The Australasian Tour schedule was released recently with four events to be contested in Australia later this year. The Triple Crown events – the Australian Masters, Australian Open and Australian PGA – have been joined by a European, Asian and Australasian Tour tri-sanctioned tournament, the Perth International.
In an ever-increasing battle to find dates for Australian events, organisers have to try to ensure they don’t clash with overseas tournaments which carry prize purses up to eight times higher than what is available here. Tournament owners – like the PGA, Golf Australia and the International Management Group – have done the best they can to avoid going head-to-head with events like the two US$7 million tournaments in China (October 25 to November 4) as well as the US$8 million World Tour Championship (November 22-25), which will all attract some of the biggest names in the game.
The Perth International (October 18 to 21) will carry a $2 million purse and will be played at the Mike Clayton-redesigned Lake Karrinyup in Perth’s inner northern suburbs. The field will draw on players from the three sanctioned tours but don’t expect any 2012 major winners because the event date clashes with the Grand Slam of Golf in Bermuda. Missing also will be a host of US-based Australian players who may need to play PGA Tour Fall Series events to ensure they keep their card for 2013.
The Australian Masters (November 15-18) will go head-to-head with two European Tour sanctioned events — the Hong Kong and South African Opens — being played the same week. With an $8 million carrot being dangled the week after in Dubai at the World Tour Championship, Europe’s best players might choose to sit out the preceding week to be fresh for the event, especially if their schedule included the Ryder Cup six weeks earlier. This suggests some name American players might be on the shopping list for the Masters, which returns to Kingston Heath.
As for the Open (The Lakes in Sydney from December 6 to 9) and PGA (Coolum Resort from December 13 to 16), they might look to European stars to join our local favourites as the Americans, for the most part, will be at home celebrating Thanksgiving and preparing for Christmas.
Right now, I think any event that could boast Rory McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Geoff Ogilvy, Adam Scott and Jason Day in the field is likely to be a memorable tournament.
With tournament organisers here likely to start announcing star attractions within the next month or two, it begs the question: will they opt to pay millions in appearance fees to Tiger Woods again or will they target the likes of McIlroy, Fowler and other overseas stars from ‘Generation Next’, who have seemingly taken over the game from where Woods left off pre-scandal?
Personally, if I had control of the purse strings, I would target the likes of Rory and Fowler because I believe with each appearance Tiger makes in Australia he is having less of an impact.
When he was here for the Masters in 2009, there was saturation coverage of his presence. He was front and back page news across the country and his every move was monitored and broadcast. Then there was the scandal.
There was much less fuss over Woods when he defended his Masters title at Victoria Golf Club in 2010. Last year, he played the Australian Open and backed-up the following week at the Presidents Cup in Melbourne and, while the crowds following him were enough to make a tournament promoter grin from ear-to-ear, they certainly did not compare with Kingston Heath in ’09. The hype about him, across all forms of media, was not as great either.
I would argue that Woods’ value to an event, and the appearance fee he demands, is decreasing with every tournament he plays these days. Back in 2009 when the Victorian Government (and the tax payers it represents) stumped up most of the $4 million fee to get Woods to Melbourne, he was an unbackable favourite. At the very least, he could be expected to be around for four days and give the galleries value for money simply because he didn’t miss cuts. After all, think of the appearance money that has been pocketed by overseas players through the years and they have been on the first flight home on Friday night. In 2009, Woods was a guaranteed four-day player.
That is no longer the case. Since returning to the game post-scandal at the 2010 Masters, Tiger has had 28 starts on the PGA Tour for six top-10s and a combined six missed cuts and withdrawals through injury. The days where he would go an entire year, or two, without missing a cut are well and truly a thing of the past.
The fact is, much has changed with Woods’ game in the past three years, but the biggest change is that Tiger has lost his bankable consistency.
“If I get over the golf ball and I feel uncomfortable, I hit it great,” Woods said after missing the cut at Quail Hollow last month. “It’s just that I get out there and I want to get comfortable, and I follow my old stuff, and I hit it awful.”
Tiger sounds confused, so whatever ‘concepts’ swing coach Sean Foley is feeding him, they don’t appear to be working. I’m not alone in thinking the best thing Tiger could do is leave the concepts behind, go to the range and practise until he owns his swing again.
Lee Trevino said something similar recently. “What he needs to do is go off by himself and take it out of the ground. That’s what I did, that’s Mr (Ben) Hogan did. All of the old pros used to take it out of the ground. There was no instructor, there was no guru, no sports psychologist and all this other stuff,” he said.
Sadly, I don’t think Woods is going to follow such advice, and with each passing week he battles with his swing, the list of players who regularly beat him grows longer and the queue of tournament organisers with fistfuls of appearance money grows shorter.
Would you go to a tournament this year to watch Tiger Woods or would you prefer to see Rory McIlroy? Let me know your thoughts below.
