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Saturday, August 18, 2007
PGA’s FedEx Cup won’t fly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Gentlemen, start your drivers! Put your 3-metal to the pedal. The FedEx Cup is upon us.
Strange, you say. “I thought we’d already played the four majors,” and they have. This is the, shall we say, “second season.” None of the four major championships belongs to the PGA Tour. The tour has its Players Championship, and likes to think of it as “the fifth major,” but that won’t sell historically.
So, commissioner Tim Finchem came up with his own creation, the FedEx Cup, a title shared with FedEx, its benefactor, and modeled, no less, after NASCAR’s Chase for the Nextel Cup, a sort of race-off among the top 12 in the points standings with 10 races remaining on the schedule.
Now, the tour “race-off” starts this week with the Barclays at Westchester in New York, then the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston, then the BMW Championship near Chicago. The “regular season” ends in Greensboro today, and the 144 FedEx point leaders move into center ring for the scramble for the Tour Championship at East Lake in mid-September. Last year, you may recall, both Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson passed up the grand finale, the Tour’s showpiece, and this did not set well at all. Not that this snub fueled the FedEx Cup. That was already in motion, but like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces were still being slipped into place. Fact is, they still are.
A lot of us want to know what happens to those who don’t make the 144-player FedEx list, and are left without a game once the run to East Lake cranks up. After each of the playoff tournaments, a number of players are lopped off until, at the Tour Championship, the field is sized down to 30 survivors. What happens to those players eliminated during the qualifiers?
The Tour Championship was moved up nearly two months to avoid the November football rage. The main local competition is Georgia Tech’s game with Boston College. Georgia has a workout game with Western Carolina, and the Falcons are in Jacksonville. So much for that fret.
Next concern — will the Tour get the major boost it expects between its marquee players at East Lake? Woods had committed to play the table, from the Barclays to the Tour Championship, but he has already pulled out of the Barclays. That would have been stretching his customary schedule. Rarely does he ever play two tournaments in a row, but he already has, between Akron and Southern Hills. If he follows through, from the AT&T in July to the Tour Championship in September, that would have been eight tournaments in roughly two and a half months, something he has never done before.
But there’s another commitment here. Finchem gave him his own tournament near Washington on the Fourth of July weekend, the AT&T Congressional. One hand washes the other. He owes Finchem one, all the way down to East Lake, and no way he can bail out on him this time, and there is a $10 million payout to the player who wins the FedEx Cup, highest payoff to any champion in any sport. The entire purse comes to $35 million. Players get a double dip in the three qualifying tournaments, for the Barclays, the Deutsche and the BMW all offer $7 million payouts on the spot.
Money is no issue with Woods. The tour is the stage on which he performs and creates his endorsement connections. For that matter, it isn’t cash in hand, anyway. At first the payout was referred to as an annuity, then later it was changed to “deferred compensation.” Thus, players don’t collect their winnings until they retire from tour competition, and not before they reach age 45, this affirmed by the office of Bob Combs, vice president of communications.
This might be a threat to the prosperity of the Champions Tour, for how many seniors might decide to take early retirement with a fat deferred payment there to be collected?
If all of this sounds complicated to you, join the crowd. I’m not sure the PGA Tour is sure just how it all will work out down the road, this, a sort of shakedown cruise into the great unknown. Especially, should Tiger Woods stay the course, for in the long run all that would do is simply reconfirm him as the champion of the year, and we already knew that.
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