Three Team Events in One September: Golf Is Inventing a Second Season for Itself

Three Team Events in One September: Golf Is Inventing a Second Season for Itself

"If Chicago had weather, it would be scary."

Fred Couples said that about the city he was tied to throughout his playing career — a half-joking, half-true line, the sort that only slips out after you have stood in the middle of a Medinah fairway when the wind turns. Medinah sits about forty minutes west of downtown Chicago. This September, the club reopens in a new guise to host the Presidents Cup.

Medinah will not stand alone. Lahinch, a links course on Ireland's west coast, stages the Walker Cup. The Solheim Cup takes place a sea or two away, on European soil. Three team events, three different tiers of the game — amateur, women's, men's — squeezed into four weeks.

I have followed the international golf calendar for decades, and I cannot remember a September packed like this one. Some people call it golf's "new July". The phrase unsettled me, and it took me a while to work out why.

A gap, filled

The men's individual PGA Tour season ends in August, after the Tour Championship. From that point until the autumn schedules elsewhere begin, the top tier of men's golf leaves a hole. September did not become a big month on its own. It became a big month because it was empty.

The three events placed in that hole belong to the same family: team competition, match-play format, and one feature that is rare in professional golf — the players are not playing for themselves.

The Walker Cup is a biennial match between the amateur teams of Great Britain and Ireland and the United States, played over two days in foursomes, four-ball and singles. It is the elite amateur stage, where the youngest golfers from both sides of the Atlantic meet before turning professional. Putting it on a links course such as Lahinch is a deliberate choice: sea wind, firm turf, the ball running out, and no room for hesitation.

The Solheim Cup pits the United States women's team against Europe, also on a two-year cycle. For the women's game, it is the most emotionally charged week on the entire calendar. European crowds bring drums, horns, and songs written for individual players. Nothing about that atmosphere resembles a stroke-play event.

The Presidents Cup matches the United States against the International team — the rest of the world minus Europe. This year it goes to Medinah, a club that has hosted the PGA Championship twice and the Ryder Cup once. That Medinah has been renovated before the event is a notable signal: traditional clubs are preparing for a new cycle of major events.

One professional caveat before going further. The dates and venues of all three events should be checked against the official announcements of the governing bodies before being cited, because this is the kind of information that shifts with each publication cycle. I always double-check, even the things I think I know.

When the turf changes character

The most interesting part of the September story is not on the scoreboard. It is under the players' feet.

In the American Northeast, July and August are the harshest stretch for putting-green grass. Sustained heat, high humidity, and nights that never cool enough for the turf to recover. Greenkeepers respond by watering more, slowing the greens down, and hoping they do not lose the grass. By September the nights are cooler, heat stress eases, and the greens begin to recover their natural smoothness and uniformity.

That is why September in this region often delivers the best playing surfaces of the year: smooth greens, rough cut back after the growing season, a ball rolling faster and truer, and a round played at a noticeably quicker pace than at the height of summer.

I should be clear that this is observation, not measurement. I hold no agronomic data to prove that September is "the best". It is the experience of players and observers, scoped to the Northeast, and it may look entirely different elsewhere.

September also brings two seasonal markers that any long-time golfer recognises. The first is the leaf rule — a common autumn local rule granting free relief when a ball is lost in fallen leaves. The second is the frost delay: a cold morning freezes the greens and the organisers push back the starting times. Those two small details say a great deal about the real limits of a golf season.

And here is where I want Vietnamese readers to note something Western golf media often forgets to explain. The entire "September is the new July" argument only holds in the northern hemisphere. In Australia, where I live, September is the start of spring. The turf has just come through a damp winter, the grass is waking up, and it is a good time to play — but for the opposite reason. The Australian golf season has no concept of a "burnt-out summer". When reading an American piece about September, a southern-hemisphere reader has to translate the entire frame of reference.

Three events, one window

From a broadcast standpoint, cramming three team events into one month is a decision with obvious logic. One month, one theme, three distinct audiences. A network can sell a single sponsorship package across all three rather than three disconnected deals. A sponsor can attach its name to a continuous content window instead of a single Sunday afternoon.

