By: Pro From Dover

Dry mouthed, hand twitching, sphincter tightening, palm sweating, brain lock inducing terror is just around the corner. Nope, it’s not the Salem Halloween fright extravaganza. It’s PGA Tour Qualifying Tournaments.

Q School!

Oh, the horror! Hide the women and children! Torture may violate the Geneva Conventions but it’s alive and well in professional golf.

Contrary to popular wisdom, there are now four stages. The PGA Tour held what is called ”pre qualifying” tournaments in September at several locations. Just over two hundred players emerged from that hoard and are entered in the first of the three “real” stages beginning next week at eleven courses across the country.

One of the grand illusions of the Q School death march is that it’s a series of elimination tournaments. It is and it isn’t. Yes, in each specific event there will be a certain number of players who survive and move on to the next event. That’s fine. But then the survivors are joined by a whole new set of players who were exempted from having to play in the preceding tournament for one reason or another.

Here are some of the numbers from the 2008 qualifying tournaments:

• 951 entered the first stage and 315 moved to the next.
• Those 315 were joined by an additional 185 players of which 125 advanced to the final stage.
• Those were joined by 38 more and then the top 25 and ties received their Tour card for 2009.

Of course, making it even more difficult for budding youngsters is the players who were exempted into a particular stage are increasingly better and more experienced. They are high money earners from the Nationwide Tour, players from Europe and Asia, PGA Tour players who didn’t break into the 125 money list, players who made a certain number of cuts. It gets tougher and tougher until the final 108 holes.

This year the final six rounds will be played on two courses at Bear Lakes Golf Club in Florida in early December. The Golf Network will be televising it and it gets pretty compelling as the players approach the final 18.

As noted, the top 25 and ties are given their Tour cards for the next year which is dandy except it doesn’t guarantee that they will get into every event because of the numerical limits on tournament entries. Players are arranged in a hierarchy from #1 (Tiger) on down. It is not unusual for a low qualifying player to get into only a dozen or so events in a season. In round numbers there could be almost 200 with tour privileges.

• The top 125 money earners from the year before.
• The top 25 plus ties from Q school.
• The top 25 money earners from the Nationwide Tour the prior year.
• Money earners number 126 to 150 from the PGA Tour the prior year.
• Special exemptions from having won a PGA Tour event in the preceding two years.
• Major winners for a certain number of years.

Inasmuch as most tournaments have a field of 144, that tournament directors usually have four sponsor’s picks and there is occasionally a local qualifier event for a couple of slots, the odds of a low ranking player getting into certain fields are not great. 

During the season, the deck is reshuffled a couple of times based upon performance moving people up and down. If you are low on the list, getting in an event is a problem and then the pressure is to not only make the cuts but earn enough money to get into the top 125 by year end so one doesn’t have to go through it all again.

There is some solace in the final stage. The next fifty players after those who receive tour privileges are given open access to the Nationwide Tour which is no longer small potatoes. The top earner this year, with two events remaining, has more than $500,000 in prize money and many players make something north of $100,000. Granted, there are weekly expenses for hotel, meals, entry fees, caddies and transportation but at least break even is within grasp.

But for the rest who put up their $5000 entry fee plus, plus…it’s back to the practice range. Yeeesh! It makes the haunted house look inviting.

By: Pro From Dover

It may be a unique American gene in our national DNA. When we find something appealing, we replicate, duplicate, masticate and imitate it until the specialness is gone.

It wasn’t good enough that “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” got great ratings. Nope, the network decided to put it on three nights a week.  And “Deal or no Deal” is another.

How about reality TV? “American Idol” begets “America’s Got Talent” begets “Dancing with the Stars” begets “So You Think You Can Dance?” and on and on. We can only imagine the show concepts that have been presented and mercifully euthanized in a producer’s office. As P.T. Barnum allegedly said, “Give ‘em what they want.”

So, here’s the Presidents Cup this week, spawn of the Ryder Cup. It’s the eighth iteration of this team competition being played on a wonderful public course in San Francisco, Harding Park Golf Club. It’s contested in alternate years as the counterpoint to the Ryder Cup.

The US captain is Fred Couples, Mr. Smooth. The International captain is Greg Norman, Mr. Alimony. Actually come to think if it, Couples and Norman may have more divorces between them than majors. Maybe not. 

We love the Ryder Cup. Granted, the original version with the US against Great Britain evolved into a boring, predictable biennial US rout. But Jack Nicklaus had the foresight and the influence to introduce the modification which brought the rest of Europe into the mix. That was a stroke of genius and has resulted in wonderful, enthralling, gut-wrenching, competitive contests.

So now we have the Presidents Cup which pits US players against stars from the rest of the world. The opposition this year has players from South Africa, Australia, South Korea, Columbia and elsewhere. It’s a potpourri of professionals. And Tiger is playing for us.

Yet, for some reason, in this corner it’s just not particularly exciting because it’s a knock-off of the real deal.

What’s particularly interesting is having Greg Norman as the captain. Several years ago Norman came up with the idea of a world tour of tournaments and he was lobbying players to more or less break away from the PGA Tour. The Tour folks aren’t too stupid and there are those who say they ripped off Norman’s idea and created the World Golf Championships we now see integrated into the regular Tour season as well as the Presidents Cup.

The other interesting side bar relates to the extremely chilly relationship between the PGA and the PGA Tour. We have alluded to this in the past and will dig into it sometime in the future. But the wrinkle here is that the PGA owns and operates the Ryder Cup and the PGA Tour was more than a little bit jealous of not just the competitive success but the enormous amount of money generated by the event.

Thus we have the Presidents Cup, owned and operated by the PGA Tour. What a coincidence.

