RIO DE JANEIRO -- While winning the gold medal in the Olympic golf tournament last week, Justin Rose also dropped two spots in the PGA Tour's FedEx Cup standings.
It is probably not a big deal to Rose, who will try to make up the ground when the FedEx Cup playoffs begin next week. But it does offer an example of the problem with staging a tournament opposite the Olympics.
And it was something LPGA Tour commissioner Mike Whan was determined to not let happen for the women.
Although Whan acknowledged the circumstances between tours are different, he said he began working on the 2016 schedule with an eye on giving players a break heading into Olympic golf and not staging anything opposite it.
"We didn't know how many of the 60 [players in the Olympic field] would be LPGA members,'' Whan said Wednesday during the opening day of the women's competition. "We figured it would be in the 40 to 45 kind of number. If you think of 45 being here playing for their country, and then we play somewhere else [also], that seemed tough. It seems tough to say you could get passed on the money list or the Race to CME [points list].''
The LPGA Tour has not had an event since July 31, the final round of the Ricoh Women's British Open. Whan admitted he might have had a tournament the following week, but it became a tough sell going up against the first weekend of the Olympic Games and the opening ceremony.
So the women took that week off, last week and now only those in the Olympics are playing this week. Next week the LPGA Tour heads to Canada.
The LPGA Tour typically has fewer tournaments than the PGA Tour, which consists of a jam-packed schedule. The PGA Tour elected not to take time off despite the men's Olympic golf tournament being played last week. That meant that two players who were eligible for the Olympics, Colombia's Camilo Villegas and Zimbabwe's Brendon de Jonge, played the John Deere Classic in Illinois because it was the second-to-last event in the regular season and both needed to earn FedEx points.
"We wanted the focus to be here,'' Whan said.
The PGA Tour came under some criticism for staging a tournament last week and it's not clear what the organization will do in 2020 when golf is back in the Olympics. But Whan said he will strive again to have a clear week during that time.
"For us, it seemed like the right thing to do,'' he said. "Almost all of our players are fighting for different things. It seemed unfair to see them get passed because they are here.''