The State of the Game in 2012

Despite the bum economy and a mostly missing-in-action Tiger Woods, 2011 was a good year for the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Tim Finchem. Young players like Keegan Bradley and Webb Simpson identified themselves as future stars, the Tour signed up new sponsors to replace every departing one, and the television networks agreed to contracts that last for an unprecedented nine years.

For Finchem, 2012 is starting out even better. On Wednesday the Tour announced that its board of directors had extended his contract for four years, until the end of 2016, when he will be 69. "That will probably be it," he told me in an extended State of the Tour interview on the occasion of the new contract. "But never say never. Primarily right now I'm excited about the opportunity to put some serious energy into developing our long-term strategies."

The television deal was Finchem's key triumph in 2011. The Tour has not disclosed the financial terms of the contracts, but no doubt they are lucrative given the premium sports are fetching for television rights these days. And in any case Finchem seems less jazzed about the millions involved than the stability the contracts create for the Tour.

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PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, with last season's FedEx Cup winner, Bill Haas.

"In the past we've had to do things looking ahead four years, five years or at the most six years, because everything was tied to the TV contracts and our current sponsor agreements. Now, with most of the big stuff set, we have a much longer runway to think about the next environment," he said.

In Finchem-speak, "runway" means planning period and "the next environment" is what most people call "the future." Finchem gets a lot of grief from the golf media for speaking in corporatese. "Value proposition" is his favorite two-word utterance, more so even than "Tiger Woods." He's seldom met a noun that he can't verb: He "platforms" new initiatives and "same-pages" adversaries. But whatever Finchem is channeling, it seems to be working to his players' advantage. Prize money on Tour has quintupled in his 17 years at the helm, to $280 million last season from $56 million in 1994. The Presidents Cup, the Players Championship and the World Golf Championships have all blossomed on his watch. And he and his staff concocted the FedEx Cup Playoffs from scratch; the four-tournament purse for this year's edition totals $67 million.

FedEx's current sponsorship of the playoffs ends after this year, but Finchem, uncharacteristically, felt buoyant enough about the ongoing negotiations to say he felt "very positive" that FedEx would re-up. From fans' point of view, the playoffs, with their complicated points system and mid-football-season timing, aren't nearly the perfect sporting event that the Super Bowl is. But for the Tour they've been a winner. They have meaningfully extended the season and helped stem the defection of talent to the European and other world tours. Finchem said that part of the reason Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood rejoined the PGA Tour this year was to be eligible for the playoffs' bounty. "I would say the FedEx Cup is about 80% of the way to being fully integrated into the texture of PGA Tour golf, the way we want them to be, as a formidable, year-round part of tour competition. And in the next four to five years, we can round that out," he said.

The other major bit of unfinished business is finding a new sponsor for the developmental Nationwide Tour. Are you ready for the Hyundai Tour? The South Korean auto maker is reportedly a possible replacement for Nationwide, which is switching its sponsorship to Jack Nicklaus's Memorial Tournament in Columbus, Ohio—a natural fit, since the insurer is based there. Part and parcel of the negotiations is a proposed reconfiguring of the Tour's qualifying process. Under the plan, starting in 2013 the primary route to the big tour will be through yearlong performance on the developmental tour, culminating in some kind of multiweek super-tournament that includes low finishers from the PGA Tour. Q School as we know it would be scrapped.

As part of the Tour's new TV deals, virtually all of the Tour's live broadcasts will be available online starting next year. That may be bad news for the nation's office managers, but it thrills Finchem. It's a chance, in his phraseology, "to organize and present the sport across more platforms." By 2015, he pointed out, an estimated 90 million Americans will own electronic tablets.

"Steve Jobs's genius was to figure out what people wanted before they knew they wanted it," he said. That's what he wants the Tour to do. It has two advantages: the data-rich ShotLink statistical system and well-heeled fans. One possibility: complementary broadcasts on Golf Channel, such as featured foursomes or alternate on-course commentaries, while the main network broadcast is airing live.

Finchem does not foresee a single global tour superseding the major regional or continental tours, but he does believe that a more coordinated world competitive schedule will evolve, and it may eventually include some kind of major new global competition. "I am not offering any specific solutions right now, but there are various models to look at and certainly other models we haven't thought of yet," he said. One model he mentioned is the soccer World Cup, bringing together the best players every four years, or maybe every two. (The Olympics would not be suitable for this purpose, he said, because there golf is just one of many sports and, as currently drafted for the 2016 games, involves only 60 men and 60 women.)

Meanwhile and forever, he said, the success of golf as a spectator sport depends on the charisma and talent of the athletes. "The young guys who are coming to the forefront are better athletes, taller and bigger and stronger than we've ever had. Guys like [PGA Champion and Rookie of the Year] Keegan Bradley and Dustin Johnson. What they can do really inspires the fans." Ideally, he said, Woods would come back in 2012 as strong as ever, but two or three of the young stars would emerge as his main rivals, to regularly challenge and beat him. "Unfortunately," he said, "that's not the sort of the thing you can engineer in the lab."