The Champions Tour is off for two weeks now, but that doesn't mean things aren't happening. Mike Stevens, its president, was in Montreal earlier this week to discuss the Champions Tour event that will be played June 22-24 at Richelieu Valley Golf Club. Stevens announced that Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters winner, Larry Mize, the 1987 Masters winner, and John Cook, who won last year's Montreal Championship, have committed to the tournament.
The Montreal Championship has demonstrated that Golf Canada isn't the only organization in the country that can run a successful high-level professional tournament. Synchro Sports, a Montreal-based sports properties and marketing company, conducts the event, which will be played for the third time.
Synchro had run a Canadian Tour event, but a Champions Tour event is a big step up. That's why the first deal that the Champions Tour did for the Montreal tournament was three years only.
"We probably could have done a little more," Stevens said in a telephone interview from Montreal the other day, "but we wanted to make sure Synchro has the wherewithal to do it right. We felt they could, but we wanted to be sure. The tournament has exceeded our expectations."
An extension hasn't been signed yet, but that's likely to happen. Stevens said the tournament will almost certainly stay in Montreal, except for 2014, when, he said, "It looks like Golf Canada will bring the RBC Canadian Open to Montreal." The country's biggest tournament will probably go to the Royal Montreal Golf Club's Blue course.
Should that happen, the Montreal Championship could take a year off, or, perhaps, move to another market. It would be interesting to see what the name would be, "The Montreal Championship in Calgary?" Just kidding.
Meanwhile, Stevens and Synchro's vice-president David Skitt, the tournament director, were in Calgary on March 28th to see if they could drum up interest in a title sponsor. The financial services company Desjardins is the Montreal Championship's presenting sponsor. Stevens emphasized in Montreal that there were no plans to move the tournament to Calgary.
Whatever transpires, it's certain that the Champions Tour will play a schedule of 25-27 tournaments each year, at least under Stevens' watch. The schedule contracted from 38 tournaments to 27 after studies showed that the top players were entering 20-23 tournaments.
"Tournaments were having strength of field issues," Stevens said. "But now the strength of the fields is going through the roof. We're averaging 26 of the top 30 money-winners from the previous year."
The challenge for the Champions Tour is, not surprisingly, the economy. Stevens feels that it's weathered the roughest part, but this doesn't mean that all is smooth. Sponsorship dollars don't flow as easily as they once did. Meanwhile, the Champions Tour at least provides a superb pro-am experience for sponsors and their clients.
"I think our pro-am experience is the best in golf," Stevens said. "Players do almost anything we ask of them. They'll give lessons. They'll attend pro-am dinners."
One thing does remain complicated. That's the convoluted mechanism, or mechanisms, by which players get into tournaments. The field for Champions Tour events has been expanded from 78 to 81, and there's no cut, as always. That seems simple enough, but it's not.
Let's see. The annual qualifying tournament once gave spots to the low nine players. Then it went to five. The Monday qualifier for every tournament once offered seven spots. Now four spots are up for grabs. And it gets confusing from there.
"You need a Ph.D to figure it out," Stevens said. "I've been at if five years, and I'm still figuring it out."
Here's one thing nobody needs to figure out: The Montreal Championship's purse will be $1.8 million (USD). Only five Champions Tour events have higher purses, excluding its major championships. This is impressive, especially for a tournament that doesn't have a title sponsor.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest . He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at . You can now follow him on Twitter