For journalists, the pleasures are many when it comes to writing or reading about the Players Championship. The brilliantly designed TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course has a way not only of testing the best players in the world but also of providing stirring finishes. And the fact that the Players is the PGA Tour’s flagship event and staged just down the road from the organization’s headquarters gives it considerable cachet as well.
But for those of us in the wordsmithing business, there are annoyances as well, with perhaps the most bothersome being the tour’s obsession with “all-caps” and making the letters in its corporate name as well as its signature event uppercase.
To be sure, this is a year-long irritation. But it has a way of really hitting home when the tour and the tournament are front and center.
All-caps often feels like shouting, and angrily so. And ours is not a game that necessarily lends itself to such loudness. Unless, of course, you are a LIV fan or fancy a drunken day in the grandstand overlooking the 16th at TPC Scottsdale ...
My first problem with “all-caps” is the sense of pretension they suggest. And that opinion tracks with what Paul Luna, a professor of typography and graphic communication, once told a writer for The New Republic on the subject of capitalization, saying that that format has long been used “to convey grandeur, pomposity or aesthetic seriousness.”
But is that how we really want golf to be seen?
All-caps often feels like shouting, and angrily so. And ours is not a game that necessarily lends itself to such loudness. Unless, of course, you are a LIV fan or fancy a drunken day in the grandstand overlooking the 16th at TPC Scottsdale during what has come to be known as the Wasted Man Open.
To be sure, I get that the tour’s corporate name is PGA TOUR, Inc. But does it really need to be all formal and uppercase with that appellation as well as those of several of its tournaments, among them THE PLAYERS Championship, the TOUR Championship and the Junior PLAYERS Championship?
I cannot quite pinpoint the reason for my dislike of all-caps. Perhaps it is my rebellious nature and a general aversion as a journalist to promoting anything that feels like brand marketing when all I really want to do is tell a story. Or it could stem from my love of the poet e e cummings and the lovely pieces he composed in the early and mid-20th century, many times with all letters – and his name – lowercase. For me, his avant-garde orthography only enhanced the depth and meaning of his well-chosen words.
Can you imagine the players or the pga tour that way?
John Steinbreder
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: Barbara Ivins-Georgoudiou, GGP