But there is a difference in audience tier that anyone working in this trade must remember. In the United States, the Presidents Cup does not carry the viewing intensity of the Ryder Cup. That has been true since the event was created. The Ryder Cup has nearly a century of history and an opponent defined by European collective memory. The Presidents Cup has an opponent defined by an administrative rule: countries that are not in Europe. Emotion cannot be manufactured by regulation.

The Walker Cup sits on an entirely different storey. This is the amateur stage, with no prize money and no world ranking points. Its value lies elsewhere: it is where federations see the next generation. For golf's talent pipeline, the Walker Cup is one of the few occasions to compare two young golfing nations head-to-head under genuine match-play pressure.

Based on my experience tracking these matches across many seasons, I have drawn one conclusion about team weeks: they are not measured by technique, they are measured by the capacity to absorb social pressure. A player may own the prettiest swing of the week, but if he cannot bear his partner's eyes on him at the 17th, he will drop points at precisely the decisive moment. That is a category of data that exists in no statistical system.

There is one memory I still carry. In 2026, when the pandemic closed every stadium, I lost all my hosting contracts for six months and sat rewatching more than a hundred old matches in a room. Empty stadiums, yet the applause still echoed inside me. It was during that period that I understood team weeks live on crowd noise, and a Solheim Cup without spectators loses much of its reason to exist.

Behind the "second season"

There is an economic story here that nobody names correctly.

If September genuinely offers better playing conditions than July, its value does not lie in television. It lies in the tee sheet. A month with four extra weeks of smooth greens and faster play is four weeks in which clubs can sell tee times at a higher price, serve more rounds, and stretch revenue across a period usually written off as dead. For the golf course economy, that is the most important part of the story, and it never appears on any leaderboard.

In Australia we understand this differently. The brutal Queensland summer pushes many players into early-morning slots or reduces their rounds. Autumn and early winter are when the courses feel best. In other words, every golf market has its own hidden "second season". What September in America is doing is turning that second season into a branded broadcast product.

There is something troubling in the method. Modern golf runs so fast it has forgotten how to breathe. When the individual season ends in August and the team season begins immediately in September, no gap is left for players to recover. Other tours around the world are still playing. Leading players are still pulled across continents. In many sports, schedule density is the single biggest cause of injury, and no medical team can save a calendar of two matches a week. Golf involves less collision, but the principle of a recovery window does not change.

Exhaustion is not a stopping point; it is a crossroads where we choose the next road. For golf, that crossroads now arrives every September.

What is suspect about a catchy slogan

Now to the part I want to say plainly.

"September is the new July" is a cliché. It sits in the same drawer as "orange is the new black" and "fifty is the new forty". The author of the phrase undercut it himself with a line to the effect that, personally, he just wanted one more month of summer. When the person making the argument hedges it first, we should read the hedge more seriously than the argument.

Second, the three team events carry little ranking value. The Walker Cup offers no world ranking points. The Solheim Cup and the Presidents Cup have historically counted for limited points or none, depending on the era. If the yardstick is sporting prestige established through a ranking system, September is not July. It is a month of media prestige.

Third, concentration does not increase total audience. It divides audience. An ordinary golf fan cannot watch all three events in full across four weeks. Attention share is a zero-sum game. Crushing three events into one month can make each of them look paler, not richer.

Fourth, the claim of "the best course conditions of the year" is a personal observation, limited to one region, with no agronomic data attached. It is biologically plausible — cool-season grass recovering after heat stress — but plausible does not mean proven. I once wrote a deeply felt piece about Croatia at the 2026 World Cup, using numbers to build a perfect story of patience. Croatia have no trophy, but they created a new yardstick for patience. Three days after the final, it took me nearly a week to write again, because I had believed in the story I built. Since then, every analysis I write includes a paragraph for the possibility that I am wrong.

With September, that possibility looks like this: if the PGA Tour season extends again, or if the team calendar is spread out, the "new September" disappears in a single season. A slogan built on a scheduling gap can collapse along with the gap.

What remains

There is one genuine strength in this whole story, and it is not in the slogan.

Across those four weeks, golf is forced to confront an old question: this sport has two distinct identities. An individual identity, where a player competes against the course and against himself, measured in strokes. A collective identity, where a player competes for the person beside him, measured by whether he dares to hit the shot at the last hole. Those two identities need two different rhythms. September separating them out — even accidentally — may be the best thing to happen to the golf calendar in years.

If September really is a different season, then perhaps it is time to stop calling it by July's name.