The Other Tour

We North Americans can get a little narrow in our world view. Sometimes we forget that there's a top flight professional tour operating on the other side of the Atlantic.

Yesterday Anders Hansen won the Euoprean Tour's BMW PGA Championship by draining a 25 foot birdie putt on the first extra hole. The man he beat, Justin Rose, managed to birdie the 18th to force the playoff by nearly holing his approach, leaving it a mere ten inches from the cup. An exciting finale to what should have been one of the top ten events in the world this year. But it's not.

The BMW PGA Championship is the European Tour's version of the PGA Tour's Players Championship. It's played on a renowned course (Wentworth) and attracts the best players from Europe, Australia, South Africa, Asia and South America. The only problem is that exactly zero Americans showed up, a fact publicly bemoaned by European Tour officials and American Tour mainstay Vijay Singh.

There are reasons for this. All the top American players and many even further down the money list have an incredibly comfortable life and don't feel the need to globe trot for the good of the game. The PGA Tour, while not prohibiting its players from playing a worldwide schedule, certainly don't encourage it by mandating the amount of tournaments its members must play and aggressively promoting the Fed Ex Cup, which benefits players who play a lot on the American Tour. Ultimately, it all comes down to money, and nothing speaks to the imbalance of the two tours than the fact that the European Tour's flagship event this past week paid Hansen less than Rory Sabbatini won at the Colonial, a tour stop that has turned into a middle of the road event.

In order to address this imbalance, the European Tour has announced it's going to consolidate with the other world tours in order to compete more aggressively against the PGA Tour. This move could have been avoided if the PGA Tour had played a little nicer with the other tours by, at a minimum, allowing just one of the so-called World Golf Championship events to be staged outside of the US this year. Instead, the PGA may soon find its supremacy under serious threat as the European Tour and it's allies work to attract the world's top players away from the US Tour. Considering that 32 of the world's top 50 golfers hail from locations outside the US, it is a definite possibility.

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The Other Tour

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