If Las Vegas is the city that never sleeps, where money talks and there must always be some sizzle in the steak, then the PGA Tour picked the perfect venue to begin unveiling rough drafts for the new FedEx Cup points system.
Next week at the tour stop in Sin City, while the fans are trying to catch a glimpse of recording star and tournament host Justin Timberlake, the tour's Player Advisory Council is scheduled to press the flesh with a considerably less-sexy figure, at least by pop-culture standards.
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| Vijay Singh only needed to limp across the finish line this year to win the Cup. (AP) |
Finchem will be laying down a series of tunes for the tour's PAC board on Tuesday as it relates to possible fixes for the 2009 FedEx points structure, hoping to atone for two years that bombed worse than the time Siegfried & Roy's trained tiger decided to sink his teeth into one of his famous trainers.
As with wild animals, the success of the proposed FedEx fixes under consideration are hard to predict.
"I don't think there's anything that doesn't have at least a small collection of downsides," PGA Tour official Steve Dennis said Wednesday.
That beats getting knocked on their collective backside, as has been the case for two years in a row as the FedEx series rolled into the Tour Championship in Atlanta for an underwhelming final act. Fans wanted Copperfield and got a clown's squirting lapel flower instead.
But give Finchem credit. He has freely acknowledged the flaws in the design and intends to break out the socket wrench, if not a crowbar, sledgehammer or backhoe, to remedy it. At tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., a series of offbeat proposals are being vetted, and it's possible that a new system could be ratified by the final Policy Board meeting of the year on Nov. 10, the day after the season-ending event at Disney World. Otherwise, the hand-wringing could stretch into the next meeting in February.
Last year, the tour took four months to kick around revisions, discuss the permutations with top players like Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh, and then implemented the changes somewhat quietly in early March. This time, Dennis said there's a decent chance the chainsaw will get fired up far sooner.
"I can tell you there is interest in getting this done by November," he said, "But I think it's going to be difficult."
It won't be for lack of good intentions. But consider this scenario -- while Finchem is a tremendous consensus builder who could sell hairbrushes to Joe Biden, he'll be pitching a variety of far-flung plans to a PAC panel composed of 16 tour players and four player directors.
Even by Vegas standards, where chaos is a nightly and desired occurrence, that sounds like a potentially frenetic panel discussion, eh? Let's see, that's 20 golfers arguing over a half-dozen completely different points plans, which sounds like an exchange of flying elbows and opinions not seen since the tour last served free sushi at the media buffet table.
There are a handful of ideas being bandied about in the hallways of tour HQ at the moment, where vice president Tom Wade and his marketing crew are running numbers and projections for how a variety of fixes might play out next year.
