Tiger Woods of the U.S. reacts after missing a birdie on the ninth hole during the final round of the WGC-HSBC Champions golf tournament in Shanghai, in this file image from November 7, 2010. A year after an early-morning auto accident led to revelations of marital infidelities, the world's former top golfer is trying to turn the page on his troubles. Woods wants consumers and sponsors to give him a second chance, and the PGA Tour, suffering from lower TV viewer numbers without a dominant Tiger, hopes he gets just that.ALY SONG
Unless Tiger Woods starts to win again, the PGA Tour could in 2011 find itself looking more like it did 15 years ago before he started to light up the golf world and ignite sponsors and the public.
Back then, only golf enthusiasts followed the professional game closely. Woods turned pro in August of 1996, won two PGA Tour events the rest of the year, and the sport took off. Casual and non-golfers followed his exploits. PGA Tour purses totalled $65.95-million (all currency U.S.) in 1996, and $279.8-million this year.
That was then, and this is now. This Saturday will mark the one-year anniversary of Woods crashing his SUV in front of his home in the middle of the night. His private life was soon exposed, and he's not been the same golfer since. Nor has the PGA Tour been the same.
Woods had won 71 PGA Tour events, including 14 major championships, prior to this year. It was expected that he would almost as a matter of routine inevitably pass Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors. But Woods didn't win any majors this year. He hasn't won any tournaments at all. He has one chance left, at the Chevron World Challenge next week in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Woods plays host to this invitation-only event for 18 players.
But only majors really matter to Woods. He's said that a season in which he wins a single major is a successful one. This year hasn't been successful for him by any standard, except, perhaps, that he's showing some recent improvement under the guidance of coach Sean Foley.
Foley, who is Canadian, has been working with Woods since August.
Woods has put together some stretches of strong golf, but hasn't come up with 72 holes the likes of which he did regularly.
Woods has been all but absent from contention. He's lost his world No. 1 ranking to Lee Westwood. Television ratings overall for PGA Tour events on weekends are down 21 per cent, which isn't a good thing for commissioner Tim Finchem as he and his associates enter negotiations for the next contract. The current television deal expires after the 2012 season. There are rumours that Finchem has asked Woods to play more in the first part of 2011 as talks begin.
Meanwhile, the veteran Westwood and some of the game's newer stars have opted not to take up PGA Tour membership next year. The list includes the current PGA Championship winner Martin Kaymer, and Rory McIlroy, the popular and hugely talented golfer from Northern Ireland.
Still, Graeme McDowell, the Northern Irishman who won the U.S. Open, will be a PGA Tour member. Kaymer and McIlroy will play some in the United States, but will focus on the European Tour, where they are members.
These golfers, talented as they are, will never draw like Woods at his best. The masses who watched golf while Woods stomped over his fellow players will evaporate. It's hard to see how this won't mean a retraction in title sponsors and perhaps even purses, although Finchem said during the Tour Championship in September that he didn't want to go "backwards."
"I think Tiger brings a lot of unique viewers to the telecast," Finchem said then. "Tiger doesn't generate the core audience that we have week in and week out. And I'll say this for maybe the 50th time: We have 47 tournaments; Tiger plays in 16. We have 120 tournaments and three or four we're looking for sponsors for. The economy is the problem, not Tiger."
But, Finchem added, "Having said that, there isn't any question that when you have not just the No. 1 player on this tour but the most dominating player in a sport in history, you want him playing because it makes a lot of things work a lot better. And we want him playing, we want him playing well, and given his intensity, we assume that'll be the case."
That wasn't the case this year, nor is there reason to assume it will be the case next year, or that the PGA Tour will return to its golden days of the last 15 years. But then, there wasn't much wrong when golfers such as Nicklaus, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino and Johnny Miller were playing, and when the core audience was the main audience.
The core audience may again become the only audience.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca .