Lorne Rubenstein | |
Is the Canadian Open in big trouble?
May 15, 2006
What's going on with the Canadian Open? The rest of the golf world probably doesn't care, but it's a hot topic in Canada. It might not be as interesting to most people as whatever Mike Weir is doing or not doing, but the subject still gets plenty of attention.
Here's why: The Canadian Open, which started in 1904, is slipping so far down the line from the significant tournament it once was that it's painful to watch. It must be very painful in particular for Bill Paul, the Canadian Open's tournament director who works impossibly hard, talks to players and their managers endlessly, yet watches year after year as the tournament declines in importance.
The latest indignity is the date that the PGA Tour doled out to the Royal Canadian Golf Association starting in 2007, the year the FedEx Cup begins. It's moving from early September to the week after the British Open. The former date was bad; the new one is very bad, even though the Canadian Open wanted a summer date and even though it will be part of the FedEx Cup. It could have become part of the so-called Quest for the Card, the series of PGA Tour events that will follow the FedEx Cup.
The date's hopeless, but both PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem and the Royal Canadian Golf Association's executive director Stephen Ross still said they were "bullish" on the new date when it was announced on January 13th. Another word that begins with "bull" comes to mind.
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Ian Baker-Finch has been very out-spoken on the new dates for the Canadian Open calling them "Suicide". |
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It's so bad that Ian Baker-Finch, the 1991 British Open champion who has always thought of the Canadian Open as an important event because it's a national championship, used the word "suicide" when referring to the date. He was speaking specifically to how poor the date is likely to be should the Royal Canadian Golf Association, which conducts the tournament in conjunction with the PGA Tour, holds the tournament anywhere west of Toronto.
Baker-Finch didn't think the date, which will run through 2012, will be all that bad when the tournament is in the Toronto or Montreal area. But the RCGA is in a bind. It's committed itself to moving the tournament around Canada, which basically means around Montreal, Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver. The Canadian Open's a national championship as well as a PGA Tour event. It has to move around to justify that designation as "national."
That being the case, it's worth noting that Richard Zokol, a Canadian and a two-time winner on the PGA Tour, dates the Canadian Open's slide back to 1977, when the tournament was first held at the Jack Nicklaus-designed Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario. It was held there every year through 2000, except in 1980 and 1997, when the Royal Montreal Golf Club's Blue course was the site. Zokol played the last of his 28 Canadian Opens in 2004, and he's passionate about the tournament.
"The RCGA when it brought in Jack Nicklaus assumed that kryptonite couldn't take the tournament down," Zokol said the other day. "Even though the Canadian Open got Nicklaus (in fact, it had been getting Nicklaus for years, and he finished second in the tournament seven times but never won it), it lost a lot of other players, guys like [Tom] Watson, [Tom] Kite, and [Ray] Floyd. Fifty per cent of the Tour didn't like Glen Abbey."
Photo © Stan Badz/WireImage |
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Richard Zokol feels that the Royal Canadian Golf Association didn't listen to the players and their thoughts. |
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Zokol argues that the direction the RCGA took cost the tournament the respect of the players. This wasn't only because some players didn't like Glen Abbey, he said, but because the tournament ceased in their eyes becoming a national tournament; it no longer moved around the country.
"They didn't listen to other players," Zokol said. "They didn't have the pulse of the Tour. The Canadian Open was very lucky it got [Lee] Trevino (1977,1979), [Nick] Price (1991, 1994), [Mark] O'Meara (1995) and [Greg] Norman (1984 and 1992) as winners. Then Tiger [Woods] won in 2000, and Vijay [Singh] in 2004."
Zokol insists that the RCGA caused the Canadian Open problems, and that the PGA Tour in giving the tournament a poor date is simply responding to the developments, or lack of them.
"So now you have a situation where you've had companies like Imperial Tobacco (the sponsor prior to Bell) and Bell, which have sponsored the tournament, don't market to the U.S.," he added. "Bell is out now (it declined to renew its title sponsorship after 2006, although it will still continue in a lesser role). So who's going to come in? I think the RCGA has to go to a global company, maybe to a Chinese company."
Meanwhile, the RCGA took the Bell Canadian Open to Vancouver's Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club last September. It was doing what it said it would do, moving the tournament around. The buzz on the track was that it was classic and strong, and it was. But what happened was what was expected to happen. The field was weaker than the Toronto Maple Leafs have been since they last won the Stanley Cup, which was in 1967. The Canadian Open, by the way, hadn't been in Vancouver since 1966, when it was also at Shaughnessy. It hadn't been in western Canada since then.
