CBSSports.com senior writer Steve Elling and Augusta Chronicle golf writer and columnist Scott Michaux, two guys who would get eaten alive in Las Vegas, take a look at Sin City's golf future and other scattershot, albeit less salacious, topics in this week's Shotgun Start. Let's start blasting.
| 1. Another PGA Tour event in Las Vegas has come and gone, and judging by the fan attendance spotted during the Golf Channel broadcast, nobody much noticed. Is there a future for golf in that glitzy town? | |
| Steve Elling | Scott Michaux |
 You don't need to be a CSI to see that the Vegas tour event, as a fan draw, is as dead as Liberace and about nine times less colorful. A string of first-time and largely obscure winners, a spot in the watered-down Fall Series and tepid fields can't be overcome merely by cutting ticket prices or propping up Justin Timberlake as host. There was media discussion last week about what needs to happen in order for the event to slide into the FedEx season, but apathy looks like a huge hurdle. Vegas tournament officials believe they can pull bigger turnstile numbers if the tour can get Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods (who won his first career title in Vegas) to play, but that's a refrain every other tournament director is humming, too. Vegas is a city built on the backs of stars like Elvis, Sinatra and Streisand. The transient city's Triple-A baseball team averaged 4,169 for its home games, the fourth-worst total in the 16-team Pacific Coast League. In other words, if the stars aren't there, second-tier sports events are a hard sell. Besides, the wretched and legendary excesses of Sin City just don't seem to mesh with the haughty, image-conscious mindset of golf. It seems like a bad fit. There's nothing remotely neon about golf, is there? |  What you call a "bad fit," I contend is a "good opportunity." The PGA Tour needs to break out of its fuddy-duddy mode with some neon flash if it really wants to grow the game among fans. Embracing the star of an incredibly talented and likeable guy such as Justin Timberlake would be a good start. Timberlake made no bones about his desire for the event to "get in the FedEx Cup. I'm still pretty vocal about that." Why not give the guy a chance to see if his Midas touch can work in a slot more conducive to drawing a decent field that might draw fans? So what if all of his material sometimes exceeds PG-13 and his viral SNL videos aren't appealing to everyone in the Cialis audience. The tour brass might not recognize a good cross-promotional opportunity if it was 6-foot-6 and dressed up in a U.S. team Presidents Cup uniform. I fear they'll pull the plug on Timberlake the same way they did with George Lopez when he was energetically doing everything he could to revitalize the floundering Bob Hope event in Palm Springs. Give JT a chance and see if he can work some celebrity magic and get Tiger, Phil and friends to show up at a time when they are willing. Tiger jam's Vegas once a year, doesn't he? Maybe a little schedule coordination could do the trick. |
| 2. The European Tour player council has tabled, for now anyway, a plan that would have forced players to compete in certain weeks as a means of keeping stars on the Continent for key tournaments. The Euro Tour last year raised the membership minimum from 11 to 12 tournaments last year to keep players at home more often. Do you envision these arm-twisting tactics working? | |
| Steve Elling | Scott Michaux |
| The talent siphoning is a cause for concern and even the Race to Dubai, which began this year as a huge financial carrot at the end of the seasonal stick, apparently isn't enough to keep the European Tour stars from playing overseas (read: U.S. and Asia) much of the year. Mandating that guys play in designated events is a tough ask. What is this, NASCAR, where every driver runs every week? Sure, sponsors are unhappy that they aren't getting better fields for their bucks, a common and completely legitimate complaint in the States, too, especially as companies re-think their investment in sports marketing. The banking title sponsor in Milwaukee, an opposite event, quit last week after earlier bemoaning the lack of electricity and recognizable names on the golf course. Yet it's hard to see how establishing a points system -- players would need to amass some sort of membership count by playing in select events -- will play out. But if that plan is instituted, it's a calculated risk, because if top players balk and play even more often elsewhere in reaction, Euro Tour sponsors will really be screaming. It's a tough business predicament, which is why the U.S. tour is discussing using rotating tournament dates to potentially help second-tier events occasionally draw better players. Using a music analogy, golf is the only tour where the headliners and frontmen don't sing at every stop. | Here's the biggest problem with mandating certain events: just how unhappy are the tournaments NOT being mandated going to be? This would be a Euro Tour equivalent of the "Tiger" tour that exists in the U.S. Tiger plays essentially the same schedule every year with few exceptions, and the events that don't get him don't get the exposure of the events that do. How do you plan your coverage schedule, Steve? Does a Tiger tournament take priority in the travel budget? That would be what the European Tour would be doing if it mandated certain events as must-plays over others. Why would the others even want to exist? I ask myself the same question about the Fall Series every year. So while you may compel players to play more often at certain designated checkpoints, you'd end up with a secondary infection in the other venues that could be more dangerous in the long run. Just let it be. There have always been plenty of big stars who will never felt comfortable with a U.S.-based schedule and there is enough Ryder Cup incentive for even the ones who do to support their home tour. What is wrong with a system that lifted the tour from obscurity to a level of relative equality with the PGA Tour? |
| 3. Look into your dimpled crystal balls. Seven years down the road, as golf is poised to become a medal sport in the Olympic Games for the first time in more than a century, will the game's global landscape have changed much? | |
| Steve Elling | Scott Michaux |
| Even the folks pushing the propaganda parade can't seem to agree on that issue. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem says he believes golf will experience a huge growth spurt over the short term, meaning the next six or seven years in advance of the Games. Ty Votaw, one of his army of V.P. types, says it will take 60 years to find a significant foothold in some countries. From this vantage point, the potential parallels between golf and tennis seem increasingly clear. Tennis is also played in several countries and has been an Olympic medal sport for the past 20 years, yet the traction seemingly has been limited. Given the extraordinary amounts of infrastructure needed to play golf -- like building and maintaining quality courses -- I just don't see how this is going to be a boon anywhere outside the Asian nations, where an increasing middle class is emerging. Maybe that's enough to fuel the game over the next three decades or so. No question, golf certainly seems to have reached its saturation point in the West. | Tiger Woods changed the face of golf with his landmark victory at the 1997 Masters. He attracted a whole new audience to the game. He inspired a movement of First Tee programs aimed at providing opportunities for minorities and underprivileged kids to get involved with the sport so that one day the PGA Tour would not look so lily white. How's that working out? We're 12 years down that road and Woods remains the one and only black golfer at the game's highest level. And it's not as though the second and third tiers are loaded with minority stars in waiting. At this point I'm not even sure we'll ever see a tour that looks like a true cross-section of America. But if that does happen, it will take generations. Tiger has repeatedly said as much when asked about it. It took generations to get from emancipation to civil rights and it took 44 more years to get from there to electing an African-American president. My guess is that Votaw is right and that golf's global spread will be slower than Ben Crane. Let's hope it works and hope that the rest of the world doesn't import the American model of exclusivity. If it does, what's really been gained? |
