How can a tournament with 50 years of idiosyncrasy grow without endangering its uniqueness?
That’s been the question facing the Sanderson Farms Championship ever since it announced in January that it was bulking up its purse from $4.4 million to $6.6 million and moving to a standalone September date (see also “Sanderson Sheds Old Questions for New”). And striking a balance between those two interests has always seemed (to me, at least) something less than a certainty.
But less than a week from the biggest iteration of this event in its history, the list of committed players suggests that the character of this year’s event is secure. To be sure, it has a handful of the caliber of players that have rarely made time for the Sanderson. Brandt Snedeker, the two-time Ryder Cup team member and former No. 4-ranked player in the world, is the biggest name in the field. Jason Dufner, the 2013 PGA Champion and himself a former top-10 golfer, also will be recognizable to golf fans outside the game’s hardcore devotees. So will be two-time major winner Zach Johnson and 2016 PGA Champion Jimmy Walker.
In all, four of the world’s top 50 players — Chez Reavie (No. 27), Snedeker (No. 38), Cameron Smith (No. 45), and Byeong Hun An (No. 48) — are in the field. That’s not exactly the Players Championship, but for an event that spent most of the past 25 years being played opposite one major or another, my guess is it’s the most top-50 players ever for the Sanderson.
More importantly, the field is full of the young players and rookies that have been central to the Sanderson’s identity.
If any constituency has been cut out of the Sanderson by the changes, then it appears to be the 40-plus crowd. Retief Goosen and Stuart Appleby, for example, both have played the Sanderson for the past three years; neither man is in the field this year. If some element of the Sanderson had to go the way of the Buick Open, then I’m fine with it being this.
To be clear, the Sanderson’s evolution is an ongoing process, because the event’s organizers inevitably will continue recruiting more top-tier players to Jackson in future years. If I had to speculate (which I don’t, but I will), my guess would be that organizers might’ve hoped for a couple more recognizable names in the field but that they’re pleased with this first step; accordingly, one would expect to see the field get incrementally stronger over the next few years, as the purse continues to grow and newcomers talk the event up among their peers.
That means that the tension between preserving the Sanderson’s identity and attracting top-50 players isn’t going away. But for this year, at least, that tension has been allayed.
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Photo credit: Sanderson Farms Championship
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