A lot of us can clearly remember a time when sports weren”t about big bucks and a weak economy. It wasn”t about TV timeouts, it wasn”t about free agency and salary caps, and it wasn”t about holdouts and strikes. The greats of the game were tested on the playing fields, not in the drug labs.
Mickey Mantle was always a Yankee and Sandy Koufax was always a Dodger. Television didn”t have the influence that it has today, so when major sports leagues produced their game of the week, they literally meant their one and only game of the week. Professional athletes had out-of-season everyday jobs and that Willie McCovey rookie card you owned was clipped to the spokes of your bicycle.
Professional golf was very different, too. The tour was a haphazard barnstorming show ping-ponging about the country from large cities to minor markets. There were no real international tours of note and their certainly wasn”t a Fed Ex Cup or a Race to Dubai.
At the onset of the television era, golf was a niche sport although its top performers such as Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus earned about as much annually as Willie Mays and Bill Russell. Most professionals had club jobs and although they didn”t have no-cut contracts like the team sports guys, they could continue to successfully compete beyond their 40th birthday.
While there were a handful of major championship performers such as Gary Player, Billy Casper, Lee Trevino, Raymond Floyd and Julius Boros, the golfer easily acknowledged as the best was Jack Nicklaus. Nicklaus won all four majors multiple times. He also won prestigious events such as the Players Championship, Doral, the Western Open, the Colonial, and the World Series of Golf.
Yet looking over Nicklaus” tournament-winning resume of 73 American wins and 14 international victories, it”s obvious that Nicklaus” game, as well as his ability to attract fans, traveled far and wide. He won tour events that remain in existence today, including Westchester, Phoenix, Harbour Town, Byron Nelson, New Orleans, Pebble Beach, Atlanta, New Orleans, Palm Springs, and Memphis. Nicklaus also won tour events at such stops as the Seattle Open, the Portland Open, Kings Island, Whitemarsh, and the Kaiser in Napa.
Nicklaus” chief rival and the poster boy of the PGA Tour at that time was Arnold Palmer. Palmer won many of the same major titles and high-profile events. Yet among his 62 wins in America were minor market victories such as the Rubber City Open, the Azalea Open, the Oklahoma City Open, the Thunderbird Invitational, and the Mobile Seratoma Open.
In the last 1950s, Palmer played in 30-plus tournaments annually. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Palmer always played in 20 events and more often than not he”d play 25 tourneys in a year. Arnie had a personal scheduling philosophy that he would make sure to play at a tournament site at least every other year.
Because Palmer was a world-renown figure, he just didn”t limit his competitive golf to the United States. He won tournaments in Panama, South Africa, England, Australia, France and Spain. Nicklaus was a lot more careful with his schedule, always taking off the week before a grand slam event. Yet he played 24-plus times in the early 1960s and 20-plus tourneys after that, all the while watching his large and active family play school-level sports and while also winning 14 times internationally.
Fast forward to 2009. Tournament purses average more than $6 million and the winner”s share is consistently more than $1 million. Winning a major or a prestigious event will enhance your bank account even more. Last Sunday, Geoff Ogilvy won the Match Play and was rewarded with a first-place check of $1.4 million. Sure, it”s not Alex Rodriguez money, but it certainly gives the professional golfer a lot more freedom to pick and choose his schedule for maximum impact.
Yet if the game”s best are going to Qatar every January to play for big money as well as receive a six- or even seven-figure appearance fee, a practice that is allowed everywhere except on the American PGA Tour, then that also means those same professionals are turning their back on the Bob Hope and its 50-year history. The Bob Hope was the only show on tour when Jack and Arnie ruled the links. Now it”s an afterthought and can barely get a top-20 player to tee it up and partake in its hefty $5 million purse.
When Tiger Woods came out on tour in September of 1996 following his third consecutive triumph in the United States Amateur, he received sponsor exemptions to Milwaukee, the BC Open, the Quad Cities, the Texas Open, Las Vegas, the Canadian Open, and Walt Disney. His wins at Vegas and Disney got him into the season-ending Tour Championship. Yet Tiger has never been back to Milwaukee, the Quad Cities and Texas, and the BC Open no longer exists.
When all is said and done, there are three tiers of tournaments for golf”s elite. There are the top tournaments such as the majors, the World Golf events, the Fed Ex Cup tourneys, and a few others such as the Memorial. The second tier of tournaments includes the international events such as Dubai and the Johnnie Walker. These events pay appearance money to attract top players. The third tier includes the rest, be it historical tourneys of note such as Pebble Beach, the Canadian Open and the Colonial, or relative newcomers such as Harbour Town and the Honda Classic.
How much longer can these third-tier events survive with inferior fields? How much longer will AT&T want to sponsor an event at Pebble Beach? Will there come a time when the PGA Tour consists of just 20 big-time events? Where”s Arnold Palmer when your tournament in Milwaukee or Orlando really needs him?
