The 41-year relationship between the PGA Tour and Westchester Country Club was like a good marriage gone bad. There was the innocent beginning, the complacent middle years and then, finally, when the Tour's wandering eye led it to Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., the bitter, dish-throwing end.
Theories abound on why the Tour abandoned a once-celebrated venue, but who's to blame depends entirely on whom you ask. The Tour says it's Westchester's fault because the club's members were too demanding and out of touch, insisting that they be allowed to continue to play tennis and golf in the middle of a $7 million Tour event. The club says the divorce is the Tour's fault because the Tour kept asking for more, even as it was courting alternate courses. Either way, this week's Barclays will not be held at Westchester—and most insiders believe the Tour will never be back.
In a messy series of events last winter, the Tour decided to buy its way out of its contract for 2008 with Westchester and move to Ridgewood, another classic course—Westchester was designed by Walter Travis; Ridgewood by A.W. Tillinghast—with its own proud tournament pedigree. As part of the 2006 agreement to include the Barclays in the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs, the Tour had already announced that it would rotate the event to different venues, with the new Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City locked in for 2009. But the current agreement also says that the Tour still has to come back to Westchester at least one more time before 2012. In other words, this could only be a separation for the two sides. But given everything that has transpired, how could a divorce not be inevitable?
"I was a proponent of the Tour and went through two contracts with them; now I really don't want them back under any circumstances," says Joe Pepe, a former Westchester president and chairman. "There's bad blood and there's mistrust. The Tour has done everything in its power to tarnish our reputation so they could move the tournament." (Westchester's current president, Philip M. Halpern, said in a letter to Golf.com that he does want the Tour to return.)
How an event that began as the Westchester Classic in 1967 ended up across the Hudson River in New Jersey is a story that goes back several years, maybe even longer. Because of disappointing attendance over the last decade and an unenthusiastic playing record by the game's star attraction — Tiger Woods has entered the Westchester Tour stop only three times, and signaled his disdain for the course by skipping the inaugural event of the FedEx Cup playoffs last August — the Tour's championship-management division had been promoting the idea of rotating the event around the New York metropolitan area for years. The Tour's stated motivation in originally looking at places like Ridgewood, Bethpage and even a stalled Jack Nicklaus project under the Whitestone Bridge in the Bronx was to give the event more of a New York feel. But not far below the surface was discontent with Westchester, a venue that featured a charming, snug shotmaker's course but also a high-powered membership that had little interest in turning over the facilities to the Tour when the tournament came to town. Among the membership's longstanding agreements with the Tour was that during tournament week members could still play the adjacent South course, still play tennis on the courts that bordered the par-3 1st hole and still have access to the sports house that included the pros' locker room and a fitness center.
The uneasy coexistence was best encapsulated by an incident at last summer's Barclays, during which Tour player Aaron Baddeley was kicked out of the fitness center by a Westchester member who said Baddeley didn't belong there. (Westchester's current president, Halpern, confirmed that an "older member" mistakenly thought the room was for members only.)
"I think what happened is that the Tour and its tournaments evolved, and what was acceptable and overlooked in the 1970s and '80s was no longer the case," says a PGA Tour official who requested anonymity. "Every host venue has evolved or been replaced, but they simply weren't of the mindset to evolve. You won't find another venue on Tour where they play tennis off the 1st hole or play the other course when the tournament's going on. I guarantee you there's not another locker room on Tour shared with members."
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