Tour to golfers: Be friendly

Augusta —- The message was videotaped and dispatched last winter to the PGA Tour’s elite players. It came from commissioner Tim Finchem, who was concerned about how the golfers handled themselves.

He asked for more interplay with sponsors, more access for fans, more autograph sessions.

Decades ago, the Tour had soared on the personalities of its players. Now, with its financial health at issue, he wanted some more of that. And for those who didn’t hear him, Finchem repeated the message later in a players meeting.

Wanted: a little more humanity.

“They’ve always wanted us to do that,” Stewart Cink, a player director with the Tour Policy Board, said Wednesday. “But when the economy’s in the toilet, it makes it more difficult to keep our sponsors signed. The sponsors want value, and if we’re interacting with their clients and the people in the Pro-Am and the media, we’re doing more for that.”

But, since Finchem’s message, is that happening?

“Slowly, I think it is,” Cink said. “Hard to say.”

The Masters, pristine and perhaps the most fan-friendly event in the game, is hardly the place to gauge the health of pro golf. It is independent and a privately funded tournament.

But out on the Tour, contracts with 18 events will expire after the 2010 season. Television ratings over the first three months of the year were down 14 percent, at least until Tiger Woods’ 72nd-hole victory at Bay Hill two weeks ago, which generated the highest ratings for a non-major in nearly two years.

It was during the Bay Hill event, which Arnold Palmer founded and still hosts, that one of the Tour’s chief forefathers suggested the contemporary player, perhaps a little too aloof or even pampered, may have lost touch with the people who support the game.

“I would say that [today’s pros] need to understand more about what the Tour is all about, how it got to be where it is,” Palmer said recently. “And then maybe realize that it just didn’t happen. It’s taken a lot of years for it to happen.”

It also took the players’ goodwill, which Finchem has requested. Rocco Mediate, runner-up to Woods last June in one of the most stirring U.S. Opens ever, didn’t bristle over receiving Finchem’s request. He was disturbed that Finchem ever had to make it in the first place.

“The fact that he had to even say it makes me nauseous,” Mediate said at Bay Hill. “It should be known already. I don’t care who you are, how young you are, how old you are. We have to tell people how to [act around] sponsors who are putting up a bazillion dollars for us to play golf?

“Think about that for a second. And we’ve got to train guys to be better with them? It’s ridiculous. I know Arnold is probably nauseous even hearing those facts.”

For now, compliance with the commissioner’s request is unknowable. Woods, for instance, very quietly had a recent private corporate outing for selected sponsor executives at his Orlando home. But increasing Woods’ profile is not an issue; the man’s persona drives the Tour as it is.

The first three months showed little evidence of increased accessibility to the biggest stars. In fact, it showed less. Recent research by cbssports.com showed that the top 30 money winners from 2008 (minus Woods and Vijay Singh, who were injured) played in 12 fewer events through the recently completed Florida swing than they did the year before.

Finchem may never get his players to be as cozy with the people as in the formative 1960s, but he clearly wants something different than what the Tour is going through now. His is, as other pro sports have already endured, a game in economic transition.

“When it comes to approaching the players on this, we’re the ones who make up the Tour. I think it’s appropriate,” said 2007 Masters champion Zach Johnson, another Policy Board member. “It’s not a negative. If anything, it’s kind of our responsibility. And we shouldn’t slight it.”

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