Presence, or lack, of Woods prompts PGA changes

	While Tiger Woods helps draw fans to any event he plays, his absences at some events have reshaped the PGA landscape. SI

January has been a busy month for the PGA Tour. The new season started with Stuart Appleby and David Toms scoring nice wins in the photo-op islands of Hawaii. The new TV contract concluded, notable because three networks -- ABC, ESPN and USA -- dropped golf like a live grenade and because the tour was so embarrassed about taking a hit in its rights fees that it wouldn't even announce the numbers. The rejiggered PGA Tour schedule for 2007 debuted, highlighted by moving the Players Championship to May, ending the main portion of the season in mid-September, creating an already overrated points race championship known as the FedEx Cup and for signing virtual death warrants for a handful of tournaments, some of them rich with history. And finally, there was Michelle Wie and David Duval in Hawaii. One shot a 79, one shot a 63 and if you guessed who shot which, you'd probably be wrong.

All you really need to know about the changes is this: They all stem from the basic fact that the PGA Tour, even with Tiger Woods, is not a hot property. The September wrap-up is a surrender flag to college and pro football, which the tour can't compete with on TV. Of course, even NASCAR is a hotter TV commodity than professional golf. A second truth is that there are two kinds of PGA Tour events -- those with Woods and those without. The Tiger-haves are doing well; the Tiger-less events -- ones in which there's no chance he's going to show up, -- are much more likely to be on the ropes. Tiger has given golf an amazing boost in the last decade, almost immeasurable in proportions, but there's also a dark side to his iconic success. He casts such a big shadow that the events he plays in dwarf the one he doesn't. Tiger-less events seem small (see the Champions Tour for details).

The TV deal showed just how Tiger-phobic the PGA Tour is. Check out the newspapers from every city that has a PGA Tour event and nearly every one had a story in the wake of the latest developments that focused on how the changes impact the odds of Tiger playing in that event. The answer, in most cases, is none -- he's not coming. Again.

Anyway, here's a look at what's hot and what's not in golf ...

Hot stuff: The Golf Channel, the little-engine-that-could, scores a bunch of PGA Tour telecasts -- the lesser fall events plus early-round coverage for the other regular-season events. One thing missing from The Golf Channel's schedule has been, ironically, golf. Now it has arrived. And it's going to have to seriously upgrade its act because its Nationwide and Champions tour live coverage has looked pretty lame compared to the big networks. One other tiny drawback: How many hotel room TVs get The Golf Channel? In my experience as a traveler, it's only about one in 10.

Cold case: ABC comes up with the best duo in televised golf, the tasty combo platter of Nick Faldo and Paul Azinger, and goes from worst to near-first in golf telecast quality ... and now it's getting out of the game. It still holds the British Open for a few more years. Unless Johnny Miller retires from NBC or CBS shakes up its staid announcing crew, there's no place for the Faldo-Zinger duo to continue, which is a shame. I wonder what ex-ABC Sports genius Roone Arledge would say about the network giving up Monday Night Football and pro golf? The departure of ESPN from golf is no loss, except for informative analyst Andy North, who's at his best in pre-game and post-game shows during majors. The only drawback here is that it didn't happen soon enough to spare us from Karl Ravetch on the Mercedes and Sony Hawaiian Open telecasts.