Unlike other major sports leagues, the PGA Tour does not break at the half point of a season. There are no all-star festivities of any sort, no post-season all-star team selections or televised award shows. It may not be such a bad idea to host a PGA Tour All-Star weekend, featuring Tiger Woods doing his bouncing-balls-off-his-clubs tricks, Phil Mickelson hitting flop shots over the head of a 6-foot-5 man standing two feet away and Sergio Garcia gripping and regripping and regripping and regripping and... well, you get the story.
But seriously, wouldn't it be something to have Woods and John Daly go head-to-head in a long drive competition? Or pit Brad Faxon against Loren Roberts in a putting contest that determines who sinks more 45-foot downhill, double-break putts?
If the Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem is concerned about generating revenues or handling costs, no problem. I am no economics or marketing major, but then again, it doesn't take an M.B.A. to figure out that as long as Tiger is there, fans will come and it will be fairly easy to get sponsors. Attach their names to the contests-similar to what the NBA does during its all-star weekend-and the problem is solved. Perhaps I should be careful here since Finchem once stole Greg Norman's idea of the World Tour and recast it to create the Tour's set of World Golf Championships. Then again, why would Finchem ever read this story and try to steal my idea of the PGA Tour All-Star weekend?
Anyway, 26 of 49 PGA Tour-sanctioned tournaments have been played by the end of the last week, and with two of the season's four majors completed, it's an appropriate time to look back on what has been yet another interesting PGA Tour season. (translation: I've run out of material and am suffering from the post-U.S. Open syndrome, so bear with me this week as I resort back to a good ol' list.) Let's have some fun with numbers, shall we?
- 9-first time winners on the Tour so far this year.
- 10-foreign-born winners, including back-to-back triumphs by Korea's K.J. Choi and Japanese Shigeki Maruyama.
- 89-consecutive cuts Woods has made through the U.S. Open, and 11 so far this year. The record is 113 set by Byron Nelson, followed by Jack Nicklaus' 105.
- 16-statistical categories in which Woods is in the top three. He leads nine of them, including greens in regulation, scoring average, money list and final round scoring average.
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