Courtesy: Tavistock Cup.com
Players Arrive by Helicopter for Tavistock Cup

What's with this Tavistock Cup? It's billed as a "fight to the finish" between PGA pros from two high-end golf clubs in Florida.

The thing is squeezed into two days - Monday and Tuesday - right after the CA Championship and is televised, of course.

Surprisingly, it's a PGA sanctioned event. But it's not really a public event.

Spectators are allowed by invitation only. And those invitations come from Citi Private Bank.

Both the country clubs involved - Isleworth and Lake Nona - are owned by Tavistock Group, a private investment company with real estate and financial interests.

Big money, in other words.

Indeed, the purse is enormous, considering this is just a two-day event and features only players (men and women) who are members at either club. Nearly 4 million dollars with the winning team collecting a million and disbursing a further one million dollars to charities of their choosing.

Indeed, the charity angle is hugely played up in this pointless venture; the organizers boast that they will have contributed more than 3 and a half million to charities after this year's event.

Yet, while "charities benefit", the enticements for the players are enormous. There's that one million to the winning team, a Cadillac Escalade for closest-to-the-pin (should a tee shot actually go in the hole, everyone on the team gets an Escalade), ski boats, high-end golf simulators and something the organizers call a "Cartier buying experience".

Please.

The UN World Food Programme has issued an appeal for at least 500 million dollars from wealthy nations to make up for a dire shortfall in food supplies to needy countries.

And they're giving a Cadillac Escalade for closest-to-the-pin to someone who makes millions of dollars a year so that a few well-heeled "by invitation only" clients can watch and rub shoulders?

There's a huge disconnect here and we need to give our heads a shake.

The game of golf at the professional level still dwells in the rich part of town, well away from the real world "across the tracks".

Events like the Tavistock Cup underline that in red.