Presidents Cup 2007

Vartan Kupelian: Burning Questions

Burning questions from Europe’s overwhelming 18 1/2 -9 1/2 victory at the Ryder Cup:
Q . Same old question: What’s wrong with the United States at the Ryder Cup?
A . Same old answer: Everybody is missing the obvious.
The American performances at the Ryder Cup haven’t been the same since the introduction of the Presidents Cup.
Every year is simply too much for this kind of competition.
Read more »

From Sports Illustrated

Dave Stockton, who captained the U.S. Ryder Cup team to victory in 1991, says the key to winning in team golf is chemistry. “It’s not who’s the hottest golfer,” he says, “it’s who fits in the best.” SI asked a dozen other past and present Ryder and Presidents cuppers what they thought were the keys to victory and came up with this list of laws.

I. Thou Shalt Be Compatible
This sounds too simple to be important, but it was the No. 1 factor given by the players and captains for what makes a good pairing. You don’t have to be best friends, they said, but you have to be friendly and communicate. “You have to be comfortable,” says Jim Furyk. “You need to be excited with your pairing and say, ‘Gee, I can’t wait to play this match.’” Gee, if it’s that straight forward, how come we had to endure Woods-Mickelson last time around?

II. Thou Shalt Find the Right Partner for Tiger
Woods has a disappointing Ryder Cup record (5-10-1) in team matches, partly because he hasn’t found a soulmate while burning through 10 partners. The Americans think they found the answer — Furyk — at last year’s Presidents Cup, during which the pair was unbeaten in three matches. “Tiger and Furyk go about things similarly,” says Jerry Kelly. “They don’t talk much. They simply play their game. Furyk is seething to win. So is Tiger.”
Read more »

From Golf Today

With its global reach and stronger line-ups the Presidents Cup can replace the Ryder Cup as golf’s most prestigious team competition, according to rival captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player.

“I think that the potential of the Presidents Cup to be greater than the Ryder Cup is there, simply because the scope is larger,” Nicklaus said on Tuesday as his U.S. team practised for their clash with the International team.

“You look at the players that are in the event and I think there are probably more good players in the Presidents Cup as it relates to world rankings than probably if you played the Ryder Cup,” he told reporters at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course.
Read more »

Montreal Gazette
Randy Phillips, CanWest News Service

ANCASTER, Ont. — The 2007 Presidents Cup at the Royal Montreal Golf Club shared the spotlight with the Canadian Open this week, proving how important the event is to the PGA Tour.

The biennial, international, match-play competition is Tim Finchem’s baby and the PGA Tour commissioner spoke precisely to it before the first ball was hit in the 97th edition of the world’s third-oldest national championship at Hamilton Golf and Country Club.

“We’re excited about it,” Finchem said of the event to be held next Sept. 25-30. “We made the decision to come to Canada with the Presidents Cup recognizing the intensity of the fan base in Canada.

“But I think the important thing about the Presidents Cup and that relationship here in Canada next year is that the Presidents Cup now has attained, and it really hit this level in Washington last year, a very special place in golf.”

Only a dozen of 45 corporate tents, priced at $70,000 US and $95,000, respectively, remain unsold. Ten-person private table seating either in the clubhouse or marquee village also is available at $20,000 and $18,000, respectively.

The event also appears to be en route toward a sellout with approximately 75 per cent of tickets already sold. Weekly passes are $350 or $250 while daily admission ranges from $35 for practice rounds to $65 on the final day, when the best 10 players selected from each of the two 12-man U.S. and international teams go head to head in singles matches.

Tickets, all in U.S. dollars, are available online at www.presidentscup.com, or via a link through the Royal Canadian Golf Association’s website at www.rcga.org.

“We’re way ahead of where we were prior to going to Washington in 2005,” Presidents Cup executive director Tom Clark said of last year at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Lake Manassas, Va., where the U.S. defeated the internationals 18 1/2 to 15 1/2, following a tie in South Africa in 2003.

“The biggest surprise has been the reception of the sponsors and ticket purchasers in the Montreal area. When we set our revenue goals, we hoped to reach people and surprisingly, they came onboard early to sign for sponsorships and hospitality.”

Players don’t receive prize money, but members of each 14-man team, including captains and their assistants, get an equal share to designate to charity. Each got $125,000 in 2005 and since the inaugural event in 1994, more than $13.5 million has been donated to charities worldwide.

Peter Stone, The Sydney Morning Herald
September 10, 2006

IT MIGHT be five years away, but Australia’s push to host the 2011 Presidents Cup increases in intensity this week with a visit by Mike Bodney, the US PGA Tour senior vice-president for championship management.

Bodney, no stranger to Australia as he lived in Melbourne for two years before the 1998 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne, arrives tomorrow to inspect prospective venues in Sydney and Melbourne.

During the four-day visit, officials from Sydney clubs (Royal Sydney, The Australian, The Lakes and the NSW GC) and their Melbourne counterparts (Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Metropolitan and the Victoria GC) will talk up the merits of their courses.

