Two weeks ago, Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 player in the world and the current leader of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs, called the premise of the entire competition “silly.”

“You can’t call it a season-long race and have it come down to one tournament,” Scheffler said in Memphis, Tenn. “Hypothetically, we get to East Lake and my neck flares up and it doesn’t heal the way it did at The Players, I finish 30th in the FedEx Cup because I had to withdraw from the last tournament? Is that really the season-long race? No. It is what it is.”

In Scheffler’s mind, the FedEx Cup playoffs instead identify “the guy that plays the best in these playoff events,” not the best player throughout the season. Take Keegan Bradley, the 50th and final player to make the BMW Championship, who then won in Denver on Sunday to shoot up to No. 4 in the standings. He’ll start this week’s tournament at 6-under-par, just four shots behind Scheffler. Bradley has a solid chance to win the $25 million bonus at the end of this week in Atlanta.

“I would use Keegan Bradley as a great example of what the playoffs are,” Scheffler said Tuesday. “You can have somebody who has had not their best year, and then all of a sudden he turns it into what could be his best year or one of his best years on tour.”

At its core, what Scheffler is describing is not a season-long competition. All reasonable points, right? Why are we calling this a season-long race if that’s just not what it is?

It’s more complicated than that. The bone that Scheffler is picking with the Tour Championship is exactly why the format was changed to the “starting strokes” model in 2019. In the tour’s eyes, by giving strokes to each player based on their place in the standings at the beginning of the Tour Championship, the FedEx Cup is balancing the responsibilities of being a season-long race and one that ends with one winner.

The PGA Tour wanted the FedEx Cup to culminate with a single tournament and a single champion: The player who wins the Tour Championship also wins the FedEx Cup. It’s flashy. It’s (somewhat) easy to follow. The broadcast won’t need constant cuts to a dizzying graphic of the points system changing in real time. We can just watch a golf tournament that is simply just a golf tournament — but with $25 million on the line.

In its previous format, the Tour Championship effectively had two champions: the player who performed the best at East Lake, and the one who finished the points list on top. Most famously, this led to the scene in 2018 where fans swarmed Tiger Woods in the 18th fairway after he won the former, but Justin Rose won the latter.

Now, points freeze before the Tour Championship, and they turn into strokes: Scheffler is starting the week at 10 under, Xander Schauffele at 8 under, Hideki Matsuyama at 7 under, Bradley at 6 under and Ludvig Åberg at 5 under. Then Nos. 6-10 begin at 4 under. Nos. 11-15 are at 3 under; Nos. 16-20 at 2 under; No. 21-25 at 1 under and No. 26-30 at even par.

The FedEx sponsorship permeates the PGA Tour’s playoffs system. (Andy Lyons / Getty Images)

It’s still confusing. And Scheffler still isn’t into the whole thing. What does the FedEx Cup mean if it isn’t an accurate representation of what the PGA Tour calls it: a season-long race?

“I think we need a season-long race. I think the FedExCup has been really good for our tour and for the game. I think it’s something exciting to finish off the year,” Scheffler said. “Personally, I thought the old format, I didn’t have a ton of issues with. Personally, when I watched it I found it kind of interesting who was going to end up where, and I didn’t necessarily mind that the winner of the Tour Championship wasn’t the winner of the FedExCup. It provides a little less volatility, which is the negative.”

“In terms of the season-long race, I think, yeah, I would have deserved to win the season-long race with winning the amount of times I did and winning a playoff event, but at the end of the day then we get here and it would be like, well, the thing we worked all year to have a great finish on TV for is now over.”

Therein lies the problem: the importance of “the product.”

Scheffler gave a long, honest rant about the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup format Tuesday. Some of his answers were so long that Schauffele, next on the media schedule, had to wait his turn in the corner of the media tent for nearly 10 minutes, listening to Scheffler give his take. You can tell Scheffler has thought about this subject extensively. In doing so, the world No. 1 didn’t just identify the problem with the FedEx Cup playoffs. He pointed out exactly what is stalling the PGA Tour as an organization in general.

Scheffler’s recognition of why the Tour Championship doesn’t make sense — and his acceptance of that reason — is telling considering the state of the professional game. In the face of the LIV threat, the PGA Tour has been plagued with conflicting priorities tearing it in different directions. What do the players want? What do the fans want? What do the TV networks want? It doesn’t matter. None of it can happen without the sponsors — they keep the tour running, and they always win.

