World Golf Championships Losing Appeal

Filed in archive Golf News on February 21, 2008

The Gallery at Dove Mountain, Tucson. Home of the WGC

Tucson, Arizona hosts the first event in the World Golf Championships series which saw round one yesterday.

This is when tour players take a break from stroke play and go head to head in Match Play. And that's probably why the series attracts so many European and International players who are as comfortable with the format as they are with week-in, week-out stroke play tournaments.

But the excitement level may be dropping for the WGC.



The fine Canadian site, Score Golf, has a solid editorial on the future of the World Golf Championships, now 10 years old. Some players, says the story, don't find the WGC any different from a regular PGA tournament - apart from the format, of course.

And that's because the WGC is not really a WORLD championship. Once upon a time, it was, with tournaments staged on superb courses in different parts of the world.

Now, all events under the WGC umbrella are played in the United States.

The Score Golf story explains the reasons for this - mostly to do with the American sponsor wanting TV coverage in U.S. prime time. Very understandable.

Yet PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem is reportedly trying to organize one of the WGC events for Asia.

It's not unusual for one golf tour like the PGA to be involved in planning a tournament in another part of the world. The European Tour did it recently with the Indian Masters, working alongside the Indian PGA Tour.

Given the fact that golf is a truly worldwide game, played in almost as many countries as soccer, I can't help thinking that the day is coming when a World Tour is going to emerge.

I can envision an international board of directors comprised of elected representatives from the major "domestic" tours like the PGA, European and Asian Tours, planning for global series like the WGC and major single tournaments. And spreading them around the world.

Remember Shell's Wonderful World of Golf series? It began on TV back in the early 60s and visited fine courses throughout the world where Shell had a presence (which was just about everywhere). The TV series showed a North American audience glimpses of golf courses, cities and countries around the world. It was ahead of its time in many ways.

There are certainly more than enough global companies - like LG, for example - who are willing to step up and sponsor a series seen in every country where they have a market presence.

That would provide the impetus to return the World Golf Championships series to what it once briefly was: a world event. The FedEx Cup and the Race to Dubai's pot of golf would become part of a planetary pool of money.

Call it the Global Cup.