If Australia is to host the cup, and Japan is the only other country bidding for the 2011 series, Sydney might have the inside running, as not only has Melbourne hosted the event previously, but the Victorian Government has yet to guarantee financial backing.

Jeff Sluman:
Last year at the Presidents Cup at the 18th hole. He and Jim Furyk are playing Singh and Appleby. Appleby hits it to 8 feet. Tiger’s got a wedge to the green, getting ready to hit and that was it. This horn sounded and he backed off. He knocked it up there and they won the hole. It was me that hit the horn. They had it hidden up there underneath the drive shaft. Hidden. Didn’t even know it was there. I got out of the cart, stepped up and grabbed it and hit the horn. I fell down in the grass and laid down. I looked over and asked some people to tell me he didn’t hit the ball. Tiger finished and, well, you’ve gotta come right out and be a man and I said “Tiger, it was me who hit the horn. You were lined up to the right and it was the only way I could stop ya. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” We all had a big chuckle.

Dates for the 2007 Presidents Cup in Montreal, Canada will be pushed back one week, delaying the event from the originally planned September 20-23 to September 27-30.

The seventh edition of the biennial team matchplay competition between holders United States and an International squad of non-European players will be contested at Royal Montreal Golf Club.

The move comes following last week’s release of plans to alter the US PGA Tour schedule format starting in 2007 to create more interest in the season-ending Tour Championship with an eye to boosting US television ratings.

A four-event late-season series will conclude with the Tour Championship on September 13-16 and PGA officials did not want the Presidents Cup to be scheduled for the following week.

“This move will help ensure the worlds best players have an extra week to prepare for the 2007 Presidents Cup,” said US PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. “We felt the competitors could use an extra week to rest and be fully prepared for The Presidents Cup.”

US players have won four times and drawn another in the first six Presidents Cup events, the lone US loss coming at Melbourne, Australia, in 1998. The draw came in 2003 at South Africa. Montreal will be the third non-US site to host.

Alec Hogg
From SouthAfrica.info

Back to the Presidents Cup. The final two days produced many highlights in a golfing sense. But, for me, the most memorable moment of the tournament came from an entirely different quarter, and involved one of the more famous spectators, former US President George Bush (Snr).

Like any golf fan, Bush was clearly keen to get the best possible view. But unlike the rest of us, he felt entitled to share the structure erected for television cameras next to the 7th green.

No sooner had Bush Snr settled in than the hard-working SABC cameraman alongside spotted him and shooed the former leader of the Free World away. That forced Bush to clamber back down the steep temporary steps accompanied by chuckles among dozens of us watching from a legal position 10 metres away.

To his credit, Bush took the instruction in good humour. Still, be sure there’s one cameraman who has a wonderful tale to tell his grandchildren one day.

As do all the others who saw up close how South Africa can put on an event that the entire country should be proud of.

Alec Hogg
From SouthAfrica.info

Like every successful project, the Presidents Cup didn’t just happen. The hand of South African golfing great Gary Player was evident all over.

Son Marc told me that Player needed every bit of his famed tenacity to bring the event to fruition: “He fought pretty much everyone you could imagine to get it here. You have no idea the obstacles he had to get past. In the end it was only my Dad’s perseverance and Hasso Plattner’s chequebook that made it happen.”

Plattner, the fabulously wealthy co-founder and until recently chairman of global software group SAP (named for wife Sabina Ann, who lives permanently in SA nowadays), is turning out to be a fabulous friend for the country.

He has an affinity for the Southern Cape Coast shared by so many Germans. As a nation, they are comfortably the biggest investors in the region, having bought billions of rands worth of property and holiday homes in the region’s seemingly ever growing plethora of golf estates.

None more so than Plattner. Apart from the hundreds of millions pumped into the Fancourt Estate, the stretch of manicured fairways and greens where Ernie Els and Tiger Woods went head-to-head on that memorable Sunday cost a cool R100-million. Acknowledged as the toughest test of golf in the country and simply called The Links, its Scottish seaside appearance was shaped from a flat piece of marshland by ubiquitous Gary Player’s golf course development company.

The local newspaper reckons the Presidents Cup directly injected over R150-million into the Southern Cape region. The prestigious golf course is sure to bring in a lot more in the years ahead as The Links will be one of the most exclusive stretches of real estate in the world, becoming primarily a members-only club.

An up-front membership fee of US$70 000 plus a further R30 000 annual subscription puts The Links out of reach of your garden variety hacker. Even then, wealth is no guarantee, as prospective members need to be personally invited by Plattner. To date there are 24 members. Although the list is not public, one can safely assume the bulk are globally influential persons who might otherwise never visit our shores.

Alec Hogg
From SouthAfrica.info

Although nearly a billion people saw it on TV, you had to be there to really appreciate the moment when South African President Thabo Mbeki spontaneously handed his place of honour to the last of his white predecessors, former president FW de Klerk.

Mbeki had been called upon to officially close the hugely successful 2003 Presidents Cup, where the world’s leading golfers (outside Europe) took on the best from the US.
Read more »