Pernice: Make Tiger Play More

by Mulligan Stu on Jul 5, 2008 11:32 AM EDT Comment 1 comment

Tom Pernice believes that the top players are cheating PGA Tour tournament sponsors by only playing the tournaments they want to play, and by not playing as many of those as Pernice believes they should.

Pernice favors raising the minimum requirement for number of tournaments played:

"There are some things that the tour could do to help the sponsors," Pernice said. "I think there's got to be something. Michael Jordan didn't get to skip and not go play in Madison Square Garden against the Knicks when the Knicks were good and he didn't like playing there or whatever."

But that's a terrible analogy. Jordan was an employee of his team earning a fixed salary paid by that team.

A better analogy to golfers is the old-fashioned traveling shoe salesman. The salesman had his favorite cities and favorite neighborhoods - the places he enjoyed visiting, the places he made the most sales - and those were the places he always returned to. Places he tried and fail to drum up business, or places where he didn't feel comfortable or didn't enjoy visiting, were places he might never return to. And if he was making plenty of money, he might even cut back his schedule.

The idea of raising the requirement for minimum tournaments played wouldn't have any effect on Tiger anyway. He could drop off the PGA Tour and still get into just as many tournaments as he's been playing the past several years. He has exemptions out the wazoo - exemptions into majors, defending champion exemption, sponsor exemptions, performance-based exemption, money-list exemptions .... Woods is probably already playing fewer tournaments than he could if he was choosing tournaments based solely on exemptions.

Try again, Tom.

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at least one good point

the PGA Tour requires huge sums of money from sponsors – and the rise in price to host an event in the last 12 years is almost solely because of Tiger Woods. But Tiger doesn’t make the rounds of all the tournaments. When Tiger shows up, the tournament is a guaranteed success, barring some sort of weather extreme. The rest are left to fend for themselves, but don’t get any sort of “discount” on the Tour rates.

The LPGA requires its members to play the full schedule of events over a period of years – a rule that bit Ochoa earlier this year when she needed a break, but her break fell on a week that she had to play or break the rule, and she was fined. The LPGA rule doesn’t have any kind of allowance for exceptional years when a player has to defend a huge number of tournament wins from the year before.

However, the LPGA doesn’t have the list of majors and “sub-majors” (for lack of a better term) that the PGA has. Top PGA Tour players can arrange their schedules around the biggest tournaments so they will be at their best for the biggest events. With the inception of the Fed Ex Cup, the PGA Tour rearranged the schedule to have one major event each month leading up to the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and Tour Championship, then a post season with tournaments to let players jockey for position on the money list for next year.

My suggestion was to rotate the other tournaments each month so that every three years, all the tournaments will have a chance to attract Tiger and/or Phil to fit into their pre-major schedule. Some people said that Tiger chooses his tournaments based on the courses that give him the best chance to win. I think that’s nonsense. Tiger has proven that he can win on any kind of course. He plays a time schedule leading up to majors and WGC events.

My question to Tom Pernice is this. Do you REALLY want Tiger to play more events every year ? If he plays more events, he is going to rack up more wins and even more money. Don’t you want as many chances to win as you can ? Your chances of winning are greatly reduced if Tiger is in the field.

What I can’t figure out is if Pernice was asked this question or if he just decided to put his foot in his mouth all by himself. Kind of a chicken-bleep thing to do – waiting until the big guy can’t take a swing at you to make comments like that.

"this ball will fit in that fairway"

by courtgolf on Jul 5, 2008 2:38 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs