I forgot to mention my columns in GlobalGolfPost last week and again today.
Last week I wrote an update to the situation involving the Canadian Tour:
The Canadian Tour has a lifeline and Rick Janes plans to make the best of it.
At the end of last year Janes, the commissioner of the Canadian Tour since 2005, was almost overwhelmed by issues his tour faced. He had a couple of members of his player advisory board seeking his head over perceived failures involving tournament purses, as well as the fact the number of tournaments the tour ran was declining. Adding to his problems, a couple of key tournaments, including an event in Winnipeg that appeared to have been a success, lost significant amounts of cash, pushing the tour into a perilous financial position. Janes’ back was up against the wall, and fearing the Canadian Tour could not survive without financial support, he turned to the golf entity with the big bucks – the PGA Tour.
You can find my full column here.
For this week’s column I speak with Canadian swing coach Sean Foley on life with Tiger Woods:
After more than a year of working as the swing doctor to Tiger Woods, Sean Foley fully comprehends what it is like to live in a bubble. Everywhere you turn there’s an the hum of cameras from 24-hour news channels, Internet reports about your star pupil, and tweets that say you’re not long for the job. Despite the fact Foley’s clients – most notably Hunter Mahan, Justin Rose and, ahem, Tiger Woods – have had outstanding years, with more than $7-million and four wins between them, the Canadian swing coach is staggered by the tone of the media coverage.
Most notably, he’s stunned by the way people continue to react to Woods’ return to form.
“If he was doing terrible that would be one thing,” Foley explains. “But I was looking at him just before the Masters and seeing him as No. 1 in total driving, and No. 2 in scoring average and thinking, ‘Wow, what do we have to do?’”
What indeed.
I did not read your Canadian Tour column, as I do not have access, but the one thing this tour needs is events and until it can fill all weekends from June 1 to mid-September it will be nothing more than it is, which I feel runs short of being a professional golf tour.
I have had involvement with events on this tour and enjoyed every minute of it, with few exceptions, but it needs events, it has the golfers, but nowhere to play to make it any kind of success.
There should be an event in every province to keep the golfers busy for the entire summer, the hit and miss schedule now in effect does not make it worthwhile for them to stay up here all summer.