The rumblings from the last week’s decision to discontinue the popular International PGA Tour event at Castle Pines are still reverberating through the golf world, and Golf Digest’s John Hawkins isn’t pulling any punches:

The death of the International last week, however, was a big deal for a bunch of reasons. If no longer a marquee non-major, this was a solid mid-level tour stop in a major metropolitan market–not some CVS Charity Classic or B.C. Open. It is by far the most notable tournament loss in Tim Finchem’s 13 years as commissioner. Ten months ago Denver was on the short list of potential hosts for a FedEx Cup playoff tilt. Now the Mile High City is six feet under. “Players aren’t going to react well to this,” says eight-year veteran Joe Ogilvie, a member of the tour’s policy board. “You can’t do a better job of running an event than Jack Vickers and the people at Castle Pines.”[ . . .]
The International’s demise is a dangerous sign as to the widening chasm between Tiger events and the non-Tigers. Never have the haves and have-nots been so easily defined or so mindlessly categorized by the presence of a single player–it’s the frightening downside of Woods’ competitive dictatorship. When he doubles the size of a viewing audience in a strong golf economy, the rich get richer. When he does it in lean times, the poor get really poor.

Along the same lines, ESPN.com’s Bob Harig discusses the increasing risk of putting on a non-Tiger tour event:

Sponsoring a regular PGA Tour event costs in the neighborhood of $7 million per year. That money covers a portion of the purse, a television advertising commitment, a fee to the PGA Tour and to the tournament. Spread that out over the six-year length of the network contracts, and you’re talking about $42 million or more.
It is a hefty price, especially given the modest television ratings. Those small numbers — usually in the 2 million-to-3 million range for a weekend network telecast — were always justified because they were reaching the “right” kind of people Ö i.e. those with disposable income. With golf, less meant more.
But as the price has kept going up, those company executives began looking at the numbers more closely. And some of them have started to say that enough is enough — especially if Woods doesn’t play.

And guess what side of that chasm the Shell Houston Open is on?

Phil Mickelson won his first PGA Tour event of the new season this weekend by five strokes at the Crosby at Pebble Beach (I know, I know, it’s really the ATT Pebble Beach Pro-Am, but I’m old school).
Meanwhile, Geoff Shackelford notes that Mickelson committed to playing in next weekend’s event — the Nissan Open at Riviera in L.A. — where he will deploy a rather unique commuting strategy in regard to Southern California traffic:

After suggesting Thursday that he might, Mickelson did enter next week’s Nissan Open before yesterday’s deadline. He will play at Riviera for the first time since 2001.[. . .]
Mickelson said he would attempt to commute to L.A. each day from his home in Rancho Santa Fe by using his private jet, flying from Palomar Airport to Santa Monica Airport.

By the way, if you have any question that Mickelson is a good guy or that the NFL isn’t particularly appreciative of its former players, read this.

The International — the idiosyncratic PGA Tour event at Castle Pines GC in Colorado that used a modified Stableford scoring system rather than the traditional stoke play format — will shut down for good after this year’s tournament, another casualty of the increasing stratification of tournaments on the PGA Tour. John Hawkins has the story.
But for the support of Shell Oil, the same thing could happen to the Houston Open, for the reasons noted here and here. The prospects for the other Texas tournaments are not all that rosy, either. PGA Tour, are you listening?
Meanwhile, Doug Ferguson reports that several cities are vying to replace the International:

The cancellation [of the International] leaves a hole in the PGA Tour schedule on July 5-8, but tour officials have been working on a contingency plan over the last month and are expected to announce a replacement by April.
The leading candidate is Washington, the largest U.S. market without a PGA Tour event. The nation’s capital had a tour event since 1968, but that presumably ended when title sponsor Booz Allen bailed out last year because it was not part of the FedExCup portion of the PGA Tour schedule.
Other markets under consideration are Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Not only did Tiger Woods win his seventh straight PGA Tour event over this past weekend, but he debuted a pretty clever commercial in which he fends off a course rat from stealing his clubs on the range by nailing him in the head with a golf ball.
But frankly, the outtake below from the filming of the commercial is even better than the commercial itself. As they say in football evaluation circles — “good closing speed.”
Hat tip to Waggle Room, a solid new golf blog.