“Really, it comes down to the guys putting up the money for us to play with,” Scheffler said. “At the end of the day, we have sponsors for our tournaments, and they’re going to want it a certain way, and if FedEx putting up the kind of money they’re putting up at this event, we’re going to have to play it the way they want to play it. It’s just as simple as that.”

So despite sharing his opinion in recent weeks, Scheffler concluded his news conference by saying that going forward, he isn’t interested in sharing his opinion on this subject, at least in the public eye.

“All I can do is show up and compete and give my input where it’s necessary,” Scheffler said. “Sometimes sitting up here giving my input can get blown out of proportion.”

Scheffler knows where he can be valuable, and he knows where he can’t. That’s just where we are right now with the PGA Tour. And that says something.

(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

ParalympicsGB chef de mission Penny Briscoe said it is an “absolute disgrace” that 11-time Paralympic gold medallist Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson was forced to “crawl off” a train.

The former wheelchair racer arrived at London’s King’s Cross on Monday evening on a London North Eastern Railway (LNER) train but there was no one there to assist her. Baroness Grey-Thompson had booked assistance to help her off the 19.15 train from Leeds but missed it and took the 19.45 train instead.

She says she “had a contract” and should have been assisted off the train but after 20 minutes, no one came.

“So I decided that I would crawl off the train,” the 55-year-old told the BBC.

She continued: “Trains were meant to be step free by January 1 2020. It’s exhausting. I was really angry last night. I can just about do it (get off a train) but there are lots of other disabled people who can’t and would have been stuck until who knows when. In this day and age it’s not right.”

Briscoe, speaking from ParalympicsGB house in Paris, said: “It’s the lived experience of disabled people on a daily basis. It just doesn’t get reported.

“You should, as a disabled person, be able to get on and off a train and go about your daily living but the reality is far more difficult than that. We’re trying, as ParalympicsGB, to inspire a better world for disabled people. We want change and our athletes want change. There’s still so much to do, and we can’t let our foot off the pedal in terms of demanding that change and creating a more equitable society.”

An LNER spokesperson told the BBC it was investigating the incident and was “sorry to understand there was an issue”.

It is the first time Paris have hosted a Paralympics and Briscoe has said the City is “on an accessibility journey”.

“We know their bus services are a hundred per cent accessible,” she added. “The fleet of buses they’ve brought in for the athletes have six accessible wheelchair spaces on every bus. We know Paris have become more accessible because of the Games. Their metro system is a work in progress.

“The number of accessible bathrooms in hotels in Paris is still an issue, especially the older hotels. It’s one or two per hotel and that isn’t enough if you’re welcoming disabled athletes or spectators into the environment. It’s an accessibility challenge that is global. We had it in Tokyo.

“Paris’ objective in terms of legacy is to use the Games to create a more accessible society for Parisians and we have to support them on that journey, it doesn’t happen overnight.”

Baroness Grey-Thompson won a total of 16 Paralympic medals across the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m and 4x100m relay between 1988 and 2004. She is ParalympicsGB’s fourth most decorated athlete of all time.

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(Boris Streubel/Getty Images for Laureus)

Follow live coverage of the 2024 U.S. Open

NEW YORK — What motivates Novak Djokovic now that he has nothing left to fight for?

The 24-time Grand Slam champion finally won his coveted Olympic gold medal in Paris this month. In so doing, he essentially completed tennis, sweeping up the only coveted title in the sport that had eluded him. Djokovic has other targets, like the 25th Grand Slam title that would take him clear of Australia’s Margaret Court, but the Olympic gold was the true white whale for a player who has accumulated trophies like interest.

Not so much recently. He arrived in New York without his name already engraved on one of the three majors for the first time in 14 years.

The most interesting part is that he has been here before.

In 2016, in Paris, Djokovic finally won the French Open. In so doing, he completed the career Grand Slam, and became the second male player in the Open Era, after Rod Laver, to hold all four Grand Slam titles at the same time.

It felt like he would carry on dominating tennis forever. Instead, he bombed out of Wimbledon against Sam Querrey, and then didn’t win a major for another two years in a period that took in elbow surgery and some hugely uncharacteristic upsets, the mother of all comedowns.

“I wasn’t mentally in the right place,” he said later.

In 2024, the early signs are that he is working to avoid a repeat. Djokovic was asked about his motivation ahead of the tournament starting, and he spoke of his rivalries with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, his advocacy work with the Professional Tennis Players Association (PTPA) and his belief in his competitiveness.

