Columnist Dean Juipe: Senior Tour deals Vegas a bad hand

Dean Juipe

Monday, April 17, 2000 | 10:33 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Generally speaking, the pro golf tours are run by brilliant men with excellent staffs who pay strict attention to detail.

As a result, their tours ordinarily follow a cohesive and logical pattern. They take geography into account when organizing the year's schedule of tournaments.

But those responsible for the Senior PGA Tour, which is in town this week for the Las Vegas Senior Classic, goofed this year. And if there's a price to be paid, it's the Las Vegas event that will be hit the hardest by the tour's scheduling snafu.

The Senior Tour whiffed when its 2000 schedule placed the Las Vegas tour stop a week after the PGA Seniors' Championship, which was to have been completed Sunday in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., yet has been extended a day by a weekend of bad weather.

Compounding the slight to Las Vegas, the first of the Senior Tour's four majors -- The Tradition -- was held three weeks ago in Scottsdale, Ariz., and was followed by a bye week in deference to The Masters. As a result, in the past three weeks the typical Senior Tour player has had to play a major in Arizona, followed by a week off in which he almost certainly went home, followed by another major in Florida.

Now he's supposed to come back across the country to Las Vegas? And be fresh and ready to play?

Not hardly, especially with the PGA Seniors' Championship still to be completed today.

This is a problem Las Vegas did not face in 1999, when its event was held in mid-May and was part of a West Coast tour swing. A year ago, for instance, Senior Tour players competed in Charlotte, N.C., the week after the PGA Seniors' Championship in Florida, and Las Vegas was still three weeks away.

But this year the players are zigzagging here and there, at least during this early portion of the schedule.

"That'll change next year," said Las Vegas tournament director Charlie Baron, who is already privy to the likely 2001 schedule. "Next year The Tradition will move from March to April and will be played one week ahead of us.

"The PGA Seniors' Championship will go on the road, so to speak, and will be played later in the year. From a travel standpoint, everything will make a lot more sense."

An ad during the televised portion of this year's PGA Seniors' Championship said next year's tournament will be held May 24-27 in New Jersey.

The Senior Tour was nuts for placing two majors so closely together, as it has been doing with The Tradition and the PGA Seniors' Championship, let alone have them so early in the year that weather can be a negative factor. It snowed last year at The Tradition and the intermittent downpours made this year's PGA Seniors' Championship a nightmare for everyone involved.

Out of this debris, players will be arriving in Las Vegas weary and, perhaps, a day or two behind schedule. Some may even be tempted to withdraw rather than tackle the last leg of this road trip from hell.

"I think the Senior Tour has finally recognized the need to make a change," Baron said, hopeful that the appeal of coming to Las Vegas offsets the miseries the Senior Tour has been putting its players through this spring.