Match Play Is Awesome

Right now it's snowing (at certain altitudes) in Marana, Arizona. Marana, Arizona happens to be the place where the PGA Tour is right now. And they're not exactly playing right now, since there's snow accumulating on the greens (!), but if the precipitation turns into, say, a nasty wintry sleet, they'd be able to squeegee the snow off the greens and they would then start play. There are probably some tournaments where wintry mix would get them to stop playing, but this week is match play, and the great thing about match play is that you can get away with murder in terms of the conditions. Since the only thing that matters is who of two players gets a better score on a given hole, playing it at the same time, concepts of "fairness" don't apply. That usually just applies to the course set-up; for instance, I remember one year back when this was held at La Costa Resort & Spa when the fairway of some par-4 was flooded, so they moved the tees forward and played it as a par-3. Obviously, that's sort of a combination of conditions and course set-up, but the key point is that you could never just wantonly play a par-4 as a par-3 some given day in a stroke play tournament. Why not? I'm not sure; after all, everyone has to play the same course as everyone else. Nevertheless, you couldn't do that; there's some ethos against it. Likewise, when you get things like the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot, people call it unfair, and when you get things like the 2011 U.S. Open at Congressional, where Jason Day posted a score that would have won almost any Open in history but finished eight shots behind Rory McIlroy, well, it's not called unfair exactly but it makes people start thinking about how these scores need to be reigned in.

In other words, people care about the score in stroke play, and they don't just care about relative scores, but absolute ones as well. Turning a par-4 into a par-3 would mean that the scores from that day were "wrong" somehow. Excessively hard or excessively easy conditions make the absolute scores look like they're calibrated wrong. Playing in snow will artificially inflate everyone's scores, and is particularly bad because it hits some people and not others. But in match play, you don't have to worry about any of that. Everyone's making birdies? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with birdies, or won with eagles. The course is mangling the field? Great! Lots of holes are being halved with bogeys, or won with pars. The first half of the field played in sleet, and then the clouds parted and the second half of the field played in warm sunshine? Great! Basically, because competition is broken up into tiny discrete units that don't communicate with one another, the world gets much simpler. Each unit of competition is the same as each other one: here are two people, here's a tee, a few hundred years that-a-way is a hole, let's see who gets there quicker. It's almost impossible for anything to alter the competitive nature of that concept. This makes match play much more flexible than stroke play, in practice, both in terms of what kinds of courses it can be played over and in terms of how wild the conditions can tolerably get. It's just one more reason why today, assuming they ever start playing again, is one of the most fun days in the golf year.