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 Huntingdale Golf Club – the venue since its inception in 1979 – is set to end after this year’s event, from November 27-30.
The Masters, which celebrates its 30th anniversay next month, will rotate around other Melbourne sandbelt courses from next year.
Despite his $US4 million ($A5.94 million) price tag, Victorian Sports Minister James Merlino has targetted Woods and was backed today by US PGA Tour star Stuart Appleby who will be one of the headline players at this year’s Masters.
“As you would expect, the Victorian Major Events Company has approached Tiger’s management in terms of him coming back to Melbourne,” Merlino said.
The VMEC simply wouldn’t be apoproaching Tiger’s management if we didn’t think we had a good show of securing him.
“This is a fantastic tournament and it’s going to get bigger and better in the years ahead.
“It’s too early to speculate in terms of what it’s going to take to get him here but the more stars you have at a tournament, whatever it is, whether it’s golf or tennis or soccer, you need the talent to get the crowds and make it even better.”
Appleby, a close friend of Woods, said the World No.1 could be enticed back to Melbourne and would be worth the cost.
“It would be viable to get Tiger,” Appleby said. “I think financially it would be a great thing, the roll-on effect would pay for that quite easily.
“The biggest difficulty is actually getting him to say yes.
“There’s a whole bunch of people fighting for his time. There would be dozens of places he’d be saying no to.
“It won’t be that we’re not potentially offering him enough, it’s just that he goes ‘I’m busy’.
“I have talks with him about these things. He’s a very wealthy man, he’s got a family and the reason he doesn’t turn up to Australia won’t be dollars and cents, it’s just he’d rather do something else.”
Tournament organisers have promised to deliver a quality field in 2009-10 which will include at least three players in the top 25 on the World Golf Rankings list to complement the best of the Australian players.
The state government has followed the NSW government’s lead in supporting the Masters – one of the country’s three major golf events.
The NSW Government signed a long-term deal recently to ensure the Australian Open remained in Sydney until 2015.
This year’s Masters will again be co-sanctioned with the European PGA Tour and will mark the third event of the lucrative Race to Dubai initiative.
Among the internationals lining up next month will be US PGA Tour stars Appleby, Robert Allenby and John Senden, Presidents Cup International Team member Tim Clark of South Africa and exciting new US amateur champion Danny Lee of New Zealand.
Greg Russell
Roar Guru
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.