What Will Phil Say Next?

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phil pga.jpgShocking as it may seem, I don't TiVo Golf Hawaii hosted by Mark Rolfing. But at JWH's suggestion I recorded the current edition. And boy was it grand.

Attention golf writers who use this free-of-charge transcription work: I will cite your stories when the IRS questions my TiVo write-off.

Okay here's the deal. Mark Rolfing, interviewing Phil in Hawaii during November's Grand Slam of Golf, starts by saying how the 2007 television contract is the talk of the Tour. Then...

MARK ROLFING: Have you been part of the planning process?

PHIL MICKELSON: No, I haven’t. I was asked maybe a year and a half ago what I thought about certain ideas and I don’t necessarily support what’s going on, but what I feel needs to happen is we need to have the top guys playing against each other more often. And we’ll do that 2 or 3 more times. So that is a good thing. But in my opinion it’s really a half-hearted attempt at what we need to do which is force the top players to play against each other on specific tournaments 12 times a year in addition to the four majors, the Players Championship, and the three World Golf Championships. And that would give us 20 events where the top players play against each other.
But Mark, what happens is the sponsors love it because they know what they are buying. They are paying more money but are guaranteed that the top 100 guys are going to play against each other. The fans love it because that’s what they want to see. And television loves it because that’s what they want to buy. But the reason it doesn’t happen is because the 150 guys on Tour who are fighting to keep their card have such a strong voice that it stops anything like that going through. So 150 guys control and can stop what would ultimately be good for the Tour in my opinion, and that’s to stand up to the top players and force them to play these specific events, but reward them by having a larger purse because you can sell it to sponsors, television and the fans a lot easier.

MARK ROLFING: How would you force top players to play in these 12 tournaments, let’s say?
PHIL MICKELSON: Well the Tour needs to be run independent of the players. And run as an entity just like Nascar does with their drivers. They force them to play certain events and you stand up and say, “look, if you don’t play these 12 events, and you don’t play the four majors and you don’t play the Players Championship and the World Golf Championship’s, you don’t have a card next year. You can’t play any of them.” Of course we’re going to play.

MARK ROLFING: Phil, if you were talking to the player on the PGA Tour that’s 100th on the money list instead of me today, how would you convince them that it might be the best thing for them, what you are talking about.

PHIL MICKELSON: Well I shouldn’t have to Mark. The commissioner needs to step up and make the statement that this is in the best interest of the Tour to have the top guys play against each other more often and it shouldn’t be his concern to try to justify it to everybody. He needs to stand up and run the Tour like a business, in the best interest of the Tour, in the best interest of the sponsors, television and the fans. And not have to justify it to other players or even the top players. He should stand up….and when it’s run like a business, we all need to buy into it and go with it. That includes for me being told what tournaments I have to play in. I’m fine with that because it’s in the best interests of the Tour, and I’m rewarded by it because we’re able to sell those tournaments for more money and ultimately play for a larger purse.

If you want to see this for yourself, the program airs a couple more times (listed here) between now and Christmas day.

And I've started a thread under Discuss Tournaments to chat about Phil's comments.

Hold The Commissioner's Calls Today

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Nascar's new TV deal: $4.5 billion for 8 years.

"The bottom line is, Nascar is a national sport with very large ratings," George Bodenheimer, ESPN and ABC Sports president, said yesterday in a conference call with reporters. "Secondly, obviously the sport is extremely fan-friendly and sponsor-friendly. We're very bullish on the sales prospects of this property."

And...

"We at Fox believed in it, the folks at Nascar preached it and it was just a matter of Madison Avenue catching up, and it was really in black and white," said Ed Goren, the president of Fox Sports. "All they had to do was see the ratings that Nascar was generating on Fox."

No mention of demographics. Just ratings.

Tour TV Deal Perspectives

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A few weeks removed from Tim Finchem's impactful press conference and it appears some perspective has set in. First there was this quote from Greg Norman, Chairman Emeritus of Finchem's Fans:  

The PGA Tour plays things close to the chest. You really don't know what's going on until [Tim] Finchem decides to say something and then when he says something he really doesn't tell you anyway.

And Ron Sirak puts the PGA Tour's network problems this way:

...tour players should volunteer to freeze purses for the duration of the next TV contract, which will go into effect in 2007, and agree to play each tour event at least once during that four-year cycle.Golf simply has priced itself out of the market with the networks, and schedule manipulation will not make that reality go away.

Points Race Mess?

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Doug Ferguson writes about the debacle that the 2006 LPGA points race will be, at least in the context of the 2005 season.

Annika Sorenstam had the trophy at her side and spoke of her 10-win season. Had this been 2006, the $1 million payoff would have been decided between Michele Redman and Soo-Yun Kang in extra holes.

"I'm just glad it's 2005, that's all I can say," Sorenstam said.

Note from Tim Finchem to personal assistant #3: make sure Dick Ebersol does not see this story.

"Great Game's Long Goodbye"

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It took way too long for John Huggan to weigh in on the Tour's '07 concept and the state of the game.

Oh but it was worth the wait.

A season-long points series will lead to a play-off-style Fed-Ex Cup involving leading qualifiers that will, it is hoped, identify the biggest draws in the game. Otherwise, America's ever-diminishing attention span, and its desire to satisfy an out-of-control gambling habit, may switch from fades to football even earlier than it does now.

Ah he was just warming up.

As always when the PGA Tour is involved, this proposed change to a long-established status quo has nothing to do with what may or may not be good for the game. To the surprise of no-one, this is all to do with money. Instead of taking a long, hard look at an increasingly one-dimensional product involving the use of driver, wedge and putter, Finchem and his army of sycophantic minions have gone for what appears to be a short-term fix: dazzling disgruntled networks with big names and numbers in advance of imminent negotiations for the renewal of television contracts.

Oh heck, why am I interrupting?

Such a move, you won't be shocked to hear, is shortsighted, and pays no attention to recent history and the demise of tennis as a participation/spectator sport in the US. As bigger racquets and hi-tech materials removed entertaining 'feel' players, such as John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase, from the upper echelons, tennis became more and more a power game dominated by big-serving behemoths. And not surprisingly, the public rejected that tedium. From a peak of 34 million in 1975, it is estimated that only 13 million Americans play tennis and only rarely does it make it onto network TV.

Golf is going the same way. The numbers are not pretty, yet administrators on both sides of the Atlantic do nothing to stop the game becoming more about grunts than guile.

Oh I'll stop here because he goes into that tedious USGA/R&A Statement of Principles stuff which you know all too well from the last week. And the various stats also thrown in your face here and here this week.

Phony Finish

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Add Peter Kostis to the list of those underwhelmed by Tim Finchem's announced intentions to fix the Tour schedule. He raises several points not addressed in other columns and offers this extreme idea, sounds much closer to something the Tour should consider to make this so-called "playoff" dramatic instead of a rich-get-rich pyramid scheme:

...if you really want to create some excitement, play the FedEx Cup finale tournaments with a $10 million purse—winner takes all.

You have to figure that if the Tour can't convince players to do something semi-radical at The International (daily cuts, start from scratch Sunday), it's going to be tough to convince the players that FedEx Cup will only work with something bold and brash. And this is why the FedEx Cup concept will continue to receive nothing but yawns and "why?"

Hawkins on Tour TV Deal

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Golf World's John Hawkins weighs in on the proposed 2007 concept for the Tour. He's mostly celebratory, so much so that the Commish will want to order reprints. But the story is loaded with mini-bombshells and interesting anecdotes may infuriate the rank-and-file player while creating new questions about how the framework of the schedule was put together.

With considerable help from the title sponsor, the FedEx Cup will offer a whopping $38 million payoff to the 30 players who make it to the Tour Championship, a source told Golf World. About 25 percent of that will go to the winner -- unofficial money likely to come in the form of a contribution to the players' retirement funds.

Hawkins will get a wine and cheese basket from the Commissioner for this line:

Though it may never rival the major championships in terms of relevance or do much to determine a Player of the Year, the four-week playoff series should resolve the tours late-season issues and bolster Finchem's bargaining power when he meets with the networks to negotiate the upcoming television contract, a process that is expected to begin this week.

Here's the part that may have the rank and file asking more questions:

It's hard to imagine a scenario where fewer than the top 70 would advance into the playoffs. Although the tour has developed a reputation in recent years for disregarding the best interests of its middle class, the FedEx Cup series will market opportunity -- the idea that No. 78 in the standings could get hot, play great golf under immense pressure and walk off with the $10 million. In a manner of speaking, he'll have earned it. "It will probably be like NASCAR, where it's hard to move up [in the Nextel Cup]," Woods surmised. "The research says 80 percent of the time, the winner comes out of the top five [in the standings]."

And this really caught my eye:

"There are going to be two sides to this," said IMG's Mark Steinberg, Woods' agent and a key player in the shaping of the tour's revisions. "A player who has a dominant year may get passed because of the reset. Having said that, a player who had a good year but not a great one will have a chance to make it great in the final month."

Tiger's agent was a "key player" in shaping the revisions? Hmmm. He also, amazingly, was complimentary:

In that sense, Finchem didn't exactly pull a rabbit out of his hat, but he didn't produce a goat, either. "I think Tim and Ed [tour executive VP Moorhouse] have done a hell of a job in creating a new system," Steinberg said. "They've done a great job of salvaging what could have been a very difficult situation."

Uh, they haven't inked any deals yet.

The television networks may be very willing to fork over a dollar total close to (or more than) the nearly $1 billion it paid to telecast the tour four years ago, but the long-term relationship between pro golf and TV could be irreparably harmed if Finchem doesn't deliver a series of tournaments that feature all the game's top-ranked players.
"It's a step in the right direction," ESPN's Wildhack said. "Player participation is what drives ratings. The three guys that make the ratings are Woods, Mickelson and John Daly."

Then Hawkins drops this, which doesn't exactly make the ESPN guy look too good.

Last month's WGC-American Express Championship featured a near-perfect competitive scenario on Sunday afternoon: Woods vs. Daly in a playoff televised by ABC, whose parent company, Disney, also owns ESPN and has an endorsement deal with Woods. Despite a marquee leader board (Sergio Garcia and Colin Montgomerie also were in contention), the WGC emblem and the Woods-Daly showdown, the final round ranked 21st in sports programming shown on national TV that weekend.

Two More '07 Skeptics

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The normally jovial Kraig Kann sounds skeptical in posing ten questions about the proposed 2007 Tour concept.

And Seth Soffian reports that Greg Norman says what a lot of writers have come close to saying:

"The PGA Tour plays things close to the chest," said Norman, taking a not-so-veiled shot at Finchem, who offered only a framework for the proposed schedule changes last week after a year of speculation.

"You don't really know what's going on until Finchem decides to say something, and then when he says something, he really doesn't tell you anyway. If you're going to make an announcement, make an announcement and tell the world what's going on."
But see Greg, if you make an announcement without really saying anything, and no one likes the sound of the announcment,  then you can say you never really made such an announcement!