Last October, in a bid to stop LIV Golf from luring away players with big-money paydays, the PGA Tour named the four existing tournaments that would join eight previously announced ‘elevated’ events on the 2023 schedule. The strategy was understandable, but none other than Jack Nicklaus wondered aloud about the collateral damage it might create, even as his own Memorial Tournament was one of those designated for a loftier position.

“What it’s done is made the PGA Tour almost two tiers,” Nicklaus said. “All of a sudden the other tournaments become feeders.”

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It was a reasonable reaction. With 11 events sporting $20 million-plus purses (and the Sentry Tournament of Champions offering $15 million to its limited field), the tour’s top players would see those tournaments as “must-plays” — indeed, to be eligible for payouts from the tour’s Player Impact Programme, they can only miss one of those events. Toss in the majors and the FedEx Cup Playoffs, and that amounts to 19 starts on tour for the year, which doesn’t leave a bunch of wiggle room for other events.

Once the new schedule was revealed, there were some tournament directors at the “other” events who wondered the same thing as Nicklaus: How could they attract any top-ranked players in this new landscape?

“Everybody realises the tour is trying to do something to combat LIV Golf, and that’s understandable,” one tournament director, who asked not to be identified, told Golf Digest in October. “We all want to protect the tour and see it continue to grow. But a lot of us can’t believe they did this. Some sponsors are pretty hot.”

It seems too early to tell whether this will become a real problem or not, considering there have always been some tournaments that attracted better fields than others. But so far in this calendar year, the prospects for impressive fields in early tournaments on the West Coast are equal to or better than they’ve been in the most recent years before the COVID-19 pandemic. And that’s with two “elevated” events looming in the next five weeks — the WM Phoenix Open and Genesis Invitational in Los Angeles.

They’re doing a little bit of extra celebrating in the California desert at La Quinta for this week’s American Express after drawing the strongest field they’ve had since maybe Arnold Palmer was a regular competitor. A year after only one of the top-10 players in the World Ranking entered, five of the top seven — Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele and Will Zalatoris — are set to compete for the tournament’s largest-ever purse of $8 million.

At Torrey Pines next week, when the $8.7 million Farmers Insurance Open is played Wednesday-Saturday for the second time, five of the top 10 are entered, with Scheffler and Cantlay not committed (the deadline is Friday), but major winners Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa playing.

Both fields have one of the game’s most popular players in Tony Finau, while the Farmers will get its usual boost of orange-clad devotees to Rickie Fowler, as well as the ardent followers of former Masters champ Hideki Matsuyama. Arguably, the only true stars that either event is missing are World No. 1 Rory McIlroy (who will play at the Dubai Desert Classic on the DP World Tour on the Farmers week) and three-time major winner Jordan Spieth.

Neither the close proximity of events with heftier prizes nor the existence of LIV Golf seems to have affected the big-picture prospects of the AmEx and Farmers.

“LIV Golf didn’t take our best golfers,” said Marty Gorsich, the tournament director of the Farmers Open. “They took the villains and took the guys whose names were bigger than their games.”

Gorsich insisted he was not one of those executives who reacted passionately against the notion of elevated events — the tour has since shifted to calling them “designated” events. He repeated an assertion that he’s no doubt used with his sponsors and corporate patrons. “I was not worried in the least,” he said. “Elevated is not elevating an event, it’s elevating a field. Are a few more guys who are ranked going to change who watches this tournament? I don’t think so.”

Pat McCabe, The American Express tournament director, had a bit more of a practical assessment: “There aren’t any of those elevated events in the month of January, so we fall into a perfect spot. That helps us a lot.”