There was something missing from the PGA Tour's recent World Golf Championship event at Doral.
The world.
A tournament with only 74 players in the field is an outing, not a true world championship. Sure, it's the cream of he crop in golf, but even cream has to float on top of something. In the WGC events, there's nothing underneath the cream.
Perhaps that's one reason the WGC events have generated little or no buzz since their creation in the late 1990s — the Accenture World Match Play has been a modest critical success because match play makes for the best theater, but it hasn't exactly captured the public's interest.
As a limited-field exercise, it's hard to take the other WGC events too seriously. Plus they haven't had time to build any history. If you can name a memorable WGC moment, other than John Daly smoking during that playoff with Tiger Woods at Harding Park, give yourself double bonus points.
Woods has dominated the series, winning 13 of 24 WGC events. Maybe there's a reason beyond the obvious — that he's the best player by a mile. The WGC events are basically just a cash grab. Maybe someday they'll develop into something more, but all the PGA Tour has to offer as an inducement to attract the top players is big money. So the purses are $8 million and there's no cut. It's a guaranteed payday — a disguised appearance fee. There was absolutely no buzz Friday at Doral, and that may have been the lack of urgency to play well because there's no cut.
Other than the 30-man Tour Championship, the WGC events are the easiest tournaments to win because they offer the fewest opponents to beat. It's not a weak field because of who's there; it's weak due to a lack of depth. You're talking about a field that's half the size of a normal tour event — 70 or so versus 144 or 156. The PGA Tour's slogan of "These guys are good" is true in the sense that anybody in a field can catch fire and shoot 63 any day.
In a full field, half a dozen players shoot lights-out every day. In a half-field, only two or three do. Golf leaderboards are exciting because they're bunched, and that's a function of the numbers. With a full field, it's going to be more like the Tour de France — no one usually breaks away from the pack without taking a half-dozen pursuers with him. In a half field, well, Tiger or Darren Clarke or someone else can break away from the field and win in a runaway.
In addition, the field is a patchwork quilt of who deserves to be there. Basically, it's the top 50 in the world along with assorted throw-ins — the top three finishers on the money lists from Japan, Australia, Asia and South Africa. Some aren't even ranked in the top 100. So you end up with the kind of disparity that existed at Doral. Ryder Cuppers Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood, Vaughn Taylor and Scott Verplank, all ranked just outside the top 50, didn't get in the field. Prom Meesawat, Thongchai Jaidee, Louis Oosthuizen, Anton Haig, Hideto Tanihara and Shingo Katayama did. They're accomplished players with credentials, but are they better than Clarke and Westwood?
