General / Editor / 06 September 2007 / Leave a Comment

US Tour boss Tim Finchem has got it right with the FedEx it's just a shame the players won't play ball, says acclaimed golf journalist Bill Elliott

Few things in life can be as tedious as a pro golfer.

Twenty years ago a magazine ran a poll among players on the European Tour asking them to list their likes and dislikes. Top of the dislike list was the fact that these golfers envied their American counterparts the fact that over there they enjoyed courtesy cars to whisk them to and from tournaments.

So what's wrong with that you might ask. Everyone, after all, is entitled to some aspiration. Quite right too but the point here is that a year later these courtesy cars were supplied and, when the same magazine ran the same sort of poll, top of the dislike list was the fact that occasionally the drivers turned up a couple of minutes late.

In other words most of the time most of these sods are complaining about something.

I was reminded of this irritating fact when I sat down to write a 'think piece' about The Fedex Cup this week. Now into its third week the US Tour's Big Idea to inject some drama and, more importantly, TV interest into the fourth quarter of the golf season was being criticised on all sides by the American media.

Too complicated, too long, just too much, was the basis of most of this criticism. Well, I don't agree. At least the Yanks are trying to do something to lift us all out of the relentless rut that week-in, week-out 72 hole strokeplay encourages. Admittedly they are trying to do this by tagging on a complicated knock-out system to what in effect is a month long 288 hole strokeplay competition but, hey, a man has to start somewhere.

No, while the Fedex thing needs some serious tweaking before next year rolls on top of us, what annoyed me was the attitude of several of the players and most notably the attitude of sport's control freak twins, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. Woods, of course, elected to miss the opening Fedex week while Mickelson had no sooner won the second than he was threatening to drop out of the third. Ernie Els, Scott Verplank and David Toms also pulled out of one of these weeks while KJ Choi suddenly developed an injury.

Somewhere, probably in a padded room, the US Tour boss Tim Finchem was thumping his head hard into a wall. In the world that is Finchem's the only public language is corporatespeak but don't try to tell me that privately he wasn't thinking something along the lines of "I get these guys a four week run with 35 million bucks in bonus money and still the sonsovbitches find something to moan about".

If so, Tim has a fair point. It is not, however, one that will impact on the average professional's mindset, a brain plan that, by comparison, makes the psychotic/obsessive appear a fully-rounded human being.

Top pros in any game get where they are partly by dint of talent but mostly because they are single-minded to the point of certifiable. Mark Calcavecchia, a rare exception to this rule, once told me of the day he made his pro debut. He was partnered by Hale Irwin as it happened and when Calc shot an opening 80 he was moved to apologise to the two-time US Open champ as the pair made their way to the scorer's office.

It was then that Irwin stopped, laid a hand on Calc's shoulder and gave him his first real pro lesson in how to survive. "Listen, the sooner you realise that nobody out here gives a shit about your game the better you'll be."

If he didn't know the validity of this advice before, Tim Finchem knows it now.

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