Polish Up Your Polish

Filed in archive Golf News on December 17, 2007

Courtesy: Toya Golf Club, Warsaw

The European Tour has announced that Poland will once again be on the pro golf map.

The Tour's Challenge Tour - their equivalent of the Nationwide Tour in the U.S. - has signed a three year deal with the PGA of Poland to host the Wroclaw Open, "Wroclaw" being the Polish name of the capital, Warsaw.

The tournament will be staged over the Toya Golf and Country Club just north of Warsaw. This is a course that only opened in April of 2006 but the club's website boasts that it's topnotch all the way with all greens built to USGA specs.

Jeremy Pern is the course architect, a man with more than 25 designs to his credit in Europe. No less than 14 of them appear in the Peugeot Golf Guide of Europe's finest courses.

The land on which the course was built is a former military practice ground, likely used by Soviet forces in the days of the Iron Curtain.

"Military traces are still visible and make some of the holes very unique", says the course website. At least great conversation starters, anyway.

What's important in this announcement is that there hasn't been a European Tour presence in Poland since 1999. So this is a significant development for the Tour.

Granted, it's a Challenge Tour event, ergo, the purse is not large, but it gets the European Tour's foot back in the door in Poland.

And that is critical for the Tour as it looks to expand into new markets both on its doorstep and elsewhere in the world.

There is little doubt that golf is going to expand rapidly in eastern Europe at the professional level. More and more tournaments will be sanctioned by the European Tour in the near future.

There is a lot of money in eastern Europe and Russia, much of it derived from natural resources. Witness the recent announcement from the chairman of Gazprom, Russia's monstrous energy company that he plans to start a professional hockey league to rival the NHL in North America.

Professional golf is already on the European Tour schedule with the Russian Open and there is an event in Kazakhstan.

However, many of the former Soviet bloc nations are ripe for the picking like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and others. Let's throw the former Yugoslavia into the mix, as well, although, technically, it was a non-aligned nation under Tito.

The point is that there is a bright future for the European Tour in terms of growth, perhaps more so than the PGA Tour in the United States where entry level tournament purses start at 2 or 3 million dollars and corporate sponsors are tougher to come by.