America At Large: Last Sunday afternoon Darren Clarke had a four-shot victory that made him the first man not named Tiger Woods to win the$1 million first prize in the NEC Invitational at Firestone Country Club, Ohio. Informed that this year the winning purse had been increased to $1,050,000, the Ulsterman thereupon declared his intention to spend the extra fifty grand before the night was out.
That evening Clarke must have pushed himself away from his last pint and made his way to the Akron-Canton Airport where he had a private jet waiting, because he woke up in Rhode Island, which is where he was when we tracked him down on Monday to ask if he intended to play a practice round at TPC Boston, the site of the Deutsche Bank Championship which starts tomorrow.
"Absolutely not," Clarke told us. "I don't know anything about the course, but I'll see it soon enough. Today I'm going to relax and try to get over my hangover."
When Clarke embarked on Sunday's final round, the leaderboard behind him included Brad Faxon, Jim Furyk, Retief Goosen, Jonathan Kaye, Davis Love III, Vijay Singh, Hal Sutton - and Woods. Apparently, for television viewers, only the latter name counted, but it might be added that from that select group, only Kaye was sufficiently obscure to fit among the low-profile winners of this summer's other big events. After two-month's worth of Ben Curtises, Shaun Micheels, and Chad Campbells, viewers were doubtless pleased to see a golfer they'd actually heard of winning a championship.
Deutsche Bank's inaugural American tournament won't get under way until tomorrow (Monday is Labour Day in the US, and ABC wanted a live event to show in the afternoon), but the event is already sold out. Well over a 100,000 spectators will visit the new facility in Norton, some 35 miles south of Boston. When Jim O'Mara, general manager of TPC Boston at Norton, is asked how a facility barely a year old landed such a marquee event, he replies: "It doesn't hurt if your club is half-owned by the PGA Tour."
Woods, Clarke, and a handful of other Ryder Cup veterans will be returning to the Boston area for the first time since the events at Brookline in 1999. For the past five years, New England has been bereft of a PGA Tour event. The demise of the annual tournament at Pleasant Valley created a void, both in the hearts of local golf fans and among the movers and shakers of the tour. An old-fashioned operation reminiscent of the tour's early days, Pleasant Valley might have been a relic, but it had been a favourite stop among players.
It might have outgrown its usefulness from a business standpoint, but dropping the tournament had been a move fraught with moral repercussions. Moreover, from a business standpoint, it didn't seem particularly sensible to abandon the nation's sixth-largest television market. "I think the tour was anxious to get back to the Boston marketplace," said O'Mara, "and everyone was pleased with the course construction and design here. It's a high-quality, championship quality facility with the infrastructure to handle a PGA tournament today.
"There are certain demands when it comes to hosting a PGA event today, and there aren't that many facilities capable of doing it," explained O'Mara last week. "That's basically what happened at Pleasant Valley: there were a lot of great things about Pleasant Valley. The fans loved it. The players liked it there, but the tournament simply outgrew its surroundings."
The PGA Tour had been discussing ways to return to New England for years and ABC was looking for an event to televise over the holiday weekend. As Pleasant Valley had learned, two basic ingredients are required to stage a modern-day PGA event: (1) a well-heeled corporate sponsor, and (2) Tiger Woods - and not necessarily in that order.
IMG, the agency founded by the late Mark McCormack, not only represented Woods but had worked closely over the years with the German bank which had shelled out to get Tiger to commit annually to its event in Europe. Deutsche Bank was looking to enhance its profile in the US and enjoyed a good relationship with Woods.
Then came the master stroke: each PGA tournament is conducted to benefit a charity, usually a locally-based one, but early in the planning stages somebody came up with an ingenious proposal: "What if we made the charitable beneficiary of this one the Tiger Woods Foundation?" Thus is was when the Deutsche Bank Championship was announced 10 months ago, the tournament was able to reveal Woods's commitment to the event.
The importance of this is illustrated by TV ratings: the drama of Micheel's win in the PGA Championship at Oak Hill two weeks ago might have been great golf, but it was watched by far fewer viewers than would have been glued to their sets had Woods been in contention.
All right, we know how they got Tiger to Boston, but how did they manage to attract Clarke, Furyk, Vijay Singh, Nick Price, Jesper Parvnevik, Greg Norman, and Ben Curtis as well? Jay Monahan, the 33-year-old Deutsche Bank tournament director, offered up a trifecta of the Patriots, Jimmy Buffett, and Fenway Park.
Beginning tomorrow, Gillette Stadium will serve as a car-park for spectators, but a significant segment of the tournament field will be in Foxboro for the Patriots' pre-season finale against the Bears tonight. Musically-inclined golfers will be provided with tickets for Buffett's concert at Norton's Tweeter Centre on Saturday night. Monahan also wangled 36 pairs of tickets for tomorrow night's sold-out Red Sox game against the New York Yankees.
We couldn't resist asking Monahan if any golfers had committed to the tournament because they got tickets for the baseball game thrown in?" "Absolutely," he said, but we suspect Darren Clarke wasn't one of them.
