Golf's Never Ending Story needs to be edited

“My players finished q-school on Thursday and got on a plane for South Africa on the Saturday, they had one day off after a 6-round tournament before the start of the next season” Stephen Sweeney, PGA Professional and European Tour coach

The avid golfer and golf fans knows when the season ends, my parents didn't even know golf had a season like other sports. Golf needs a prolonged off-season and it needs a big start and a big finish.

The first tournament of the 2012 season started on Friday 6 January and the final tournament of the season ended on Sunday 16 December, and the year featured over 250 Official World Golf Ranking tournaments on the PGA Tour, Web.com Tour, European Tour, Challenge Tour, Asian Tour, OneAsia, Japan Golf Tour, Korean PGA Tour, PGA Tour of Australasia, Sunshine Tour, Canadian Tour and PGA Tour Latinoamerica.

In 2013 both the PGA Tour and European Tour will finish their seasons and start their 2014 seasons within two weeks of finishing their 2013 seasons. The season just doesn't ever have a rest. Can you imagine the Premier League for 2012-13 finishing in the second week of May, and then the next season beginning a week or two later? Or the NFL playing the Super Bowl in the first week of February and then having its Kick-off week the following week? Even a sport of similar global popularity and stature, Tennis, has increased the gap between the end of its season and the beginning of the next season. Golf doesn't have an off season or a pre-season, and it is suffering because of it.

The players lack enthusiasm, the fans lack enthusiasm and very soon it will reach the point when sponsors lack enthusiasm and the big bubble will go bang for the tours.

The 2013 PGA Tour season begins tomorrow, January 4, in a desperate attempt to boost interest in an event which has been in decline for 10 years. The Tournament of Champions is now the Tournament of Available Champions, with only one of the 2011 Major winners playing in last year's ToC and Tiger Woods hasn't played in Hawaii since 2005.

Rory McIlroy, Luke Donald, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Justin Rose among others will not be starting their season at the first event of the year this week. For the first event of the year not to have the games biggest stars is detrimental to the sport, golf needs a big start to the season to engage the fans and make the product more attractive to sponsors. But it can surely be no surprise that the top players in the main have decided to launch their campaigns in Abu Dhabi or Los Angeles, the season is just too long on all of the tours and that leads to players starting their seasons in different events and ending their seasons in different events. With the worldwide economic climate not looking any better than it did four years ago it surely cannot continue to be the case that major companies continue to sponsor the multitude of tournaments that are played across the world, and this will inevitably lead to a decrease in prize funds or in many cases lead to tournaments being discontinued.

So there are several reasons why a shorter season will be better for golf, and it doesn't necessarily have to mean tournaments being cancelled. It is a trend that players tend to start their seasons later in the year and finish their seasons just before Christmas, so ending the season in December wouldn't be a problem. Every major team sport has a pre-season, a series of matches that prepare players for the upcoming season and help to develop a players fitness ahead of a long season. Golf does not have this pre-season so inevitably players will play a few tournaments before gaining form in a year and in general you don't see the very best of players until July, August and September. I have looked closely at the PGA Tour and European Tour schedule and I have developed a schedule that has an extended off-season, a pre-season and a season which ends just before Christmas and enables both the PGA Tour Playoffs and the European Tour Race to Dubai Final Series to be played at different times over the last two months of the year, and enables the best players in the world to play both.

The World Golf Championships would feature different tournaments at be played at different times of the year to which they are now. This series would be more global and feature tournaments which should have received WGC status in 1999 but were overlooked for new tournaments, each with their own unique sponsor. These championships already have established partners and therefore are likely to continue with those partners into the future, rather than relying on the continued backing from the likes of Cadillac and Accenture.

The likes of MasterCard, Volvo and Bridgestone are prolific sponsors of golf across the world and are sponsors of tournaments that are established events and have a long history and have existed far beyond the duration of the current sponsors agreement. The Arnold Palmer Invitational, World Match Play Championship and World Series are events which have a roll of honour and a profile that will ensure wherever they are positioned on the schedule and are events that will likely not struggle to attract sponsors. HSBC invented the HSBC Champions and it is very much their flagship event within golf, despite sponsoring several other events within the game, so again, wherever it is positioned on the schedule it is likely HSBC will continue their backing of the event.

This cannot be said for some other events on the calendar.

Pre-season events wouldn't need the $5million commitment for prize money every year and because of this companies would likely continue to sponsor events for a longer period, even if they do not attract a plethora of world class golfers each year. Aside from a sponsorship issue it would be beneficial to have a shorter season so that players would compete more often, and would be beneficial to have a structured pre-season with events played in the sun for players to competitive practice ahead of the regular season. The European Tour really gets going in the middle east anyway so the only change would be the dates of the tournaments, the PGA Tour has tournaments in the California and Nevada deserts, Florida, Georgia and Hawaii and each of those have perfect conditions for preparations for the season and to prepare for an event which is traditionally seen as the start to the golfing season, and one which I think would be the perfect one to launch the season.

The Masters.

Augusta National Golf Club brings all of the world's best golfers, all of the golf media and all of the golf tours together at the same time, and because of this and the global profile that The Masters has as the year's first major, makes it the perfect tournament to launch the regular season following a pre-season. The pre-season for both the PGA Tour and European Tour would be played over 6 weeks of 72-hole tournaments featuring between 140 and 204 players each week in each event on both tours. The European Tour would hold its pre-season in the Middle East and North Africa, starting with the Volvo Golf Champions played in Bahrain, Jordan or Kuwait as a way of developing golf across the wider region. The Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, CommercialBank Qatar Masters and OMEGA Dubai Desert Classic would follow and the pre-season would finish with events in Oman and Morocco.

“The UAE is full of world-class facilities” and has perfect golfing conditions, especially in February and March. The PGA Tour's pre-season would start, as traditional, in Hawaii with the Hyundai Tournament of Champions, followed by the Humana Challenge in California, the Las Vegas Invitational in Nevada, the Tampa Bay Championship in Florida and two events in the state of Georgia; The McGladrey Classic and the Atlanta Classic (played either at TPC Sugarloaf or East Lake) – this event was for many years the lead-in tournament to The Masters and proved popular with the likes of Phil Mickelson.

The PGA Tour Playoffs would take place from mid October to the first week of November in Houston, Phoenix, San Diego and the Tour Championship in Los Angeles. The European Tour's Final Series of the Race to Dubai would be played over four weeks from mid November to mid December, culminating at the DP World Tour Championship. In 2012 many of the world's best players competed right up to a fortnight before Christmas, and finished at different tournaments across the world, providing a dis-jointed finish to the season. A fifth World Golf Championship would take place at Pebble Beach, one week prior to Christmas, the International Federation of PGA Tours Grand Final would feature the leading players from each of the member tours with qualification based solely on performance on each tour. This would provide golf with one, global and singular final event played on an iconic course. The prize money would not count for any of the tours, but would award official world golf ranking points.

A ten-week official off-season would then take place before the next pre-season. The dates of the calendar would be as followed based on the 2020 calendar:

Off-season 16 December – 23 February (10 weeks)

Pre-season 24 February – 5 April (6 weeks)

Season 6 April – 20 December (37 weeks)

Graeme McDowell had 10 full weeks off following his win in the Tiger Woods World Challenge in December, if everyone did this then the level of fitness would improve and players would be more likely to compete more often in a more condensed period. This can only be a good thing for golf, having a real off-season with an extended period without golf. It would heighten anticipation for the new season, something which is distinctly lacking as we get ready for the launch of the 2013 PGA Tour season at Kapalua this Friday.