The Fall Series has seemed like a double entendre ever since the PGA Tour decided to end its official season with the FedEx Cup playoffs. The name fit not only because the seven post-Cup events were played in the fall, but also because they were destined to fall off the schedule.
Once there were seven. On the 2009 PGA Tour schedule, just announced, five tournaments remain. Tournament officials suggest that another event may be cobbled together for a date in early November, but I'm not holding my breath.
The country's economic hard times are part of why the PGA Tour is suddenly feeling a squeeze. The Ginn sur Mer event, held in the fall, disappeared because the sponsor, Ginn Resorts, is caught in the housing and real estate meltdown. No surprise there. The Valero Texas Open in San Antonio, which has long been on standby for a regular-season date, finally got an opening when the Atlanta tour stop couldn't find a sponsor.
And the other shoe could drop, perhaps in 2010, with the regular-season tournaments currently sponsored by struggling automakers — two Buick events, the Honda Classic and the Mercedes-Benz Championship, as well as the BMW Championship, a playoff tournament.
You can blame it all on hard times if you want, but the problems began before the current economic crisis. The tour showed overconfidence — dare I say arrogance? — in the way that it rode the wave created by Tiger Woods. Some of the decisions made during this period took the tour in the wrong direction.
I remember a press briefing earlier this decade in which Commissioner Tim Finchem boasted about the growing number of golf fans and the game's growing reach. As Woods became arguably the planet's No. 1 celebrity, the game drew more exposure. That succeeded in creating more casual fans — more Tiger fans, not golf fans — but it didn't seem to translate into more golfers, as figures on the number of players have remained flat. The Tiger-inspired audience that the Tour banked on is vast, but it's more fickle than one made up of golfers who will watch every week, no matter who's playing.
This irrational exuberance has led to some questionable decisions.
Too much television exposure: Finchem finally realized a long-term goal when every PGA Tour event got television coverage. The new age of televising golf on Thursdays and Fridays has backfired. At best, it's oversaturation. At worst, it's a bad product. My sympathies to the TV producers who have to find some kind of story to tell while covering the tail-end of the first or second rounds with nothing more to show than journeymen and Q-school grads. Often, the leader played in the morning, and no one near the lead is even on the course when the coverage begins. Factor in a B-team broadcast squad, and you've got a product far inferior to the weekend coverage.
Gigantic purses: Players are thrilled that prize money has climbed out of sight during the Tiger era, but jacking up the price of sponsoring a tournament to current levels ($8-10 million) in the wake of 9/11 was too aggressive. Tour purses in 1995 were $62 million; by 1999, the total was $134 million; by 2007, the figure had reached $270 million. The tour may have priced itself out of the market. During the glory years of Wall Street, when executives were voting themselves $30 million bonuses, maybe those figure were workable. Now? I'm not sure. The tour may need to reduce the cost of sponsoring tournaments to make it more affordable.
