Buzz Is All That's Missing at the Presidents Cup

Byline: Leonard Shapiro

What with the NFL season and college football underway and several baseball pennant races going down to the wire, the Presidents Cup -- being contested this week off the shores of Lake Manassas in Northern Virginia -- has not exactly created much pre-tournament buzz. Even the players admit they generally don't think about the event much until they actually arrive and start getting into their match-play mode and mood.

Certainly, the anticipation of the event pales in comparison to the far older Ryder Cup, the matches between teams from the United States and Europe that have been going on since 1927. In a Ryder Cup year, the weeks before the PGA Championship, the final event to earn points for the top-10 automatic berths on the team, media speculation usually runs rampant on who will make the team and who will be the captain's choice wild-card selections. The press conference the day after the PGA Championship to announce those wild-card selections is always packed to hear the two captains round out their teams.

The Presidents Cup, at least in this country, pales in comparison. You have to look long and hard in many American newspapers simply to find the up-to-date Cup point standings over the summer, and when the two captains announced their wild-card picks this year, it was done by conference call, with news of the picks the next day buried in most sports sections.

And yet, at this moment in time, the Presidents Cup would seem to be the far more compelling event. For one, the two teams played to a dramatic tie when last they met in George, South Africa, in November 2003. It was called a draw only after the teams were tied at 17-all in the matches and Tiger Woods and Ernie Els kept halving each other into darkness after three holes of knee-knocking sudden death.

A colleague from Toronto who went to South Africa to cover the Cup because of the presence of Canadian golfing hero Mike Weir, said it ranked among the most exciting sports events he had ever witnessed. Yet, only one American newspaper bothered to cover what also has been described as one of the most significant sporting events in post-apartheid South African history.

This week, the American press is far better represented in the 200-seat media center just behind the 18th green. But a number of major media markets are still missing, including Chicago and virtually the entire West Coast. Yet, representatives from newspapers in Australia, New Zealand and Japan have seats in the tent here, and likely will give the event major space on their pages back home.

Certainly, the Presidents Cup outdoes the Ryder Cup in star power. Between the two teams, eight of the world's top-10 players are competing, including No. 1 Tiger Woods and No. 2 Vijay Singh, and it would have been nine of 10 save for Els having to pull out because of knee surgery last month.

The captains certainly need no introduction, with Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player having won 27 major championships between them and reprising their roles as captains in the 2003 event in South Africa. Both firmly believe the Presidents Cup has a chance to surpass to the Ryder Cup in prestige and popularity.

"I've said on numerous occasions I think that the potential of the Presidents Cup to be greater than the Ryder Cup is there," Nicklaus said earlier this week. "I think the Presidents Cup has come of age. I think the event in South Africa moved it up a big notch. And I think it showed the world that the game is a game and not a war. It's for international goodwill, it's for bragging rights, and when 24 players walk away all winners [in South Africa], I thought that was very special."

Added Player: "As President Eisenhower once said to me, America is a global society and I think that everybody in the world should be thinking of it as a global society. The Presidents Cup is played in different parts of the world, not just America and Europe. It's going around the world gradually, and fostering the game of golf which we all love and want to see happen."

In many ways, this week's competition could take the event up another level if the matches stay relatively close and the outcome is still in doubt when NBC turns on its cameras Sunday afternoon.

The trend, however, does not exactly point in that direction, with the United States winning all three times the Cup has been contested on American soil, all on RTJ's soil, as a matter of fact. The United States has a 58-38 point advantage in those three victories, including the most lopsided outcome in the tournament's five-match history here in 2003, a 21 1/2 to 10 1/2 rout with the United States ahead by 14-6 going into the singles Sunday.

The closer the better this time around, but sadly, a tie this week won't be settled by any sudden-death playoff. For an event looking to enhance its profile and elevate to Ryder Cup-like coverage, the PGA Tour's decision not to break a tie seems rather strange considering the drama that unfolded in near darkness two years ago in South Africa.

The players prefer it this way because they know the sort of crushing pressure Els and Woods felt going mano a mano for those last three holes. None of them, including Woods, wants to bear that burden. But from a spectator's point of view, that was as good as it gets, and sudden death ought to be back in the format next time these teams meet in Montreal in 2007.

It's called creating even better buzz, the only element lacking in the run-up to this year's event.

Questions or comments? E-mail Len .

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