PGA Tour might shorten its season
Updated: March 9, 2005, 4:15 PM ET
By John Hawkins | Golf World
If lousy weather didn't follow the PGA Tour from its West Coast swing to south Florida, the ramifications of all those rain delays did. Amid numerous complaints over the sloppy conditions in Los Angeles and San Diego, some players began wondering why the tour doesn't begin its mainland schedule in the self-proclaimed Sunshine State, then head to California in March, when the climate is warmer and drier.
AP"How can we compete against football? It's not going to happen," Woods said recently.
With a nod to the difficulties of playing golf underwater, we shouldn't hold our breath. The tour, which is based in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., near Jacksonville, knows the area isn't immune to downpours and 42-degree mornings in February. Record rainfall on the West Coast precipitated the cry for change, but this year's 36-hole Nissan Open was an obvious anomaly – just seven of the more than 200 tour events played in southern California since 1926 have been shortened because of weather.
The umbrellas were given a break last week at Doral, but the high-octane field and low humidity helped reprise an old scheduling bugaboo: the notion that the season should be reduced from its current size of 10-plus months and 48 official events.
"It would be more exciting for the fans, sponsors, TV, everybody, if we [top players] did play more often together," Tiger Woods said several days before notching his 42nd tour victory in dramatic fashion over Phil Mickelson. "The only way we can do that is if we shorten the season, which is something I've really been trying to get into [commissioner Tim] Finchem's ear about."
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Making more out of less?
Talk of a reduced PGA Tour schedule and reports the current $1 billion TV deal lost money for the networks likely means the tour will have to enter the television negotiations this year with an open mind for non-traditional options. Among the possible avenues to pursue are broader use of cable outlets for the fall events crushed in the ratings by college and pro football.
One source familiar with tour thinking says Comcast, the corporate parent of The Golf Channel, "is willing to break the bank" to get weekend coverage for the all-golf cable network. A second source says NBC could propose weekend coverage on the USA Network, which it recently purchased. ABC and sister-network ESPN have much of the fall schedule this year. The tour also could bring Fox into the negotiations. It has no PGA Tour events.
As for which tournaments are candidates for elimination, one possible place to look is the five weeks with dual events. The Chrysler Classic of Tucson (opposite the WGC-Accenture Match Play), B.C. Open (British Open), Reno-Tahoe Open (WGC-NEC Invitational), Valero Texas Open (Ryder Cup/Presidents Cup) and Southern Farm Bureau Classic (WGC-American Express Championship) fit that description. According to one source close to the situation, the two Chrysler events in the fall (Greensboro and Tampa) could be vulnerable, as could the Funai Classic at the Walt Disney World Resort, especially if Disney-owned ABC and ESPN reduce fall PGA Tour coverage.
Eleven events, meanwhile, have renewed title sponsorship past the 2006 expiration of the current television deal. Assuming the four major championships, the Players Championship, the Tour Championship and the three World Golf Championship events are solid (a safe assumption), that locks 20 weeks into the tour's schedule. Hurt by a reduction in events would be nonexempt players who need the lesser events to help them make the top 125 on the money list and earn their PGA Tour cards.
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Added Nick Price, who spent the early 1990s ranked atop or near the top of the World Ranking despite annually skipping the West Coast swing: "In an ideal world, it would be great if we had 25 tournaments and everybody played. Once football season starts, peripheral interest in golf dies. We all know there are weak spots [on the schedule]. The only way to increase revenue is to get rid of those weak spots."
Count Mickelson among the name-brand stars who favor schedule shrinkage, but the matter is far more complex than it might appear. Most significantly, there is little evidence to suggest the game's top performers would play "more often" with fewer events. It is, however, an intriguing concept. Might the tour be strengthening its product by downsizing, avoiding the dilution that comes from relatively meaningless events in September and October? And how likely is it to actually happen?
That the game's biggest names are addressing the topic makes it buzzworthy, if not front-page news or fresh material. This isn't the first time the issue has surfaced, nor is it likely to be the last. "I know we've heard this kind of conversation in the past from time to time," said Phil Cannon, who runs the FedEx St. Jude Classic. As the tour heads into the final 18 months of its television contract, however, the pros and cons are taking on greater relevance, imparting more pressure on the powers in Ponte Vedra Beach.
Ratings on all three networks have flattened, in some cases fallen, since Woods' emergence/dominance caused them to spike in the late '90s. With prize money currently at an all-time high, this creates a financial imbalance for ABC, CBS and NBC, which found themselves subservient to the tour's bargaining power in negotiations during the last two TV contracts (1997 and 2001).
