ATLANTA, Ga.— Here’s what the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club showed us:

1. England’s Tommy Fleetwood may have ESP or ESPN or both. Tuesday, he joked that it would be hilarious if made his first-ever PGA Tour win this week and walked off with the Tour Championship and the FedEx Cup title. Fleetwood called it. He won by three over Russell Henley and Patrick Cantlay. (Too bad he declined to give me any stock picks. Dang it.)
2. No matter how long Cantlay dawdles over a putt or how long he shifts his weight back and forth before hitting a tee shot even after the final twosome was put on the clock, PGA Tour officials do not have the guts/power/wherewithal to slap him with the slow-play penalty he deserved. But they’re playing for $10 million? Yeah, everybody else was, too, and they somehow played faster than paint drying.
3. Scottie Schefler is not invincible. Dominant but not invincible. Sunday, he yanked a squirrelly drive left that bounced hard once and dived under the boundary fence, out of bounds. Scheffler re-teed, hit his approach shot to two feet and salvaged a bogey. At 15, he still had an outside chance but pulled his iron shot left of the green and into the water for a double bogey. Nothing’s wrong with Scottie that wouldn’t be fixed by not getting drained by the heat and humidity in Memphis the previous week.
4. Feel free to compare how the Ryder Cuppers on both teams played at East Lake. It’s pretty much a tossup and besides, the Ryder Cup is still four weeks away. That leaves plenty of time for players to find—or lose—their form. This week’s results won’t matter by the time they reach Bethpage Black.
   • Did any Americans earn their way onto the team by impressing captain Keegan Bradley this week? Did Bradley impress himself by finishing seventh? We won’t know until the picks are announced in a few days. Cameron Young, fresh off his win at the Wyndham Championship and a nice FedEx Cup run, finished fourth. While form is more important than reputation, the Cup is a month away but Young has to be a serious contender for one of the final spots. Ditto Sam Burns, an experienced Ryder Cupper who tied for seventh and is just about the best putter on tour. The Ryder Cup, if you didn’t already know, is about making putts. Chris Gotterup and Ben Griffin were 10th, Brian Harman was 13th. Hmm. Nobody knows. Did those change Capt. Bradley’s mind? Doubtful.
5. East Lake got its you-know-what shot off thanks to soft conditions that led to lift-clean-and-place on the weekend. That plus soft greens gave tour players a license to kill. Fleetwood shot 18 under on a par 70 golf course. That’s low. Ten under was a tie for 13th and that’s in a tiny field of only 30 players. Firm and fast makes East Lake a challenge but that didn’t happen this week.
6. The back nine of Sunday’s telecast went on without commercial interruption. Besides giving us a chance to see how long it takes for Cantlay to play, it also forced NBC’s commentators to talk a lot. Live TV is hard and I won’t single out the talking head who said this but with a few holes left, one of the announcers commented that Fleetwood “had to know how big this is” before he was about to play a shot. Had to know? Duh. He’d never won on the PGA Tour before and had recently coughed up 54-hole leads. And that’s not even mentioning the $10 million at stake. Sometimes stating the obvious is a good reminder. Sometimes silence is better.
7. Is it just me or have the whopping numbers in golf payouts actually devalued in meaning? Scheffler came to East Lake having already won more than $46 million and he picked up another $2.6 or so. But the $10 million first prize that used to seem so gigantic now seems almost yawn-worth (well, unless I was winning it). How much money would first prize have to be now to really get your attention? Twenty million? Twenty-five? Fifty?
8. Only two baseball players are making more money than Scheffler this year—Juan Soto, $61 million, and Shohei Ohtani, $53 mill. Practically every name quarterback in the NFL is making at least $50 million these days and a decent number of NBA players are above Scheffler but isn’t it odd that the top player in golf, still a niche sport, ranks among the highest paid? Good for him. Seventy-one players on the PGA Tour won at least $2 million in 2025.
9. Brian Rolapp, a former NFL exec who is now the CEO of the PGA Tour, snapped a lot of heads with his early-week press conference in which he described himself as an agent of change and he promised significant change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and I wasn’t aware the PGA Tour was that broken. But maybe these $20 million dollar tournaments and big checks aren’t sustainable under the current system and the plan is to improve revenue streams. That could include a lot of things. Rolapp stressed simplicity and scarcity, presumably meaning he thinks more big tournaments and fewer little events are a better future for the tour. That’s not how the Tour empire was built but things are different now, what with investment group SSG willing to pour in $1.5 billion. Which means those guys are going to expect a return on their investment.
   • My prediction: The PGA Tour is going to turn into something similar to what Greg Norman wanted in the ‘90s, a super-tour of stars only—maybe 60-70 players competing 18 or 20 times a year. Every event has to be a big one. And all the players who rank beneath the top 60 are seen as having no value while small market tournaments who have trouble drawing star-studded fields also won’t been worth the trouble in the new regime. That’s not how Deane Beman set up the modern PGA Tour, it’s not what Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus wanted. But the PGA Tour has already gone from a member-run organization to an investment vehicle with the top players, and some investment bankers, making decisions in their own best interests instead of the rank-and-file players’.
10. The passing of FedEx pioneer Fred Smith in June could be the catalyst of major changes to the tour, too. FedEx has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the FedEx Cup sponsorship. It is almost expected that in 2027, when the FedEx contract expires, Fed Ex won’t be a major tour partner anymore. Can the Tour find another sponsor willing to cough up the $100 million buy-in that FedEx was doing? Maybe. Or perhaps an entirely new format and sponsor program will be initiated by Rolapp’s crew. Imagine if each tournament stop was a franchise entity, like the Detroit Tigers, say, and were run by ownership with rights fees going to the PGA Tour? That’s an entirely different model. Rolapp certainly talks like the pro golf playing field is going to be different.
    • And if the FedEx Cup sites do change, it sure would be a shame not to go to sweltering Memphis and Atlanta in back-to-back weeks in August, wouldn’t it?