Suffice it to say that former Houstonian and prominent professional golf instructor Butch Harmon won’t be receiving any holiday greeting cards from the family of female golfer, Michelle Wie after the following public remarks from over the weekend:

“The whole thing is absolutely ridiculous,” he says. “Michelle has regressed. She is worse now at 17 than she was at 14. To continue telling us that she is getting better by playing with the men is an insult. She says it’s a learning experience. What is she learning by finishing last? It’s hurting her mentally.”
“She should go play with the women and dominate that competition first. But the whole Michelle Wie camp is about money. The biggest difference between Earl [Woods, the father of Tiger] and BJ [Wie, Michelle’s dad] is that Earl didn’t worry about money. He knew it was more important for Tiger to learn to win and then the money would take care of itself. But Michelle Wie wins nothing.”
“You should invite her to the next member-guest competition at your home club and she might actually win something because what’s going on now is ridiculous. And it’s not good for the game of golf.”

Next time, Butch, tell us what you really think and don’t beat around the bush. HT Geoff Shackelford.

Don’t miss this fascinating Ron Sirak/Golf Digest article on the top 50 money-generating golfers. Julius Boros ushered in play-for-logo deals for professional golfers back in the early 1960’s when he donned an Amana hat for $50 a week. I think it’s safe to say that no one in their wildest dreams imagined at that time that a 17-year old female golfer (Michelle Wie) would be pulling in almost $20 million in off-course income in a single year. Imagine what she could pull down if she actually won a tournament or two.
Several other interesting tidbits:

Wie made $2 million more in off-course income than Jack Nicklaus.
Someone still paid David Duval over $4 million in off-course income?
Chad Campbell is the highest-ranking Texan at 19 with over $6.6 million in total income, but The Woodlands’ K.J. Choi is gaining on him (25th at $5.7 million).
A caddie for a mid-range player in the top-50 money-earning list, who won at least once on the PGA Tour in 2006, had gross earnings of around $260,000.
This year, everyone on the PGA Tour will get a courtesy car at every tournament.

The PGA Tour kicks off its season this week with the Mercedes Championship at one of the most beautiful places in the world, Kapalua on the island of Maui, Hawaii. This Lorne Rubenstein/Golf Observer article examines the work on Kapulua’s Plantation Course of the golf design team of Austin’s Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, who have steadily become the best design team in the golf business over the past two decades:

Coore and Crenshaw are at the top of their games. Compared to some of the big names in course architecture, they’ve designed relatively few courses. That’s by choice. They keep their staff small, seven people just now, but, to appropriate a line often used about the late James Brown, the hardest-working man in show business until he died the end of December at 73, they might be the hardest-working men in the architecture business. Their projects are few, their commitment to each is huge, and personal.
Just about every one of the courses they’ve done since they met in the early 1980s is a must-play for architecture aficionados. . . . These are courses that almost uniformly are without affectation. They tend to sit low to the ground, offer multiple options for shots, include short, driveable par-fours, room to drive the ball, angles, and above all, they’re fun to play. Crenshaw’s two Masters wins came on an Augusta National course that hadn’t yet undergone the recent revisions that added length and rough and compromised the vision that Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie laid down on the property. It’s fair to say that the course provided his philosophical grounding.

By the way, Crenshaw is also an expert on golf history, which assisted him in becoming quite a good story-teller, too.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s excellent golf writer, Steve Campbell, previews the PGA Tour season here, and uses that article to pass along the following Tiger Woods crack about the always-entertaining John Daly:

What’s the career prognosis from here for fan favorite John Daly?
Bleak. Daly was 193rd on the money list last year, never cracking the top 25 in a stroke-play event. He has been down before, but now back problems are part of the equation. Given Daly’s distaste for work and fitness, don’t look for his talent to get him out of this mess. As Woods cracked last month at his offseason event, “Well, his back is bothering him because he’s got that front to deal with.”

It’s not golf season, but this story is too good to pass up.
This John Coomber/Northern Territory article addresses the difficulties that professional athletes have in acknowledging depression and the beneficial role that antidepressants have played in the lives of professional golfers Brett Ogle, Stuart Appleby and Steven Bowditch. It’s a serious issue and one that has often been swept under the rug by the folks who promote professional sports and the athletes themselves.
However, the article ends with a funny anecdote. Five-time British Open champion Peter Thomson is quoted as saying that he never noticed depression to be a much of a factor during his playing days, though he suspected that some of his colleagues self-medicated through use of alcohol. Thomson goes on to recall that the famously volatile American golfer Tommy Bolt once tried taking sedatives to control his anger on the course:

“In 1956 (the year Thomson won his third successive British Open) Tommy started taking a drug like a kind of valium to calm him down,” he said.
“When I came back to America for the 1957 season I asked him if he was still taking the tablets and whether they were doing him any good.
“‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m still three-putting but now I don’t give a shit.'”

Hat tip to Geoff Shackelford for the link.