A TV executive confirms that for the first time, the networks will lose money televising pro golf over the course of the four-year contract that earned the PGA Tour nearly $1 billion. These losses could result in smaller purses if the schedule maintains its current size. "It's difficult [to rationalize investing in] a sport that gets ratings in the high 2s and low 3s," the executive said. "You've got to ask yourself, 'Why are we doing this if we're not making money?' No matter how you spin it, [TV's financial commitment] is going to go down."
Thus, Finchem is likely to have less leverage at the bargaining table this time around. In the spring of 1997, he began negotiating the contract that ran from 1999 to 2002, capitalizing on the massive positive energy following Woods' 12-stroke win at the '97 Masters – and its 14.1 Nielsen rating. Four years later, Finchem's timing in regard to the current deal (2003-06) was just as good – an agreement was reached two months after the "Tiger Slam" and two months before Sept. 11, 2001, a tragedy that knocked the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
As the second half of that contract's lifespan unfolds, sources also see a discrepancy between prize money and revenue, most of which comes from the tour's TV relationships. "The tour did this to itself," said one tournament director. "It's hard for anyone to complain when the tour doubles its purses [from 1999 to 2005], but it really was an instance of too much, too soon."
By cutting six to eight tournaments from the schedule, there is little question the tour would improve its product. Consider the 2003 season, when none of the nine post-Labor Day events registered higher than a 2.3 Sunday rating. Compared to the viewer numbers compiled the first four months of '03 – no network tournament was lower than a 2.4 and the 14-week average was 3.5 – the argument for shrinkage seems bulletproof.
When a star-deprived Shell Houston Open draws 500,000 more viewers in late April than the season-ending Tour Championship, length of season is definitely an issue. "I've often thought the tour schedule is a little long and clunky once you get past Labor Day," said CBS golf anchor Jim Nantz. "The [golf] schedule collides with the NFL, and golf can't win. It's a shame the Tour Championship, which has a magnificent field and obviously is important to the tour, goes largely unnoticed. It's page-seven material."
Nantz might be slightly biased – he handles NFL studio duties for CBS in the fall while ABC/ESPN televises the final two months of the tour season – but there is no arguing the facts, or his logic. What's ironic is Finchem, who proclaimed several years ago that pro golf, then trending upward in viewer popularity, would eventually match pro football in terms of mainstream-sports presence, finds himself fighting a losing battle against the NFL, the ratings king and true bane of golf's late-season existence. "How can we compete against football?" Woods wondered at Doral. "It's not going to happen."
Some will tell you the same about a 40-event schedule. Beyond the fiscal implications, the tour is very proud of its charity commitments and civic impact in smaller markets such as Greensboro, N.C., San Antonio and western Pennsylvania. Those tournaments may not make money for the networks, but they're important to the people who attend them and play in them. "Is it necessary to have the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro or Chrysler Championship [in Tampa] if you know Tiger and Ernie aren't going to show up, but $1 million still goes to charity?" saidBrad Faxon. "How can you say that's bad?"
It all comes down to a question of what's best for everybody. The tour's inherent infrastructure requires it to protect and serve all levels of competitors – from Woods down to the guy 125th on the money list. In this case, what's good for Tiger isn't necessarily good for the entire animal kingdom. "I think it's great when we go into towns and show the talent that's out here on the tour," said non-winner Franklin Langham. "I'm sure [reducing the schedule] would help the guys in the upper echelon because they are still going to play their 18 to 23 events. The current schedule gives guys in the middle- to lower-tiers more playing opportunities. That's the good thing about it."
Behind closed doors, Woods' feelings may matter more than Langham's, but this is a matter beyond bureaucratic priorities: competitive integrity vs. economics, corporate relationships vs. changing reality, parochial presence vs. the national spotlight, romantic ideals vs. old-fashioned common sense. It's all part of running a business that isn't as white hot as it used to be. Ed Moorhouse, an executive VP and co-chief operating officer for the tour, said last week negotiations on the 2007 TV contract likely would start by year's end. Loosely translated, the tour is in no hurry to initiate talks, not without a golden carrot to dangle in front of the networks.
Asked about the possibility of a shorter season, Moorhouse issued essentially a speculative non-denial: "The number of [tournaments] is something to take into consideration. Ultimately, we'd come up with a schedule model [the tour recently said there are five such templates], and it would be up to the policy board to approve it. Before recommending something, we'd do our due diligence. We'd talk to a lot of players at a lot of different levels: sponsors, the networks, the venues.
"There are a lot of variables to consider," Moorhouse added. "In talking with all those constituencies, we'd come up with a plan."
Hopefully, such a diagram would lead to more Sundays like the one last week at Doral, when two of the game's best and most popular players duked it out over three hours of edge-of-your-seat television. When the answer is Woods vs. Mickelson, the questions don't seem nearly as difficult.
Additional reporting by Ron Sirak, Tim Rosaforte and Ryan Herrington
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