On What Tier Does the Hope Belong?

Looking at the two fields for the PGA Tour and European Tour stops this week, it seems like the European Tour beat out Finchem in the battle of desert stops.  The Qatar Masters field simply crushes that of the Bob Hope Classic, despite the support of Arnold Palmer to step is as host of the event in its 50th playing.

Peter Dixon in The Times, like all Euro journalists, are more than happy to discuss the story.

Kim's withdrawal meant that a tournament about to celebrate its 50th year had lost the only player it could boast from inside the world's top 15 - a poor contrast to the Commercialbank Qatar Masters that started today, which has six: Sergio Garcia, Robert Karlsson, Henrik Stenson, Lee Westwood, Ernie Els and Adam Scott. Add Justin Rose, Martin Kaymer and Paul Casey, the winner in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, to that list and you can see why the European Tour is feeling a little pleased with itself at present.

Qatar has a great field.  Abu Dhabi did pretty well for itself, and we know that the Dubai Desert Classic has become a marquee world golf event.  (World Golf Championship, anyone?)  This isn't a new phenonmenon, though.  The Desert Swing has been gaining momentum and players for the past ten years - basically as long as Tiger Woods has been showing to Dubai.

The question is what that does for the Bob Hope.  It looks like it is driving the event to extinction. 

The event sponsor, Chrysler, just had a whole ton of itself bought up by Fiat in recent days and dropped itself from the event.  The Classic Club was bought by the tournament and then soundly kicked out of the rotation because of its subjugation to desert winds.  George Lopez was unceremoniously dropped as host to bring in Arnold Palmer, but that didn't help the field at all.  The perception of the 90 hole event is that it is one round too long, and four rounds too long of a pro-am.  And the PGA Tour didn't even think enough of the event to give it weekend network coverage.  It's all in Golf Channel's hands on cable.  (More of a shot on cable than at Golf Channel.)

It's a tough time for the Hope and John Hawkins has some thoughts on what might happen to the Hope in the future:

Word on the street is that singer/actor Justin Timberlake, whose hands-on involvement with the Las Vegas tour stop transformed it into a Fall Series success, wants a bigger piece of the action and would love moving to the third week of the regular season if the spot became available.

That said, the same source told me yesterday that the Hope has a "100 percent" chance of surviving but that a move to the Champions Tour is a possibility, which may or may not meet your definition of survival. The right thing to do is to fix it and leave it on the big tour, which prospered immensely from the Hope's popularity before becoming the big business it is today.

So, is the Hope really no better than the US Bank Championship in Milwaukee now?  How do you think of the Hope?