KEY POINTS:
Beside Yourself with excitement about the FedEx Cup? You know, the four tournaments that make up the PGA Tour playoffs where the best player gets US$10 million even if he doesn't actually win one, and doesn't get the money until he turns 65.
Huh? Oh I see, you have too much else to watch. Like the Rugby World Cup, the US Open tennis, NRL playoffs and the Twenty20 World Cup. I can understand the concept of actual winners getting their prizes straight away is easier to understand than golf's latest attempt to invent something important.
Such are some of the problems with the FedEx Cup. The PGA Tour, despite being the major league and dripping with money because of the Tiger factor, does not own a major championship. Those are operated independent of the Tour. The PGA Championship is run by the PGA of America, which is completely separate from the PGA Tour.
What's worse, golf disappears off the mainstream sporting radar after the last of the majors, the PGA, in mid-August.
Despite Woods' appeal, even he can't stop the tide of NFL and college football washing across the US from late August to late January. So the PGA Tour has tried to invent something meaningful after the majors, code for "something that Tiger will play in."
The World Golf Championship does the job for one week but the FedEx Cup is an attempt to stretch it out for another month. It's problematical because of a complicated format and the delay in collecting the prize.
Golf fans, like all sports fans, like their competition nice and simple. In football, the team with the most points wins. In golf, the guy with the lowest score wins, and we have another tournament next week.
To assign a monstrous eight-figure prize to the winner of a four-event series where each individual component offers US$7 million seems, to say the least, a bit unnecessary.
The idea of the FedEx Cup is to determine the PGA Tour's most consistent player through the year but it seems odd that the money won't be paid (with investment earnings - or losses) for about another 30 years.
What has emerged is that despite this money, actually winning is still by far the supreme motivating factor. Woods, who'll want the top prize because he hates to lose, didn't play the first event because of fatigue. Phil Mickelson is not playing this week to recharge for the finale next week.
That intense desire to come first was illustrated in Boston this past week at the second of these FedEx Cup events where Mickelson beat Woods by a couple of shots.
When they shook hands afterwards, there was not a flicker of a smile or more than just a fleeting glance into each other's eye.
They know they'll meet again. When they do, there'll be far more important matters than a US$10m dollar retirement fund.
