relationship with the PGA Tour, Overbeck went on to say, “We’re working very tightly with them—they know our preference. They know what we’re willing to do and it has a lot to do with Napa. I told them as the music’s playing, when it stops we don’t want to be in a worse chair than when we started. They’ve been a great partner with us, and they’re working to move some roadblocks to make sure that we’re in a really good spot.”
I’ll be honest—I don’t know exactly what all of that means, but that one sentence—“I told them as the music’s playing, when it stops we don’t want to be in a worse chair than when we started.”—leads me to think that the Fortinet folks really like Napa, but don’t relish the thought of losing the cachet of being the event that kicks off the PGA Tour’s big show—the FedEx Cup race.
Does this mean that a change in the Fortinet Championship’s spot in the PGA Tour schedule is in the works once the calendar-year season returns? We will have to wait and see, and maybe not as long as we might think, because while the new schedule begins in January 2024, the change really comes in August 2023 after the Tour Championship, when the new fall schedule picks up as a lead-in to the return of the calendar-year season.