So we end up with the Ryder Cup and what a friend refers to as Ryder Cup Lite. We like that characterization. The Presidents Cup is a pale imitation of the real deal.

We’ll watch. Two years ago in Montreal Woody Austin played the clown and it made for entertaining television. It’s also always fun witnessing the best gag over three foot putts. Perhaps it’s the same attitude we have toward watching car races as we await the next crash. It’s not that we particularly care about the specific event but we are drawn by the prospect of catastrophe.

By: Pro From Dover

The Fed Ex Cup is not working!

Here are a few of the problems:

• No one, including the players involved, completely understands it.
• It gives the appearance of a contrived event.
• Many fans see it as just another very fat payday for millionaires.
• Did we mention no one understands it?
• The prestige associated with the majors just doesn’t transfer.

We applaud the PGA Tour for making an effort to overcome their late season doldrums. It has been a creative attempt to maintain interest while folks are busy getting ready for the real New Year’s Day: Labor Day.

The Tour understands that with football starting, baseball races getting interesting, kids returning to school and parents becoming taxi services they need something extraordinary to maintain interest.

The Tour has been receptive to constructive criticism and they have tried mightily to produce a series that is riveting. It just hasn’t happened and we’re not sure it can be fixed.

But we’ve come up with a couple of great ideas as alternatives.

The first option is take the winners of the four majors and have them play a 36 hole tournament. Offer them a pot full of money to play at a beautiful locale on a December weekend and the crowds and the TV ratings will go through the roof.  What’s that? It’s been done?

Yes, it’s been done since 1979 and this year it will be staged in Bermuda with Angel Carbrera, Lucas Glover, Stewart Cink and Y.E. Yang playing for a jaw dropping first prize of, hold your breath now, $600,000. Granted, the worst of the four will get $200,000 just for showing up but somehow, we just can’t imagine Tiger dragging himself off his yacht, firing up the G 5 and heading to Bermuda for a shot at that money.

In the 1960’s International Management Group, the mother of all sports representative agencies,  staged a TV series called “Big Three Golf” which had Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player going against one another in match play. Each match was filmed and they were televised over several weeks. It was a similar idea to the Grand Slam but it resides in the bowels of some film library now.

In 1983 IMG came up with another interesting idea: The Skins Game. Arnold, Jack, Gary and Tom Watson played hit and giggle over two days for a bunch of money and it was a ratings success for a couple of years but then it entered a slump of tedium and mediocre players and it sleeps with the fishes.

Ah, but we have another sure winner idea. Stage a 72-hole event with all tournament winners for that season at the end of the year. Oh, really? That’s being done?

Well, actually it has been staged since 1953 when Al Besselink prevailed. For the past nine years, Mercedes has been the sponsor and the tournament has been played in Hawaii in January. It’s presented as the first tournament of the new season which has never made a lot of sense.

Granted we have been in the depths of a recession but the event has been such a windfall for Mercedes that they abandoned their contract with the PGA a year early and in January 2010 the event will be sponsored by SBS. That’s the Seoul (Korea) Broadcasting System. It would seem logical that a tournament of champions for a given season would be played at the end of that season, not the beginning of another.

The challenge in all this comes from the nature of golf. The tournaments are self defining, distinct events. 72 holes, a cut, a winner. They are individual dramas played out over four acts (sometimes with play off encores.) The majors have a special importance and the Players Championship is getting there so it’s very difficult to come up with something to top those in gravitas.

The players know who the best is. They vote on the Player of the Year. There is special note made of the top official money earner. The PGA of America awards the Vardon Trophy to the leading low scorer on the PGA Tour (60 rounds minimum) and the PGA Tour presents the Byron Nelson Award (50 rounds minimum) for the same category. (The PGA of America - PGA Tour schism is a story for another day.)

Fans also think they know who is best. Most have their favorite and a rooting interest. So, all the Fed Ex Cup does is present a bunch of successful players an opportunity to make a pile of money before they pack it in for the year.

Our preference, if the PGA Tour thinks it must, would be to invigorate the Tournament of Champions. Stage it at the end of September, open it to all winners for the season, perhaps add the leading money winner from the European Tour and have a go at it for big money. It would maintain the flow of the season and add an exclamation mark.

Bravo to the Tour for trying the Fed Ex Cup, but maybe it’s time to move on to an old idea brought back to meaningful life.

By: Pro From Dover

Autumn arrived this week. We got the feel of it over the past couple of weeks but the sun made it official by crossing the equator on Tuesday.

We have a love hate relationship with this time of year. We love it for a lot of reasons.

• Cool, crisp, fresh morning air.
• Wisps of fog draped on fairways just after dawn.
• Courses have healed from the ravages of aerating and are back in first class condition.
• The trees are staging on their annual light show.
• Crowds have diminished. Casual players are back at work, watching football and doing other things.
• Great deals on equipment are everywhere. Retailers need to move inventory and get cash for next year.
• Greens fees are reduced at most public access clubs. Check out WEEI Country Club!
• We savor each round because it may be the last in warm weather.

We hate it because of all that follows. We’ve become much less tolerant of cold weather with age.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Pro From Dover

It’s the topic of the week. People losing control and acting like asses.

Regardless of your political affiliation, Congressman Joe Wilson’s shout of “you lie” to the President was way out there. Joe was followed by Serena Williams threatening a base line person at the US Tennis Open. And then Kanye West topped them all by intruding on Taylor Swift’s moment in the sun. (To that individual, our 23-year old daughter says, “Great music; bad brain.”)

We were invited to be a guest on a television program this week to talk about the rise in conspicuous incivility, particularly in sports. We witness so much show boating and bad behavior by athletes we become almost immune to its offensiveness. Read the rest of this entry »