Click on the BMW Championship Web site and you will see a link for people to register as volunteers for the 2008 event at Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis.
It is a not-so-subtle hint about the state of professional golf in Chicago.
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For the first time, the tournament the Western Golf Association runs, dating to 1899, won’t have “Western” in its title. When play begins Thursday at Cog Hill in Lemont, the players will be competing in the BMW Championship, the third stop in the PGA Tour’s new FedEx Cup playoff series.
After the pros clear out of town Sunday, they won’t return again until 2009. The current plan calls for the tournament to rotate out of Chicago every other year, with 2008 in St. Louis and 2010 at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis.
That means in 2008 the season’s only professional event will be the Nationwide Tour’s LaSalle Bank Open at the Glen Club in Glenview in early June — late spring.
There won’t be any local opportunities to see Lorena Ochoa and Annika Sorenstam on the LPGA Tour; that circuit hasn’t been here since 2004. Forget about seeing Tom Watson and Hale Irwin on the Champions Tour; the older pros haven’t been in Chicago since 2002.
And if you want to see Tiger Woods and company next summer, you will have to drive to St. Louis or elsewhere.
By contrast, Atlanta will have two PGA Tour events next year and a third if you include the Masters, which is just down the road in Augusta. The Dallas area also is scheduled for two events. Smaller markets such as Memphis, Hartford and the Quad Cities will host tournaments.
Repeat, nothing in Chicago.
How did the nation’s third-largest market and perhaps the nation’s top golf market in terms of avid golfers, a town that has hosted four major championships (two PGA Championships, a U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open) since 1999, find itself virtually left off the pro calendar for 2008 and perhaps in years beyond that?
“That is hard to believe,” LPGA Commissioner Carolyn Bivens said. “Chicago is such a great golf town. We’d love to be back here on a regular basis.”
WGA Executive Director Don Johnson insists the association’s first choice would be to anchor the new BMW tournament every year in Chicago. The Western Open had been in the area annually since 1962.
“However, we were not the decision-maker,” Johnson said. “The decision was made by the PGA Tour.”
The PGA Tour wanted to incorporate the former Western Open into its new four-tournament FedEx Cup playoffs. That meant moving the Chicago event from 4th of July week to the week after Labor Day.
Then, in a baffling decision, the tour wanted to take the BMW to other markets to “expand its brand.” It didn’t seem to be concerned too much about abandoning Chicago.
Basically, the WGA was faced with an offer it couldn’t refuse. According to sources, if the association hadn’t accepted the PGA Tour’s proposal, the Western would have been placed either the week before or the week after the U.S. Open, virtually guaranteeing that Woods and other top stars wouldn’t have played.
There also was talk of doing a three-course rotation in Chicago, involving Cog Hill, Medinah and Olympia Fields or Butler National, but that never materialized.
The WGA accepted the tour’s offer, and on many levels it is a good one. Instead of being just another tournament, the BMW will be part of the new playoff concept, which the tour will market hard. Thanks to the FedEx Cup, the WGA has its first stable sponsor in years.
BMW signed a six-year deal that will help double the funds to the WGA’s charity, the Evans Scholars program, from $2 million annually to $4 million. Also, the WGA figures to sell more tournament clothing with the BMW logo on it than that of the previous sponsor, Cialis.
“Are we unhappy the PGA Tour made the decision? The answer is no,” Johnson said. “The people who support the Evans Scholars in St. Louis and Indianapolis are extremely excited about this.”
BMW also supported the decision.
“We’re keen to be involved in this tournament, and we want to increase our market penetration in Chicago,” said Tom Purves, the chairman and CEO for BMW in North America. “We also felt it was quite beneficial for us to cover more of the Midwest.”
According to various golf insiders, the situation might have been different if the WGA had been able to line up a big local sponsor for the Western.
At one time, the Western had strong local backing in Chicago-based Motorola. The company was an enthusiastic sponsor of the tournament from 1994 to 1999.
“I thought they would be with us forever,” Johnson said. “It was a perfect fit.”
But Motorola had to sever ties when its business took a serious downturn.
“In the words of one executive, ‘How can we be sponsoring a golf tournament when we’re laying off 30,000 people?'” Johnson said.
The WGA since has failed to attract another local sponsor. Instead, it had three-year stints with Advil (2000-2002) and Cialis (2004-2006). The 2003 tournament, which was the 100th Western, didn’t have a title sponsor.
The WGA has knocked on the doors of several large, Chicago-based local companies, including Allstate, United and Sears. With all of its products, Northfield-based Kraft would be a natural target for the WGA. However, the company long has been the sponsor of the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the first major of the year on the LPGA Tour.
According to Basil Maglaris of Kraft, the LPGA makes more sense because “it provides an excellent way to reach our primary customers, women.”
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John Kaczkowski, Western Golf Association tournament director, says money is an issue for all companies. With an estimated $8 million expense to be a tournament sponsor, he says, “the price of poker is high.”
Johnson wouldn’t speculate on whether the BMW Championship would have remained solely in Chicago if it had a strong local sponsor.
The answer is apparent to Peter deYoung, the former tournament director of the Western Open, and others who operate tournaments.
“The sponsor would have enough clout to go to the tour and make its feelings known,” said deYoung, who now operates his own event management company. “If the company said, ‘We love Chicago, we want to be in Chicago,’ I have to believe it would [remain here].”
Local venues, or lack thereof, also have been an issue. There has been some talk in golf circles that the PGA Tour isn’t enamored of Cog Hill, a public facility in every sense of the word.The WGA rejects that claim.
“Absolutely not,” Johnson said. “It’s a great venue. The best player in the world [Woods] loves Cog Hill. Doesn’t that say something?”
Johnson was asked how Chicago golf fans should feel about the situation.
“They should feel fortunate,” Johnson said. “Look what happened to Denver, [which lost the International this year]. Outside of the majors, we’re going to have one of the best fields of the year. We’re so fortunate to have an event in the playoff series.”
That may be the case this year, but those fans won’t feel fortunate in the years when the BMW, the former Western Open, isn’t played in their back yard.
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