Photo © Stan Badz/WireImage |
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Despite Shaughnessy Golf Club being a classic and great course only 17 of the top 50 players bothered to show up. |
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Still, only three of the top 10 players on the PGA Tour money list showed up at Shaughnessy. They were defending champion Singh, Fred Funk and Chris DiMarco. The sponsor had brought them out to Shaughnessy in the spring, along with Weir, in hopes they'd like the course and take back the good word to the PGA Tour, which they did.
They did, but more top players didn't. Show up, that is. Only 17 of the top 50 players on the PGA Tour's money list made the trip to Vancouver. Well, they couldn't have been expected to take the long trek from the previous week's Deutsche Bank Championship near Boston, right? After all, that tournament ended on Monday, not Sunday. Never mind that charter flights were made available for players from Boston to Vancouver, before and after the cut at the Deutsche Bank Championship.
But that was then, and this is now. But there's nothing new about now. The RCGA didn't have any say in the new dates from 2007 forward, and tried to spin its new summer date as wonderful and all that when it was announced.
But really, what sort of field will gather come 2007 when the tournament will be held the week after the British Open, the week before the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational in Akron, Ohio, and two weeks before the PGA Championship? The Canadian Open could be held in Newfoundland, in the far east of Canada, the RCGA could again charter flights from the British Open, and most top players still won't play the next week.
Let's see: Which of those four tournaments do you think Tiger Woods and his colleagues at the top of the tour will pass on? As for Weir and his fellow Canadian Stephen Ames, they'll have quite a month. The Canadian Open is the fifth major for both Weir and Ames. There's no way they wouldn't play in it.
"The Canadian Open is the perfect week to take off," Zokol said. "The PGA Tour gave the tournament the dates because it doesn't have a sponsor. It's the RCGA's fault for not keeping pace. The PGA Tour moved the tournament to the back of the bus."
Photo © Marc Feldman/WireImage |
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Ian Leggatt feels that the tournament could turn around if they stuck to a permanent rotation of great golf courses. |
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Ian Leggatt chimed in on the conversation. Leggatt, also a Canadian, won the 2002 Touchstone Energy Tucson Open and has been playing the PGA Tour this year under a medical exemption.
"The problem is that other tournaments have been moving way ahead of the Canadian Open in what they do for the players," he said. "Lots of tournaments got better, while the RCGA fell behind." Leggatt referred specifically to the Wachovia Championship in Charlotte, which since it started in 2003, on a superior course, has become known for what it does for the players (fancy courtesy cars, endless baubles). Above all, there's the quality of the Quail Hollow course.
"The RCGA could turn the tournament around in a year," Leggatt contends. "If they stuck to a permanent rotation of great courses, or even if they stayed at Hamilton (the Harry Colt-designed Hamilton Golf and Country Club in Ancaster, Ontario, which hosted the 2003 tournament to rave reviews) and said the purse is $6.5 million, it would turn right around. There are only two reasons players come to tournaments, the purse and the course."
As for now, the RCGA is having a difficult time trying to find a new sponsor. A new title sponsor, or, more likely, a conglomerate of two to four sponsors, will have to ensure television coverage in the U.S. as well as Canada. But why would any sponsor or sponsors want to support a tournament with the date the PGA Tour has provided?
Or, to ask the question another way, why would any sponsor want to come in with the millions and millions of dollars needed, when it's sure to get a weak field? "Weak" in this context doesn't refer to the quality of golf that anybody with a PGA Tour card can play. All players who hold PGA Tour cards are talented. But golf fans want to watch the stars. A sponsor wants to at least think that some of the stars will show up.
In the case of the Canadian Open, it would be delusional for a sponsor or potential sponsor to believe that. The RCGA and Canadians are hoping that a very good field will show up this September at Hamilton. Here's hoping.
Whatever happens this year, though, the future looks bleak.
"It's a shame that tournaments like the Canadian Open with a tremendous history in the game are not kept up in the upper echelons of golf," Greg Norman said during a recent interview in his office in Jupiter, Fla. "I really, really truly believe that. National events are made by the competitors. To me, national titles, the British Open the U.S. Open, the Australian Open, the Canadian Open, you wanted a national title. I feel for the Canadian Open."
And well he should. So should anybody who cares about the Canadian Open. Canadians do. But so what? The Canadian Open is sinking, and it's hard to see how it will ever recover the prestige it used to have. Way back when. Way, way, back when.
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