Washington Deserves Better

A few days into the Golf Tournament That Wouldn't End, Rich Beem wandered into the TPC Avenel media center at the Booz Allen Classic last week. He was clearly perturbed.

"All I keep reading about is negative, negative, negative," moaned The Beemer, who's life in golf took a sweet turn toward the positive when he won the 1999 Kemper Open here. "Can't you guys write anything positive about this thing?"

It doesn't get any more negative than the final death throes of a golf tournament that has been a staple of Washington's late spring/early summer as much as high humidity, crackling thunderstorms and a virtual unknown -- someone like Beem, for example -- winning the event.

The sponsor, Booz Allen, had announced months earlier that it was pulling the plug after the PGA Tour essentially beat them to the plug in January by announcing Washington, the capital of the free world, was moving to the Siberia portion of the schedule, starting in the fall of 2007.

The commissioner, Tim Finchem, a guy I've always respected as one of the smartest men in any room, held a news conference the day before the tournament began and offered his own sorry spin on the situation. He tried to blame the move to the fall on Booz Allen's reluctance to fork out $10 million a year unless the tour could give Washington a date the week or weeks before the U.S. Open.

Then he insulted all of our collective intelligence by adding that people had said fall events in San Antonio and Tampa also wouldn't work, and look how successful they had become. So now, the nation's capital gets lumped in with Tampa and San Antonio? Hello Tim. It's the eighth largest media market in the country, the Nation's Capital. And we can't get on the schedule until every meaningful golf competition is so much history?

There were other negatives. The Booz Allen crowd, according to multiple sources, didn't get along with the Kemper Sports Management crowd, the company that essentially ran the tournament. And those same sources said the PGA Tour had problems with the Boozers and the Kempers, and that didn't help Washington's situation either.

Nor did the tour's delay in starting what was supposed to be a major renovation on the course and the clubhouse that should have been completed by now after a one-year move to Congressional in 2005. But it never got done, and despite Finchem's insistence that the tour is committed to spending $18 to $20 million to spruce up the place, that sounded more like a recruiting pitch to the next sucker -- or rather sponsor -- that wants to put its name on the possible new fall event.

I heard lots of other negatives last week. A number of players were openly critical of the tour for taking Washington off the schedule. They said no one had ever asked them, but that was typical of the way the tour now operates.

Go back and read Tom Kite's remarks about the boys at headquarters in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and how much they don't listen to players on the Champions Tour, many of them the same guys who helped pave the way for the tour's current success. And then check out Kite's comments on what he described as the tour's "mismanagement" of other TPC venues, some of them such dog tracks that opened too soon and still aren't suitable to even stage a proper professional tournament.

You want negatives, Beemer, you're right, there were plenty of them, not the least of which was the almost farcical finish to the event on Tuesday, when golf was played for 24 minutes so six players could finish up on a day spectators weren't allowed to set foot on the golf course or surrounding premises. Honest. They told people NOT to come!!!

Then again, in 26 years, there also have been plenty of positives. I'm thinking: