Pro golf tour adjusts without Tiger Woods

As golfers lined up putts in respectful silence below, a small airplane circled over last week’s PGA Tour event in San Diego – dragging a banner reading, “We miss you Tiger! Deja vu Showgirls.” The next day, a competing strip club countered with a plane toting this message: “We miss you too Tiger! Dreamgirls.”
This is the strange, new realm professional golf now inhabits, where strip clubs jostle for business in the airspace above tournaments.

By most accounts, Tiger Woods originally planned to play in the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, which starts Thursday. That would have created quite a scene: Woods, probably the world’s most famous athlete, strolling the picturesque fairways on the Monterey Peninsula for the first time in eight years.

Then, on Nov. 27, he drove his sport utility vehicle into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his Florida home – triggering a salacious sex scandal that includes allegations of numerous extramarital affairs. The story shook the PGA Tour to its core and prompted Woods to take an indefinite leave as he tries to salvage his marriage.

As the tour swings through Northern California, it’s clearly not the same without Woods, the world’s No. 1 player and the game’s defining figure. His absence has added another layer to the challenges facing professional golf, already coping with the effects of the nation’s slumping economy.

The efforts to overcome this double whammy are meeting with mixed results. Commissioner Tim Finchem said the tour has extended sponsorship agreements, or brought in new sponsors, for 15 events in the past few months. Prize money is comparable to what it was in 2009 (about $275 million) and Finchem anticipates the tour’s charitable giving to rebound from a 12 percent drop last year.

Then again, the tour could not find a title sponsor for last month’s Bob Hope Classic in Palm Springs. It reached a last-minute deal with Farmers Insurance to sponsor the tournament at San Diego’s Torrey Pines, reportedly for an amount well below normal. Players were not provided courtesy cars, a rare development in their coddled world.

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