Tag: Champions Tour

Did the Web.com Tour Finals work? Maybe, but it was certainly misnamed.

It is all over. Tour school or Web.com Tour Finals or whatever you want to call it is over and its now time to allow the dust to settle.

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Did it work? Did you understand it? Did you even care enough to try to understand it? These are questions thePGATour needs to address.

It really should not have been called the Web.com Tour Finals because half of the field was from thePGATour in the first place. I believe that the Web.Com company via paying thePGATour some $10 Million annually for the umbrella sponsorship demanded that their name be on this 4 tournament package of events, even if it was misnamed.

The Tour was not going to displace this $10 million sponsor and upset the first year of a 12 year sponsorship to make sure the fans understood the events. No way, but now that it is over and one year is under everyone’s belt, they need to tweak it to the point that only Web.Com players participate, or simply come up with a marketable name to enhance the events going forward.

Like when they changed the Senior Tour to call it the Champions Tour. That sounds better.

Come up with a better name, make it tour qualifying school only and it will work and be understandable going forward.

The Champions Tour has become golf’s mulligan for the not-so-great and it is OK

I find the Champions Tour—the over the hill 50 plus guys still loving to play and loving to get PGA Tour paychecks just OK—not great, not overly exciting just pretty darn OK and that’s well, that’s pretty darn OK with me.

The overall packaging of the tour is different than the regular PGA Tour.  They usually play 3 rounds instead of 4, and that gives the players an additional day for more pro-ams, and that gives more people a chance to experience playing and watching the champions in a relaxed mode.  One other major factor that makes this tour so worthwhile is the charities that benefit from its existence.  Never forget for one minute that charity is always the biggest property the tours have. The total amount of money raised by all the PGA Tours combined is fast approaching $2 billion.  It literally changes lives and that is way more than OK.

A couple of weeks ago John Riegger won an event on the Champions Tour—he just turned 50 in June and went to Q school last fall got his card and is set to go—Riegger never won on the PGA Tour—so he got his mulligan and took full advantage of it right away.  Good for him.  Yesterday Esteban Toledo won his second champions Tour event defeating Kenny Perry in a 3 hole playoff in Montreal, Canada—Toledo had never won in a long PGA Tour career—yes, indeed it is more than O.K. with me.

 

These are just two stories of the Champions Tour.