2009 Preview

It's not hard to look ahead to 2009 and see some significant question marks. Golf is a trickle-down game, in a lot respects, and it will be interesting to see how the economic tumult of the last part of 2008 affects 2009 on the links. The first question is just how much will Tiger Woods play? My guess is that he'll play a little more than most of us expect but less than the tour needs. For the last dozen years, the tour (all of the tours, in fact) have hitched a ride on Woods' glory train. Every too well funded tour, underachieving player (again, on every tour) owes over half his earning to Woods, and that's more than a little scary.

If the tour continues to function to Tiger Woods as the Washington Generals do for the Harlem Globetrotters it's going to start getting hard to find sponsors for events where Woods is not likely to play. The CEOs of all those federally bailed-out insurance companies that used to prop up the tour will be far too busy hiding the way they're spending all that tax payer cash and making sure they can still upgrade to a Gulfstream G650 this year to worry about dumping money into the tour's coffers.

And then what? Well, maybe this will actually be a good thing. Maybe golf is really not as important as we imagined. Maybe the tour is really less relevant to the world, and even to the golf world, than we thought. Maybe a downsizing of the tour would really be the best thing and 2009 will be the year that it happens. It's all up to Woods.