With its huge prize money the Million Dollar can attract top overseas players, but the poorer tournaments on the local tour can’t compete
GOLF:Jon Swift
THERE IS a feeling of distinct inevitability about the way the professional golf tour in this country is starting to fragment. The Zimbabwean customs holding back golf balls and equipment before the start of the FNB Tour’s pipe-opener at the Royal Harare Gold Club perhaps typifies
Especially when the contrast between the R400 000 Zimbabwe Open and the R9-million Nedbank Million Dollar at Sun City next week is so vast an African chasm.
With superstar Nick Price a linking factor between the two tournaments – and it must be pointed out that the Million Dollar does not form part of the tour – it serves to illustrate more graphically than anything what is happening to professional golf in this sector of the ever- shrinking globe.
It is simply this. There are big tournaments with TV. And then there are little tournaments which hardly anyone – least of all the Zimbabwean customs – seems to care about any more. There is no middle ground.
This is not meant as a criticism of FNB Tour commissioner Brent Chalmers. He has his critics and his flaws. But Chalmers has, if you will pardon the phraseology, played the best shot he could from the lie he was given.
It is a relatively simple matter to pump up interest in a tournament like the Million Dollar. Price alone is worth the trip to Solcatraz. And, even if he fails to play as well again as he did in 1993 when he shot a staggering 24-under-par devastation of a class field, the golf will be straight out of the top
You also cannot argue that the likes of holder Nick Faldo, Ernie Els, Bernhard Langer and Corey Pavin in a world-class field of 12 will fail to draw the galleries. They will. But then it is a long, long wait to the Philips SA Open at Royal Cape in mid-January.
And you could argue a substantial drop in money from the Million Dollar to the R750 000 on offer
Chalmers had to do something to upgrade the status of a tour which could not even offer the equivalent of a high finish on the American Nike Tour for winning a title in South Africa.
Examine, if you will, how he has had to go about it. Chalmers has taken the bold step – in retrospect perhaps even he would admit that it was a step too far in last season’s disappointing Lexington PGA – of getting the FNB Tour accepted as part of the European circuit.
While this will not mean automatic entry into the two European events finalised thus far – the Dunhill PGA at Houghton and the DiData Pro-am at Sun City – it will ensure that the top 70 South Africans on the Order of Merit will play for bigger purses.
And it has the salutary effect on the game in this country of lending some relevance and credibility to South Africa on the professional merry-go-round of world golf.
On the downside, the inclusion of the pair of European events – Chalmers is still aiming for a third – is the equally inescapable fact that the traditional sponsors who have backed the game in this country using cash earned in this country are starting to get cross, angry and also more than a little annoyed.
The Bell’s Cup has gone. The ICL International is a casualty after over two decades. The SA Masters has been saved … but only just.
A half-million rand tournament is big money for a local company. Especially when you apply the old promotional rule of thumb that you double the prize money to get to the real outlay.
It doesn’t even raise a ripple of interest as a cash incentive in America, Europe, Australia or the Far East.
New sponsors are becoming as endangered a species as those who traditionally supported the
Over the past few years, new developments centred round golf courses have been the target for sponsorship. These backers are – by the sheer weight of commercial considerations – largely of a transitory nature.
When all the units are sold, all the membership slots at the country club filled, the promotional cash – and with it the tournament sponsorship – must surely dry up. If this does not happen, buy somewhere else.
Chalmers has also been instrumental in integrating the winter and summer tours into one entity. It has been an innovative move which has allowed the stay-at-home pros to shoot for proper prize money each week and have it count towards the bigger money tournaments over the Christmas period.
There is the distinct feeling though that the trend manifested in the reluctance of companies to get involved in the tour with the same gusto of old could have the eventual result of this country having a handful of tournaments the public is
which has sheet-anchored the Winter Tour, a tournament that might provide tremendous battles for top spot and hugely entertaining golf, but one which is viewed by a scattered handful.
At the heart of the problems which still lie ahead are two interlinked and inescapable facts.
Our currency is worth little in world terms and likely to become even more insignificant as a monetary unit in the near future. This is the currency the tour organisers have devalued to potential sponsors; and the converted form of the crippled rand they have to upgrade in speaking to overseas players.
And now this country has secured the World Cup of Golf for Erinvale Country Club at Somerset West in 1996. When it was won for the fourth consecutive time by America’s Fred Couples and Davis Love at Shenzhen in mainland China, the total purse was 1.3-million dollars.
Convert that to rands at today’s rate and it runs close to R4-million. That’s about the number of nightmares Brent Chalmers has before that particular tournament is played next
Not because he has to raise it – even though his much overpublicised commission would be substantial – but because it dips even further into the drought-ridden sponsorship pool which is the only one Chalmers has to paddle in.