LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Joe Durant, under whose watch much of the most tumultuous scheduling revisions in PGA Tour history have taken place, isn't one to argue the point that change has come at a price.
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| Disney, where Joe Durant won last year, might not be as light-hearted in the critical final spot on the schedule. (Getty Images) |
A member of the tour's influential Policy Board, Durant is also the defending champion of the event at Walt Disney World, now entering its 36th year. This year, Disney stands as the last of the seven Fall Series events.
Or the seven dwarfs, as the case may be.
"My opinion is that we have an obligation to make these tournaments successful, too," Durant said this week at Disney media day.
If success with regard to the inaugural FedEx Cup season was measured with a yardstick, the Fall Series seven will be measured with a ruler. By increments both small and large, the marginalization of the fall tournaments has been inarguable.
One golf publication has taken to characterizing the fall events as Nationwide-plus events, a semi-sarcastic nod toward the tour's developmental Triple-A circuit. In reality, it's not necessarily an unfair assessment, given the realities of the new tour season as it shaped up in 2007 and beyond.
By establishing the big-money FedEx Cup as the putative end of the season for top players in mid-September, the tour has left those events on the back end fighting for television table scraps and sponsors willing to accept that Tiger Woods will never stand on their first tee, or that that mainstream networks won't be around to broadcast their competition.
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The Fall Series folks were the fall guys for the FedEx Cup.
The remaining events in locales like Las Vegas, Scottsdale, San Antonio and Orlando will be punctuated by smaller purses, watered-down fields and broadcast exclusively on the Golf Channel, whose availability in many American households remains limited.
The Fall Series started two weeks ago, after the FedEx Cup ended in Atlanta. While many of the top players in the game teed it up last weekend at the Presidents Cup in Montreal, that event marked the last time most stars will appear in an official U.S. event until January.
An informal survey at the Presidents Cup indicated few of the 24 on the two teams will be playing in the U.S. borders anytime soon. Even those with home bases near Disney in Orlando -- players like Stuart Appleby and Trevor Immelman -- were headed back to their native Australia and South Africa for a long winter's nap.
When the FedEx Cup was first announced two years ago, it was dishonestly positioned as a "season-ending series" designed to put vitality and finality into a year that dragged on far too long. Fair enough, but for the tournaments on the back end of the schedule, it was cruel slap in the face. By its action, the tour had certified the tournaments as a place for the second- and third-tier players to cement their status on the money list, but the junior-varsity stigma was inescapable.
