The major league baseball season came to its 162-game regular-season conclusion three weeks ago. A total of six divisional champions and two wild-card teams worked their way through an elimination tournament, and by this weekend that field will be down to the final teams, the Colorado Rockies and either the Cleveland Indians or Boston Red Sox meeting in the World Series beginning on Wednesday. It makes perfect sense, it”s always been done that way (since expansion), and when all is said and done, baseball will have its true champion for 2007.
Now fast forward to November of this year. Can you imagine that after the completion of the World Series, all the also-rans will resume playing games? The White Sox will play the Royals, the Marlins will take on the Cardinals, and on and on. Seems pretty absurd.
Last month, Tiger Woods won the Tour Championship to put an exclamation mark upon another fine season. He also took home the inaugural title as the Fed Ex Cup champion. He received the two trophies, a boatload of money, and a $10 million retirement annuity on Sunday, Sept. 16, in Atlanta.
So while the race for the Fed Ex Cup is over and the top 30 golfers have earned the big bucks that go with playing in the Tour Championship, the show that is the PGA Tour continues to go on and on and on. The week after the Tour Championship, Steve Flesch won in upstate New York. The following week, the Presidents Cup was played in Montreal. The American team handily defeated the International team. Simultaneously, the rest of the tour was competing in Mississippi with Chad Campbell taking home the first-place prize at the Viking Classic.
As the calendar turned to October, the PGA Tour kept cranking out post-Tour Championship events. Justin Leonard won the Texas Open and rookie George McNeill broke through with a big win in Las Vegas last week. This week the circuit visits Scottsdale. Then it”s off to Florida for two weeks. The tour concludes Nov. 4 at Disney World in Orlando.
Purses for these tourneys run from $3.5 million to $5 million, and the money is all official. It”s a difficult system to imagine. This so-called Fall Finish will impact such things as the exempt status for next year as well as free passes into the Masters and the United States Open. As was stated earlier, it”s like playing major league baseball after the World Series, like playing pro football games after the Super Bowl.
Yet will all the jabs thrown at the PGA Tour for its 2007 calendar, the Fed Ex Cup and the Fall Finish, one most important point sticks out in a most glaring way. The head honchos at PGA Tour headquarters in Jacksonville have great business acumen. Sure, Steve Stricker”s win in the Fed Ex Cup tourney at Westchester attracted fewer television viewers than the Little League World Series. Nonetheless, the PGA Tour made money for its television benefactors in 2007 because of the increased ratings the game received.
The PGA Championship, the fourth and final major, is historically contested in mid-August. Usually that tourney signified the “end” of the professional golf season, even through it rambled forward for 10 more weeks. Phil Mickelson put his clubs away for the year after the PGA, Tiger Woods played sparingly, and last year both of them blew off the Tour Championship in late October. The competitive season for the world”s very best golfers was too long, and there was general public disinterest in professional golf once college football and the NFL kicked off. What happened this time around was that golf maintained our interest through September.
The television ratings for the Tour Championship, the final leg of the Fed Ex Cup race, more than doubled from 2006. Tiger and Phil fighting it out at the Deutsche Bank in Boston on Labor Day Monday drew more interested viewers. Overall, tour ratings were up approximately 15 percent from the previous year. No, these are not football-type numbers, but to a sport that attracts high-end advertisers such as BMW, AT&T, American Express and Barclays, an increase in the Arbitron numbers results in greater advertising revenues. In other words, the Fed Ex Cup paid off.
The Fall Finish is the method in which the tour is looking out for its rank and file, the guys who aren”t in the top 30. A 34-week schedule that concludes in mid-September is just what Tiger, Phil, Ernie, Vijay and the other top guns wanted. Going seven more weeks is a big-time perk for struggling name players such as Justin Leonard and Chad Campbell. With no Tiger sightings on the leader board, even newcomers such as George McNeill can profit from an extended tour season.
True, these events aren”t the equal of the Masters or the U.S. Open, but for communities such as Las Vegas and Scottsdale and Orlando, having the tour come to town and getting to see John Daly and the rest makes for a fun week for the locals and their benefiting charities.
The college and NFL football seasons are in full swing. It”s a short matter of time before the NBA gets going. The World Series starts next week. Meanwhile, somewhere out there, golfers of note are teeing it up for money and for pride. However, there are not a lot of people out there paying attention to the golf. After all, didn”t it all end a long time ago when Tiger won all those trophies.
on the same day?
