HSBC Champions Event to Become World Golf Championship Event

Tim Finchem let it slip out yesterday at the Reuters Media Summit that the HSBC Champions event - Asia's major - will become a World Golf Championship event soon.  Not many details were revealed, but Finchem let the cat of the bag when he was talking about Asia as the next golf frontier.

"In today's world, a lot of players go over and play two events in Asia -- the HSBC, which will now become a world golf championship, and also the Barclays Singapore event," Finchem said at the Reuters Media Summit in New York.

This is a pretty significant move considering that the World Golf Championships were consolidated into the United States just a few years ago when the World Cup - now also staged in China - was dropped from the series.  The move was highly criticized in most golf circles.

The move could have political reverberations.  The Asian Tour is growing in strength and the European Tour has a much stronger presence on the continent than the Asian Tour in terms of high profile events.  With the PGA Tour having no formal presence there, this move could indicate that the PGA Tour - the real driver of the WGC presenter group conglomerate called the International Federation of PGA Tours - is ready to try to stake some claim in this new "golf frontier" for tournament properties.