The next golf event staged by Buick is set to begin next month near company headquarters in Michigan, a city called Grand Blanc.
Fitting, because as it relates to the future of the company’s two tournaments, PGA Tour officials are drawing a not-so-grand blank.
As expected, General Motors, the parent company of Buick, on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection and announced it will take at least three months to sort through the red ink and decide how to best streamline the company and turn a future profit.
Where golf fits in that future scenario, if it has a place at the corporate table at all, appears to be anybody’s guess.
Whether Buick will honor the final year remaining on its contract in La Jolla, Calif., and Grand Blanc, which both have deals through the 2010 stagings, is increasingly hazy. Combined, Buick spends around $10 million to conduct the two tour stops, which have been around for decades.
If the GM bankruptcy filing was supposed to calm the waters, it had the opposite effect at tour headquarters, where it seems to have fostered more uncertainty, if anything.
“We look forward continuing [sic] our discussions with Buick about the future,” the tour said in a three-paragraph statement that created as many questions as it answered.
PGA Tour spokesman Ty Votaw said the organization would have no further comment on the GM situation -- likely because nobody at the tour has a clue about what will happen next, especially since the federal government has assumed partial ownership.
Larry Peck, Buick golf’s marketing chief and the promotions manager for Buick, Pontiac and GM -- three automobile lines that face extinction as GM shutters 12 plants -- did not return a phone call. A tour official said Buick representatives have been prohibited from discussing the status of the tournaments until the dust settles.
The Buick Open in Grand Blanc last year celebrated its 50th anniversary and is expected to be staged as planned beginning July 30, according to the SportsBusiness Journal. As it did with the 2009 Buick Invitational staged in February outside San Diego, the automaker is expected to eliminate all discretionary spending on the pro-am and corporate entertainment in Grand Blanc.
In a discussion last fall about another tour sponsor that was facing a financial meltdown, Votaw indicated that in the case of a bankruptcy filing, the tour would “stand in line” with other creditors to seek its payoff once the debts percentages were settled by an bankruptcy arbitrator. For the tour, waiting presents an awkward option, since finding replacement sponsors is tough enough already given the economic climate. A tight timeline makes replacing Buick that much more difficult if the 2010 events fold.
Given the chaos in the economy and the tour’s extensive contractual ties with the automotive, banking and financial sectors as sponsors, the ups and downs on the sponsorship front this year have been fast and furious. Every week seems to bring some sort of development.
Can't tell the players without a scorecard? You can't decipher the tour schedule without an eraser.
• Five weeks ago, the parent firm that owns Wachovia Bank removed the latter's name from the event it sponsored in Charlotte and staged the tournament under the generic title, Quail Hollow Championship.
• Last week’s sponsor at Colonial, the Crowne Plaza hotel chain, announced earlier this year that it would not renew its contract.
• This week’s presenting sponsor at the Memorial Tournament, Morgan Stanley, has decided to remove its name from the marketing of the tournament and to minimize its presence.
• Next week’s event in Memphis was to be sponsored by Stanford Financial, which has had its assets frozen by federal entities as part of a multibillion-dollar fraud probe. It will proceed with no title sponsor as the St. Jude Classic, its purse propped up by PGA Tour dollars.
Buick, signed as the official car of the tour through 2010, stopped making vehicles available to players and officials as courtesy cars this year and mutually agreed to end a multimillion-dollar endorsement deal with Tiger Woods a year early.
