Wyndham Championship

FedEx, SchmedEx

Date Written: August 22, 2007

Brandt Snedecker captures The Wyndham Championship (aka The Greater Greensboro) in North Carolina with a stellar 63 in the last round over a bunch of second-tier player's angling for cash (which is good) and FedEx points (which are suspect).

The emphasis during the entire Wyndham telecast was the hype setting up the four FedEx tourneys, which will begin this coming week with The Barclays. Does anyone care who might be included in the ridiculous, reverse-point, re-shuffling format? Imagine being on the first tee at your home club and you decide amongst your foursome to play a 14-hole match. On the 15th tee, all the strokes and money you’ve earned or lost now doesn’t mean anything. It is replaced by an arbitrary, reverse-sliding, points formula with any money that you might win being paid when you are dead. A brand new game is created for each subsequent hole. Now, holes 15-18 are worth twice what each previous hole (tournament) was worth. So if you have played well for the first nine months of the year (or in this case, the first 14 holes), it doesn't count...much. If this is not confusing enough, throw in the prospect of being eliminated on each of the last four holes if you don’t accumulate enough points. I could go on…and I will. One stupid question to the format designers: what’s the deal with the arbitrary number (86) of FedEx point-getters being guaranteed entry for only two weeks?

The Commish of the PGA, Tim (Mr. Smooth) Finchem, put on his happiest face when trying to explain it to us on CBS-TV. But obvious to all who have been paying attention to the FedEx sponsorship deal, it's really about The Tour trying to find a way to cut into the TV audience shift that takes place in September when football starts and baseball finishes. The whole thing smacks of "design-by-committee." And a bad committee at that.

Did you think, for a moment, that the advertised $10,000,000 that's supposed to go to the ultimate winner will be in cash? Nope! The winner will get an annuity...like the Schwab deal on the Senior Tour. My experience in creating different impulse products has been that if you have to educate your audience, you are in BIG trouble. And boy do we need some education understanding the FedEx format. The best player on the planet either can't figure it out, doesn’t need the money, doesn’t care or he's a mathematical genius because he won't even show up for the first leg.

As the Jews would say, "FedEx, SchmedEx." I say let's just play "whip-out," which is an old expression meaning pull out your wallet at the end of the game and pay up!

On the Nationwide Tour, a clutch 30-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole gave another, talented young Australian, Nick Flanagan, an improbable one-shot victory. He began the final round trailing by seven shots. That means Flanagan, who has won three “Nationwide” events this year, will get what they call a "battlefield promotion" to the PGA TOUR for the stretch run in 2007 as well as all of 2008. No small feat...it's only been done eight times.

Finally, only four weeks to go in our funky fantasy pool and unless one of us also-rans gets "blind lucky," the top three spots look secure. Unless of course, we agree that the whole season doesn’t count and we change all our rules like the "SchmedEx. "

Walter Littenberg