A major hat tip to ESPN.com’s Jason Sobel who alerted me to two stories I missed this week:
1) As I mentioned last week, Tiger is not only playing in this week’s Memorial, but he’s also playing in Jack Nicklaus’ Skins Game which takes place on Wednesday (Live at 1pm ET on Golf Channel). Phil Mickelson is also in the field, and Jack chose to play with Phil this year, and not Tiger. Mr. Sobel wonders if this is a mini-swipe by Jack at Tiger’s recent transgressions.
(My take: I think there definitely may be something to it…maybe it’s Jack saying I’m going to “punish” you by not playing with you for this year, and then next year I’ll play with you again…something like that.)
2) Jason mentioned this Golfweek story about how, in an effort to get the PGA Tour’s big names to play more events, the Tour may start “forcing” them to play one of a select “designated” events.
My take: I’m all for this plan…I’d love to see Tiger, Phil, AK and others play events they normally don’t play and help more of the local communities. My fear, however, is that someone like Tiger will REPLACE an event he normally plays with one of these “designated events.” That would do nobody any good because Tiger’s tournament # would stay at around 18 or 19.
So while I like the plan, you need the top players to be completely on board or else this won’t work.
This is all coming to fruition, by the way, according to Golfweek, because the next Players Advisory Council meeting is Tuesday at The Memorial. Hopefully the TV initiatives that they talked about at Hilton Head will finally get approved (as the GW article kind of hints at), because that would help TV broadcasts immensely.
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