There is little to be gleaned from a 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 first-round cruise against the overmatched Radu Albot, but Djokovic — and the rest of the tennis world — might learn more from what awaits him Wednesday. He faces compatriot Laslo Djere, in a repeat of their fourth-round meeting in 2023. Djokovic trailed two sets to love, eventually coming through in five on the way to the title.

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Djokovic is in a curious position. He is coming off what he calls the “greatest achievement” of his career, but his season as a whole is more trough than peak. Despite beating Alcaraz to win that Olympic gold, Djokovic has lost to the Spaniard in consecutive Wimbledon finals. Sinner overwhelmed him at the Australian Open, an event where he had previously seemed invincible. The rivalries that motivate him are, as of recently, not going to plan.

Novak Djokovic’s struggles date back to the clay-court swing. (Filippo Monteforte / AFP via Getty Images)

This could help Djokovic. He finally has two younger rivals who are at his level, and he will be desperate to reassert himself at the top of the sport, vanquishing them like he has done so many players in the last 10 years. He may be the U.S. Open champion, but here in New York, it’s reigning French Open and Wimbledon champion Alcaraz who has the biggest target on his back. It’s Sinner, not Djokovic, who is world No. 1.

Djokovic likes nothing more than proving a point, and silencing those who have written him off. This is not like June 2016, when it almost looked too easy for Djokovic to dominate tennis, as he turned the “Big Four” to the “Big One.”

Just over eight years ago, there wasn’t even a suggestion that Djokovic’s motivation would wane. In retrospect, it might seem obvious that achieving the tennis Holy Grail could occasion a lull, but at the time it wasn’t on the forecast.

Looking back at his pre-Wimbledon press conferences, Djokovic wasn’t asked about whether he’d struggle for new targets. Only when he suffered that seismic shock of a defeat to American Sam Querrey did the topic emerge.

Novak Djokovic’s defeat to American Sam Querrey at Wimbledon is one of the biggest shocks in recent tournament history. (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)

“It’s an amazing feeling to be able to hold four Grand Slams at the same time,” Djokovic said that summer. “Coming into Wimbledon, I knew that mentally it’s not going to be easy to kind of re-motivate myself.”

Djokovic has since spoken of suffering an existential crisis in that period.

“I was going through a period where I was really looking for myself off the court,” he later reflected. During the defeat to Querrey, there were a couple of rain delays, and Djokovic recalls asking his team to leave him alone in a room during one of the interruptions.

“I just looked at the wall and I was dull. Literally, no drive inside of me,” he said.

In a 2018 interview, he added that the injuries he suffered in the middle of the previous year happened when he was “experiencing some emotional imbalance.” He parted ways with Boris Becker at the end of 2016, and had broken up his team during the 2017 clay-court season in a bid to recover his drive to win matches. Djokovic even considered retirement, as his motivation completely disappeared.

He has since been able to reframe this difficult period as a valuable learning experience. He even said he was “super glad” to have been through it. If ever there was a time when that experience would come in useful, it would be now.

At 37, and still only a couple of months on from knee surgery, physical rather than mental challenges may present the firmest obstacles to Djokovic’s quest for renewed dominance. “I don’t have any limitations in my mind,” he said at Wimbledon. “I still want to keep going and play as long as I feel like I can play on this high level.”

At the homecoming celebration in Belgrade that followed the Olympics, Djokovic hinted that he had nothing left to win. “I feel fulfilled, complete, let’s celebrate!” he said. In the next breath, he was opening up the possibility of playing into his 40s, and defending his title at the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

There are some factors in his favor. His kids are now at an age where they can watch their father in action, which seems to act as an additional inspiration, Djokovic weeping in their arms in Paris and developing a new and knowing violin celebration for his daughter.

The Olympic gold was an occasion to celebrate for the entire family. (Amin Mohammad Jamali / Getty Images)

Most of all, he has the sport. One of the great things about being a tennis player is that even when you’ve won it all, there are always new challenges to overcome. New shots to develop, new tactics to try.

Against Albot on Monday, Djokovic certainly looked motivated as he performed some of his party tricks in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Breaking serve having been 40-0 down. Hitting the forehand harder than seemingly any point in his career. Sealing the second set with a second-serve ace. Why not? A second-round match against Djere on Wednesday may not be quite the Olympic gold-medal match, but give Djokovic a court, an opponent and a crowd and he’ll still find a point to prove.

(Top photo: Erick W. Rasco / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)