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Wednesday
Dec162009

BMW renews with WGA through 2014

Writing from Chicago
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

While much of professional golf reels from the continuing freefall of Tiger Woods, at least one week on the calendar will remain the same through at least 2014. BMW and the Western Golf Association are expected to announce a two-year extension of their original six-year deal on Thursday morning.

The extension, for 2013 and 2014, is also expected to contain a commitment to play at least the 2013 Western Open / BMW Championship at Cog Hill Golf & Country Club in Lemont. There's a possibility that the 2014 championship will be played at Harding Park in San Francisco, where the PGA Tour is committed to play a number of tournaments, including at least one tournament during the FedEx Cup Playoffs, by 2015.

The deal lays to rest speculation that BMW would invoke an out clause in its contract with the PGA Tour and WGA, which the German automaker could do if sales in the U.S. dropped 10 percent in a calendar year. That bit of contract bolierplace became an issue when the economy tanked, taking sales of luxury cars – and BMW makes no other kind – with it.

In 2008, worldwide sales for its three brands – BMW, Rolls Royce and Mini – dropped 4.3 percent compared to 2007, but the drop for the BMW brand worldwide was 5.8 percent. In the U.S. sales fell 15.2 percent, to 249,113 autos. Sales fell hard in the second half of 2008, and have remained slow this year. Through November, BMW had sold about 55,000 fewer cars in the U.S. than in 2008.

Because of the decline, BMW could have pulled out after the 2010 championship, but instead began to negotiate a new deal, which one insider said was at a lower cost than before. Whether or not that will mean a reduction in the purse, which totaled $7.5 million in 2009, remains to be seen.

The extension, coming in tough economic times, with other Tour stops sans sponsors, and with the Woods saga about to enter its fourth week, is an excellent coda to the 22-year tenure of Don Johnson as the WGA's boss.

The 74-year-old retiring president of the operation was feted at a gala dinner on Tuesday night, where it was noted that approximately 4,000 Evans scholars had graduated under his watch, and that an endowment that was next to nothing when he succeeded Marshall Dann as executive director in 1988 had grown to about $45 million.

John Kaczkowski, the tournament VP, succeeds Johnson, with Vince Pellegrino taking Kaczkowski's place in the WGA lineup.

As for Woods …

Tiger Woods' fall from grace is the stuff of Greek drama, with the chorus to go with it. There is no way to predict how bad it will get, but there was also no way mere golf writers, isolated from Woods for all but his on-course activity in a given week, could have anticipated that he led two lives away from the links.

He did, and now he is paying the price in every conceivable way. He deserved all the accolades before, and now deserves all the brickbats.

Write no evil

The spin doctors at PGATour.com haven't done anything to cover themselves in glory in their non-reporting of the Woods tale. Getting ahead of the story wasn't expected, but trying to ignore it is inexcusable. Witness the first and third paragraphs of the Associated Press story on Woods' winning the AP Athlete of the Decade award, announced Wednesday. Here's how the Tour's Internet site posted them:

"(AP) -- Tiger Woods won 64 times around the world, including 12 majors, and hoisted a trophy on every continent golf is played. He lost only one time with the lead going into the final round. His 56 PGA TOUR victories in one incomparable decade were more than anyone except four of golf's greatest players won in their careers. …

"Woods received 56 of the 142 votes cast by AP member editors since last month. More than half of the ballots were returned after the Nov. 27 car accident outside his Florida home."

And here's how Lehighvalleylive.com, an outlet in Pennsylvania, posted the original story:

"In a vote that was more about 10 years of performance than nearly three weeks of salacious headlines, Tiger Woods was selected today as the Athlete of the Decade by members of The Associated Press. …

"Woods received 56 of the 142 votes cast by AP member editors. More than half of the ballots were returned after the Nov. 27 car crash outside his Florida home that set off sensational tales of infidelity."

Many other outlets used the AP's story. Of those we saw, only PGATour.com erased the mention of salacious headlines and infidelity. Not that we're surprised, but it's worth noting that the Tour's site has scrubbed negative news from stories, or ignored them completely. This was only the latest and most blatant example.

Thursday morning, PGA Tour commissioner, first on CNBC and then on a teleconference, speaks of his operation's coping without Tiger Woods, at least for a while. It will be fascinating to see how the Tour's site plays that.

– Tim Cronin

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