Season in review, Part II: Hitting three off the tee
Part I
Funny thing about scorecards.
The pencil lead is invariably black, the paper is typically white, but the rest of the sport often comes in various shades of gray.
|
|
| Ernie Els won't be in the 2008-opening tournament for '07 winners, because he wasn't one. (Getty Images) |
Same with the move of the Players Championship to May, the overall performance of the Golf Channel and the emergence of Tiger Woods as the overall FedEx Cup champion.
Seemingly, it was all good.
Then again, anytime you are dealing with 200 individualistic players and 40-plus events staged at a variety of courses and cities, there are bound to be a few dissenting opinions and caustic notes left scribbled in the scorecard margins.
Last week, we detailed what went right in 2007, and there was plenty to venerate. This time around, we ventilate what went left -- or in some instances, sailed well out of bounds.
Rich man, poor man
OK, so the FedEx Cup series was the bomb, as the kids used to say. But that means shrapnel had to have fallen elsewhere, right?
Given the timbre of the times, when the tour launches another big-money event, another tournament often suffers. Witness the exit last year of The International, once a popular invitational stop that drew the top players in the sport. When event officials accepted that Woods had removed it from his annual schedule, they elected to fold the whole program, which underscores the central point. With the advent of the WGC and FedEx Cup over the past decade, the invitationals and other elite events have frequently been neutered of some firepower.
Colonial, long associated with Ben Hogan, has been losing top players for years. At some point, it's inevitable that the invitationals staged by Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus will, too. There are so many anointed big events, the top guns won't -- notice we didn't say "can't" -- play in 'em all. Guys like Woods and Phil Mickelson are going to play in their standard 16-20 events or thereabouts annually. With the majors, Players Championship, the three WGC events and the FedEx four, that's a dozen right there.
When International founder Jack Vickers pulled the plug, he summarized the stratification very succinctly: "We never had any trouble getting sponsors, and in fact, had them lined up at the front door for a number of years. But all of the sudden here, we're into an era that the marketplace out there is not the same, and I think it's been influenced by some phenomena in that we have one outstanding, unbelievable player in the form of Tiger Woods today. When he's playing, the ratings are great, and when he isn't playing, the ratings aren't so hot."
A few weeks later, he was proved dead right when AT&T happily agreed to serve as a sponsor of an event in Washington, D.C., that fast replaced the International on the schedule -- with Woods set to play as its host. For middle-tier tournaments faced with the prospect of losing even more stars, the advent of the FedEx four was a case of subtraction by addition.
