For LPGA Tour, last to first might not be such a great idea

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Looking ahead, we are struggling with what to call it, frankly.

The beginning of the end? The end at the beginning?

Commissioner Carolyn Bivens says she likes the idea of ending a season with one big event and starting the next with another. (Getty Images)

Thursday marked the opening round of the LPGA's loopy finale, the ADT Championship, the wildest season-ending points concoction in professional sports, where the format is as unusual as the results are unpredictable.

While the swan song for tour star Annika Sorenstam has rightly been the main storyline, this week also marks the sendoff of the tour's sendoff event, if you will, a curious development that has raised both eyebrows and questions among the players.

With ADT set to bail as the sponsor, the event won't be staged next year and instead will move into the leadoff calendar position in 2010. The site remains unknown because the incoming sponsor will presumably dictate the host market. Thus, this week likely represents the last laps around the visually spectacular Trump International Golf Club, which has hosted the past eight incarnations and spoiled players like no other tour event.

That's plenty of tumult for a successful event that seemingly didn't need much tweaking. But the date flip is the biggest change of all, the LPGA equivalent of the Spanish exclamation point, which as linguists and most Miami residents know, means sentences begin with an upside-down exclamation point. That's what the flip-flopped tournament has become, really, which is why the relocation is such a curious move.

A new full-field event in Houston with a $2 million purse, the Stanford Financial Tour Championship, will serve as the schedule's back-end anchor in 2009. The LPGA is hoping it creates a bookend double whammy.

"This event (Houston) and reprising the top money winners from the previous year is a wonderful way to start off the season and to pull our fans back in and reintroduce the top players from the previous year," LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens said.

Reintroductions will be necessary. Give or take a few days, the event formerly known as the ADT (see, without a title, it's hard to describe) will be staged eight weeks after the '09 finale.

"What we have wanted is a season-opening event and a season-ending event," Bivens said.

As she spoke with the media this week during her state-of-the-tour address, a huge banner hung behind her reading "LPGA Playoffs." I don't know what you call an event staged at the beginning of a season, for which the eligible players spent the previous year earning points, but a playoff it isn't. More like a kickoff.

Ask around and the general consensus is that the LPGA's season-ending format of the moment -- 32 players fighting to be one of the eight to advance to Sunday's final round, then sprinting to the wire for the largest winner's prize in the women's game -- is the most interesting of the three points bonus races versions in the professional game.