"PGA TOUR Latinoamérica to kick-off inaugural season in 2012"

For Immediate Release...

PGA TOUR Latinoamérica to kick-off inaugural season in 2012

Wow, only one cap on Latinoamérica...

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FL (October 20, 2011)—The PGA TOUR announced today the creation of PGA TOUR Latinoamérica, a professional tour initially consisting of 11 events played in seven countries across Latin America.

“We are delighted to announce the launch of PGA TOUR Latinoamérica,” said PGA TOUR Commissioner Tim Finchem. “This expansion into Latin America, when combined with what the Nationwide Tour has been able to accomplish in the region in recent year’s, is part of the natural progression for golf which continues to grow globally.  We see this as an opportunity to help in the further development of elite players across the region.  The timing is right, with South America hosting its first ever Olympic Games, which includes golf’s return to the competition for the first time in more than 100 years.  The Latin American market has already produced several PGA TOUR stars, and one of our goals for this tour is to help develop the Latin American stars of the future.”

The 11-event schedule, the result of a collaborative effort among the PGA TOUR, Tour de Las Americas, National Golf Federations, promoters and host clubs in the region, will be contested from September through December 2012.  In 2013, the plan is to have up to 14 events on the schedule.  The events will take players through various parts of the region including Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Peru. A complete schedule will be released in the near future.

And now for the quote pile-on.

Alright, let's get to the takeaway here...

PGA TOUR Latinoamérica events will be 72-hole stroke play tournaments consisting of fields of up to 144 players. The fields will consist primarily of the top professionals in the region with the top money earners receiving access to the PGA TOUR’s Nationwide Tour the following year. The specifics of Nationwide Tour access will be disclosed next year prior to the start of the 2012 PGA TOUR Latinoamérica schedule.

Receiving access? Translation: details to be bickered over at upcoming player and policy board meetings.

From there, the release features a big quote pile-on that won't improve your day.

My knee-jerk takeaway?

The European Challenge Tour should stay away from Latin America, and, as Sean Martin noted when writing about this earlier this year, this should help get more South Americans world ranking points and therefore eligible for the 2016 Olympics.  But as Martin notes in a new story on the announcement, discussions about those points have a ways to go.

Kapalua Field May Benefit From New Exception?

Robert Collias on changes to the PGA Tour's kickoff event at Kapalua, currently sponsored by Hyundai, says the tour's Championship Management will be taking over the operation (here come the military festivities!) and that scorned Hawaii lover Mark Rolfing is mulling whether he'll pretend to act like he wasn't run out after one year as tournament director.

There is also hope that an expanded exception for non-members might entice more of the previous year's tournament winners (Rory, Darren?) to appear.

Another change that Rolfing had campaigned for is in the works, Pazder said. Nonmembers of the PGA Tour may get to compete in two more tour events, bringing that number to 12. European Tour members, including U.S. Open champion Rory McIlroy, often skip Kapalua because of the limit.

"We will be making a proposal to our policy board here in a couple weeks," Pazder said.

Who Knows What 2021 Will Bring?

While I'm happy the PGA Tour will be on television for the foreseeable future--and more importantly, network television--I'm having a hard time getting past the notion that the new PGA Tour television contract runs through 2021.

Consider that we'll have three U.S. presidential elections between now and then.

Two World Cups.

And there will be three Summer Olympics in that time, with the location for the third set of games just narrowed down to six bids this week (and only two of those are golf friendly...or at least I don't think they have much great golf in Azerbaijan).

I point this out because it seems fair to question why either the tour or networks would want to be locked into that agreement so far in advance. Especially in light of our "flat," rapidly changing world.

Consider this wisdom from someone who many consider to be very smart about business, politics and what the digital future holds:

Who knows where -- I'll just go off a little bit here, but Tom Friedman has a book coming out this week, and in that book he cites when he wrote "The World is Flat," and he thought that was a cutting-edge book. But he says in this book, if you go back and look at that book, and it's only five years ago, you can't find Skype, you can't find Twitter, and he lists about eight different things. That's pretty amazing. That's five years ago. None of that stuff was even there.

Those comments were from Commissioner Tim Finchem while announcing the 9-year deal.