Doral

Byline: Leonard Shapiro

The recent final round of the Ford Championship on Doral's Blue Monster, with Tiger Woods going head to head against Phil Mickelson over the last 18 holes, may well be a portent of wonderful events to come over the next six months of the 2005 PGA Tour season.

Woods' enthralling one-shot victory two Sundays ago not only received the highest golf television rating of any event so far this season, it also may have been the best indication yet of his return to the fabulous form he demonstrated in his dominant 2000 season, when he won three major championships and dominated the game.

His performance over a stretch of time when he won seven out of 11 major championships in a three-year span also had another dramatic effect on the sport that has started to play out over the last two seasons.

Woods' closest rivals knew that in order to stay competitive with him, they, too, had to raise the level of their own games. So now, we really do have a Big Four--Woods, No. 2 Vijay Singh, No. 3 Ernie Els and No. 4 Phil Mickelson--as well as at least a dozen other players, almost as big names like Retief Goosen, Davis Love III, David Toms, Sergio Garcia, Mike Weir and Adam Scott, among others, who have the ability to compete at the highest levels of the game on a very consistent basis.

Woods and Mickelson have already won twice on the PGA Tour. Els has had back-to-back victories on the European Tour in the last two weeks and Singh has won once and should have won last week at the Honda Classic until he missed a 21/2-foot putt to lose a playoff to Padraig Harrington, yet another emerging big-time player on the world scene.

The main concern the PGA Tour now is facing is how to get these players to show up for the same events on a fairly regular basis, the better to keep those TV ratings high and corporate sponsors lining up at tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra to get in on the action.

At Doral, Ford built its field the old fashioned way--with cold hard cash. The company paid between $500,000 to $600,000 essentially to lure Singh, Garcia, Harrington and Goosen into the field. That was the price they shelled out to have the four players show up at a corporate outing in South Florida on the Monday before the Ford Championship to play with Ford executives and dealers. And, by the way, all four players would also tee it up on Thursday at Doral.

The PGA Tour has strict rules on so-called appearance fees, where sponsors pay the best players a guarantee to compete in their event. The tour insisted that because the four players had already committed to the tournament, the corporate outing didn't break the rules.

Oh, please.

No wonder the following week, IMG, the world's largest company represent and marketing high profile athletes in a wide variety of sports, confirmed that it had sent letters out to tournament sponsors and directors around the country offering to package some of their clients for similar outings, with the understanding that they, too, would then enter those tournaments.

At that point, the tour issued a statement decrying such tactics, as it probably should have done before the Ford Championship was allowed to pay for players, as well. Perhaps this was the opening salvo in what could become an ugly little war between the tour and the world's largest athletic marketing and management company representing many of the best players on the tour, including Woods and Singh.

The tour really does have to take a very hard stance on this issue, and eliminate any whiff of impropriety involving player participation in its events. It would also be nice for the tour to institute some sort of system that would give every event on its schedule a chance to have a Woods, a Mickelson, an Els in its field.

Woods, for example, has never played in Washington's PGA Tour stop. But couldn't there be some mandate from tour headquarters that all players in the top 125 be required to visit each event on the schedule at least once every four or five years?

The problem, of course, is that the players who make up the PGA Tour would have to vote on any such radical notion. As independent contractors who have always been allowed to pick and choose their spots with no outside interference, it does not seem likely to happen.

Instead, big-time tournament corporate sponsors like Ford and Buick have provided their own solution in assuring the best men participate in their events.

Ford sponsors Mickelson, a guarantee he'll be at Doral as long as the checks keep coming. Buick, which hosts three different events on the tour, sponsors Woods, who usually shows up for two out of three. Last week, Genuity, which sponsors the Honda Classic, announced a deal to sponsor Davis Love, assuring his presence in the field in the next few years.

The good news for golf fans is that most of the top players will usually play between 20-25 events a season, including the four majors, The Players Championship and the World Golf championships. With so many men playing at the top of their respective games, at least the odds seem to be getting better for a repeat of that memorable Sunday at Doral, and appearance money be damned.

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at Badgerlen@hotmail.com

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