Last week, the PGA Tour announced its new schedule of Tour tournaments to begin during the 2007 season, and it remains to be seen how a new date for the increasingly-troubled Shell Houston Open (“the SHO”) will play out.
As noted in this previous post, the SHO has suffered over the past several years for a variety of reasons, including the fact that its recent date has been the relatively unattractive week just two weeks after The Masters Tournament. At the current time of the SHO, most of the best Tour players are taking a break from the Tour before gearing up for the U.S. Open in June.
However, under the revised Tour schedule beginning in 2007, the SHO will be moved to the weekend before The Masters. The Houston Golf Association — which runs the SHO — had been hoping for a date on the new schedule that would have been the weekend before the new spot for the Players Championship, which will be played after The Masters in mid-May under the new schedule rather than in mid-March before The Masters as it is currently scheduled.
As you might expect, the HGA is putting the best spin on the new date as possible. “Clearly our new date will generate additional excitement in the marketplace because we may attract even more marquee players to the Shell Houston Open,î said HGA president Steve Timms in a statement on the SHO website.
Count me as not so sure. Although the current date two weeks after The Masters is certainly not ideal, moving to the week before The Masters might be even worse. Under the new schedule, the Tour players will be finishing up a month-long swing through Florida, which will include a new World Golf event at Doral during the week before the SHO. After playing at Doral, the top Tour players may find it easy to skip the long jaunt to Texas and simply opt to take a week off to prepare for The Masters.
For the organizers of a tournament that attracted only two of the top ten Tour players during last year’s event, that new schedule has to raise more than a few concerns that efforts to elevate the Shell Houston Open to the first tier of the non-major Tour tournaments simply may not be feasible under the Tour’s present setup.