The number's up for genteel golf
Golf conservatives – and the sport is hardly short of them – may care to look away now.
The billionaire backers behind the European Tour’s Race to Dubai are considering everything from floodlit tournaments and new team events to numbers on the back of shirts as part of their drive to make the sport more relevant to the next generation.
They hope their revolutionary outlook – as well as their money – will entice exciting American-based players like Anthony Kim and Camilo Villegas to play in Europe in future and a younger audience to follow them.
There is a price to pay for accepting £50 million of oil money and the European Tour’s decision to get into bed with Leisurecorp, the sporting arm of the Dubai government, could well have ramifications beyond merely side-stepping the credit crunch. The kaleidoscope will be shaken when the first Race to Dubai begins at the HSBC Champions tournament in Shanghai in a month’s time. The pieces may take some time to settle but when they do golf’s landscape could be changed markedly.
It is all becoming a bit old hat
“Our ambition is not necessarily to change the format of golf but to enhance it and make it more relevant to the next generation,” said David Spencer, the chief executive of Leisurecorp. “It is all becoming a bit old hat – there have to be new things to make it more colourful. You have to chase the dream. You have to believe anything is possible.
“We are putting in tons of money. The Race to Dubai has raised the bar in professional golf and has captured the imagination of golfers around the world. We want to impress on players like Sergio Garcia, Camilo Villegas and Anthony Kim we are about improving the game and making them bigger players globally.
“There is a great dynamism to those twenty-somethings. The US thinks they are great and on the European Tour we want to celebrate that greatness.”
For Garcia, who flew into Turnberry by helicopter for the launch of The Race to Dubai yesterday, the wider vision clearly has appeal. He has committed to increasing his appearances on the European Tour next year and expects others to do likewise with the carrot of the top 60 on the Tour making it through to the £5m Dubai World Championship shoot-out on Greg Norman’s Earth Course on November 19 next year.
“The Tour has clearly moved up a gear in its ability to attract the world’s best players,” said Garcia. “It will certainly help focus the interest of the players and I for one will be seeking to get to Dubai and make a great finish to the season. I want to be in it and I want to win it.”
The uncertainty over the funding of many PGA Tour events in America – 14 of them are sponsored by financial institutions – has led many US-based players to look beyond their usual boundaries.
None of them has so far paid the £115 membership fee for the European Tour but Tour chief executive George O’Grady believes that many will.
“I am confident that we will see a real injection of quality into the European Tour. We are going to see bigger names playing,” said O’Grady, who suggested this could include Phil Mickelson, Adam Scott and Vijay Singh.
Even with oil backing, the European Tour is still not averse to the global financial problems. The schedule for next season released yesterday contained 53 tournaments, 10 of which had no confirmed venue.
That includes the Seve Trophy which may fall by the wayside after being eclipsed in terms of spectator numbers by a nearby ploughing championship when it was last staged in Ireland.
