July 23 to July 26 at Champions Run
This week: No tournament. Next event: Ford Wayne Gretzky Classic, July 9 to 12, Clarksburg, Ontario.
Last week: Tom Gilles, who was so low on the Nationwide Tour’s eligibility list that he couldn’t get into the season’s first eight events, won the $600,000 Players Cup in Bridgeport, W.Va., by three strokes over Cameron Percy and Roger Tambellini. Gilles, 40, shot 70 in the final round to finish at 15-under-par 273 and collect $108,000 to zoom from 108th to 10th on the season money list. “I felt like I’ve been playing pretty well for the last two months,’’ he said.
Steve Friesen watch: Missing the cut at the Players Cup resulted in another six-spot drop on the money list, from 55th to 61st, for the ex-Husker from Lincoln High. He has $43,484 in 12 events.
Check out: Jonas Blixt, who took fourth last week to leap from 39th to 24th on the money list. The 25-year-old Swede was the highest-ranked foreign-born collegiate player of 2008.
— Stu Pospisil
A few Nationwide Tour events are struggling, but the Cox Classic isn’t one of them.
The budget for this year’s tournament may be 5 to 10 percent smaller than a year ago, new tournament director Chad Mardesen said, but the purse has grown $25,000 to a Cox Classic-record $725,000.
This year’s tournament will be July 23 to 26. The defending champion is Ryan Hietala, who was scheduled to be in Omaha today to take part in the tournament’s golf outing for the news media.
Two tournaments this year have cut their prize money, notably the Nationwide Tour Players Cup that ended Sunday in Bridgeport, W.Va. It was to have been one of the tour’s three $1-million events this season, but slashed its purse to $600,000.
“That was a little shocking for a lot of us,’’ said Mardesen, who was hired last fall after Jamie Alt left after seven years to run a Champions Tour event in Des Moines.
Only the Gretzky Classic in Canada, the only tournament left before Omaha, will have a larger purse than the Cox Classic. The two surviving million-dollar events are late in the season.
“Our big news,’’ Mardesen said, “is that the tournament is going strong. The economy has not been kind to us, like it has been for anyone. My biggest surprise, in taking on a new role, has been how supportive everybody is. Businesses may have their own financial concerns, but they say they can’t afford not to remain a sponsor because of the community impact of our tournament and their customers’ expectations that they’ll be there.’’
Mardesen said he and his staff, including marketing director Scott Athy and operations director Jay Steadman, have made “cuts left and right.”
“We’re trying to save a buck wherever we can,’’ Mardesen said. “It’s little cost-cutting things, nothing that I think anybody at the tournament will notice.’’
The tournament has a contract with Champions Run through 2010 and has started a three-year agreement for Lexus to be the tournament’s presenting sponsor. Cox Communications is in the final year of its contract as title sponsor, with Mardesen saying renewal talks are under way.
Even if there is a new title sponsor, he said, “we’ll be hand-in-hand with Cox throughout the entire process. We’ve been very honest with them and they’ve been very honest with us. They get so much of the tournament that they want to be a part of it.’’
The Cox Classic will be shown on the Golf Channel, as it has for 12 of the first 13 years, but the weekend rounds will be tape-delay telecasts for the first time. The tradeoff is that golf on Saturday and Sunday, as it did in 2008, will finish in the late afternoon.
“It was hard to tell if the later finish helped attendance last year because it was so blazing hot,’’ Mardesen said. “What might help is that this year, people won’t have the option to stay home and watch on TV. We think that will bring out more people.’’
Contact the writer:
444-1041, stu.pospisil@owh.com
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