Second-To-Last 'Silly' Season

By Tom Clavin

Bart Bryant celebrates after sinking his final putt on the 18th
hole to win the Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in
Atlanta, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005. Photo by John Bazemore, AP

The bad news is Bart Bryant won the season-ending Tour Championship in Atlanta this past Sunday. But there are two pieces of good news, neither involving saving money on car insurance by switching to Geico: (1) The PGA Tour season is, mercifully, over, and (2) PGA Tour decision-makers have apparently been reading "Links Life," at least when it discusses changing the tour's schedule and late-season dynamic.

First, in all seriousness, a tip of the cap to Bryant. He's one of the good guys on the PGA Tour. He's a journeyman, a grinder, a player who for at least a decade never knew when or where his next paycheck was coming from. Bryant is 42, and with Sunday's victory - only the third in his career -- he finishes the year in the 2005 top 10 of tour earnings for the first time in his life. He joins the class of pro late bloomers like Kenny Perry and Fred Funk. Bryant has paid a lot of dues and earned every nickel.

The problem is that as far as a golf audience is concerned, the outcome of the Tour Championship - which did not include a win by Tiger Woods or Vijay Singh or Davis Love III or any other player ranked in the top 25 in the world - confirms that the PGA Tour season ended with a soft but extended whimper.

Who were the winners the last three weeks leading up to the Tour Championship? Well, you've got Wes Short Jr. at the Michelin Championship at Las Vegas, Lucas Glover at the Funai Classic at Disneyworld, and Carl Pettersson won the "Fall Finish." Whoop-de-doo! How do these nags get to cross the wire first at once-well-regarded tourneys? Because by this point in the PGA Tour season most of the better players don't care. Many don't bother to show up, and those that do treat these events as pre-Tour Championship practice rounds. When Singh misses two cuts in two weeks, you know his mind and his game are elsewhere.

Okay, some players do care. The way the PGA Tour works is that the top 125 players on the U.S. money list get to play in tour events the following year. So in the full two months after the PGA Championship there are two or three dozen players on the bubble, vying for the last 10 to 15 chairs to sit in when the music stops. Personally, I enjoy watching folks like Len Mattiace, Cameron Beckman, Joe Durant, Jeff Sluman, and Jonathan Byrd fighting for their professional lives down the stretch, but a lot of other people don't, including the ones who control the advertising purse strings for Buick, J.P. Morgan, Verizon, and Nike.

Carl "Big Dog" Pettersson. Photo by Sportyard.com

Now the good news part. Loyal "Links Life" readers may recall that in the October 13 edition, yours truly bemoaned the "fall of golf" that takes place after the PGA Championship in August, with the exception of the Presidents/Ryder Cup and the Tour Championship. I suggested several changes, including ending the PGA Tour season earlier and placing the remaining events in or near major U.S. cities.

Lo and behold, two days before the Tour Championship began, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem held a press conference at the East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta to announce significant changes to the tour season. Among the highlights:

• Players will accumulate points based on their performance from the season-opening Mercedes Championship in January through the PGA Championship. The top 144 earners of points will then be eligible to play in three further tourneys.

• The top 30 in points play in the Tour Championship, which also awards points. Best of all, that tourney is being moved to mid-September. At the end of the championship, the player with the most overall points wins the FedEx Cup, which could wind up, as Finchem said, as "the largest payout in professional sports."

• Only one of the three post-PGA Championship events has been set, and that is the Western Open outside Chicago. This tourney has been contested since 1899. The PGA Tour is looking at St. Louis, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and other visible sites for the other two events.

These are the positives. The PGA Tour had to make changes because of a new contract with the television networks and ample evidence that golf viewership - thus, the number of eyeballs seeing commercials - is down when that sport has to compete with the baseball playoffs and pro and college football.

But problems remain. The first is that the PGA Tour is allowing a handful of official tournaments to be held after the climactic Tour Championship. Why? Do they think anyone is going to tune in to watch John Rollins and J.L. Lewis battle down the stretch of the Ignatz Invitational? Will Xerox and Master Card really want to spend millions on advertising? The PGA Tour will be perceived as a guest who has fully worn out his welcome.

The best player - Annika Sorenstam. Photo by Calloway Golf

Another problem is the positive changes are not being put into effect until the start of the 2007 season, 14 months away. Why the glacial pace? It took less time to plan D-Day. If I were a network TV exec negotiating the new PGA Tour contract, I wouldn't be happy that the tour is throwing the 2006 season to the ratings wolves.

Well, we'll have to settle for two steps forward and one step back. A few season-ending tidbits:

• After allowing Singh to play with it last year, Tiger Woods took the PGA Tour money title in 2005 with earnings of $10,628,024 (or almost as much as my "Links Life" compensation). This was raked in via 21 events, for a jaw-dropping $506,096 per tourney. That's more than the combined total purses during the entire decade of the 1940s. Next on the final money list are Singh, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk, and David Toms (who can now go out and buy a new heart).

• Brad Faxon was named the recipient of the 2005 Payne Stewart Award, presented to the player who upholds the game's tradition of charitable support.

• Speaking of charity, kudos to the PGA Tour: In 2005, its events contributed $90 million to charitable organizations, topping $1 billion in total donations since 1938 when such record-keeping began.

• In case you missed it, Heath Slocum won the Southern Farm Bureau Classic, which was played at the same time as the Tour Championship.

• Ask "Who is the best golfer on the planet?" and most people answer Tiger Woods. El Tigre is indeed amazing, but this past weekend Annika Sorenstam won her fifth straight Mizuno title and had another incredible year. (Hmm, now that she's single again, wonder if she'd be interested in a certain golf columnist . . .)

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Tom Clavin, who lives in Sag Harbor, writes about golf for The New York Times, The Met Golfer, Golf Magazine, and other publications. His new book is "Sir Walter: Walter Hagen and the Invention of Professional Golf." This column about everything in and around golf, especially with “links” to local courses, will appear every two weeks on Hamptonsview.com. Comments, questions, information about East End players and competitions, free golf apparel and memberships, and one-way tickets to the Mercedes Championship in Hawaii in January can be sent to hondo7@optonline.net.