Was the death of Denver's Tour stop an aberration, or a foreshadowing of other shutdowns?

	Sponsorless and Tigerless, the 21-year-old International at Castle Pines was deemed hopeless. William R. Sallaz/SI

It was creepy quiet last Friday morning at Castle Pines Golf Club. Jack Vickers, the club's 81-year-old founder and president, stared out a clubhouse window at snow-covered fairways and greens. There was no 18th-hole grandstand, no giant leader board and no throng of sunburned spectators with cardboard tickets dangling from their necks.

"The community is really going to miss this thing," Vickers said, referring to the International, the quirky, classy and ultimately undervalued golf tournament that the onetime oil baron established 21 years ago at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The day before, at the Denver Athletic Club,

Vickers and PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem had delivered the bad news: The International, unable to find a title sponsor, was canceled, and Denver's spot on the Tour calendar -- the first week of July -- was up for grabs.

Did the International have to die? Vickers thought not. But as he turned away from the window, he considered a bleaker landscape than the one outside. "There's a sense of greediness in the air," he said. He was ready to begin the postmortem.

But first, a few words about the departed. The International, held in August, had a rakish charm, a certain je ne sais quoi. It was the only event of any stature to be played under the modified Stableford scoring system, a points-per-hole scheme that forced players to take off the training wheels and fire at pins. The mountain platform made shots fly farther and produced glorious sunsets. The pros didn't like the way the peaks played afternoon peekaboo with violent thunderstorms, but they raved about the Castle Pines hospitality, from the famous milk shakes served in the locker room to the fishing trips arranged by the club's staff. "It's not the normal grind on Tour," said 2000 champion Ernie Els, who made his second PGA Tour start at the 1991 International and promptly swore fealty to Vickers. Tour player Chris Perry once said, "If I had only one round of golf to play and two meals to eat, it would be at Castle Pines."

Since the turn of the millennium, however, professional golf has changed. It is now accepted, for instance, that there are two kinds of Tour events -- those with Tiger Woods in the field and those without. (Woods, who last played in the International in 1999, holds the key to television ratings. In his absence the International's ratings have sagged to around 1.8 points from a '98 high of 4.1.) It is equally clear that the market for televised golf is saturated. When the International debuted in 1986, only 34 Tour events were shown on television. Now every round of all 46 tournaments is televised by CBS, NBC, ABC or Golf Channel. Television also accommodates the Champions tour, the Nationwide tour, the LPGA, the European tour and a plethora of silly-season trifles.