Hello, My Name Is…
The following article is by Dan Galvin, and can be found in the June 19th edition of ESPN The Magazine.
Have you seen your favorite PGA player lately? Neither have we. Since Lefty slipped on his second green blazer in April, he’s played in three Tour events. Ernie Els? Four. Tiger? Zero. Now more than ever, the Tour’s top players are hitting the majors, cherry-picking their favorites from lesser tourneys and leaving the rest to the rest of the field. That’s bad for golf fans and TV ratings, but with fat appearance fees, huge purses and a 44-week regular-season schedule, what incentive is there for the big guns to play more events? Good question. Here are a few answers.
1. SET AN EVENT MINIMUM Jeff Maggert won the St. Jude Classic with a field devoid of the top seven players in the World Golf Rankings. Don’t know Maggert? How about Arron Oberholser, Rod Pampling, Stephen Ames, Chris Couch or Brett Wetterrich? All 2006 winners, all golfers you probably don’t know much about. When David Toms is the top-ranked player at a tounrey like the St. Jude, it’s a fair bet that many folks at home won’t bother tuning in. Why not mandate that all players enter a minimum number of tourneys each year (with exemptions for injuries) to retain their cards?
2. LIMIT APPEARANCE FEES Tiger made more cash (a reported $3 million) for showing up at the Dubai Desert Classic in February than most players will make all year. The PGA doesn’t allow its tourneys to offer appearance fees, but that hasn’t stopped the European Tour and other nonofficial events from using big checks to lure top players. And there’s very little the PGA can do to stop them. What American officials can do, though, is ban appearance fee junkets during the regular season. After all, 78 players made over $1 million on Tour last year while only 30 of them won tournaments. Of course, the pros will argue that the 10-month-plus season doesn’t leave a lot of time for moonlighting, which brings us to our third helpful suggestion…
3. SHORTEN THE SCHEDULE The 2006 PGA Tour teed off in Hawaii on Jan. 5 and will wrap up in Atlanta on Nov. 5. Add in the “challenge season” that runs through December, and you’ve got golf fatigue; most players are ready to hang it up after the PGA in August. (Vijay aside, the top players enter fewer than half the events on the schedule.) That’s why Tour commissioner Tim Finchem has instituted a Championship Series, to start next season. It will begin with the Mercedes Open, on Jan. 4, and run through the Tour Championship, on Sept. 16, with a $10 million bonus awarded to the regular-season points champion. By defining a shorter regular season- and by requiring and/or incentivizing the biggest stars to actually compete in it- the Tour and its tourney sponsors might not need Michelle Wie to liven things up.