By Robert Grant
October 24th 2008 @ 2:10am
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Government bails out Masters golf
The Victorian Government has come to the rescue of the Australian Masters, optimistically opening negotiations aimed at luring Tiger Woods to the event.
The government has stepped in with financial backing which will secure the tournament – left without a naming rights sponsor – in Melbourne for the next three years.
However, the tournament’s long association with [...]
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Greg Russell said | October 24th 2008 @ 12:25pm | Report comment
First the NSW government with the Australian Open, now the Victorian government with the Australian Masters – what do we think of our premier golf tournaments relying on government support for their survival? I mean, it’s not as if golf is a “poor” sport, and it’s not as if this is support for a community sporting event, say like the City to Surf (run).
One tends to think that government money should support essential infrastructure – hospitals, roads, universities, etc. In this sense it’s hard to find any justification at all for these moves.
Where there may be a weak justification is that the world of golf is changing rapidly at the moment, with “small” tours finding it very hard to survive as money pours into the two major tours, viz. USA and Europe (for simplicity I am not considering the Japanese and Asian tours). Clearly a situation is evolving where tours like Australasia simply become feeder tours for the big tours. This is a common pattern in sport, for example all the minor leagues supported by the MLB, the Sheffield Shield supported by Cricket Australia, and so on. The golfing world hasn’t really adjusted yet to this necessity. Yes, there is the secondary Nationwide tour in the USA, which is a feeder tour for the US PGA tour. But that either needs to be more geographically diverse or else the US PGA tour needs to support secondary tours in other places. Similarly, the European tour needs to create feeder tours. In the end it is in the best interests of the big tours to create clear and appropriately supported pathways into the big tours. Until this situation evolves, one can argue that it is reasonable for Australian governments to support golfing events that should ultimately become major fixtures on feeder tours. Because if these historically significant events fold, it will be very hard to get them started again.