Columnist Dean Juipe: ‘Silly Season’ misplaces the wealth

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2002 | 9:24 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Golf's "Silly Season" begins today, with outrageous and almost offensive purses paid to players regardless of what they shoot.

The select pros who are invited to participate in these things show up, collect an astronomical check and then whistle their way around the course without a care -- or maybe even a birdie -- in the world. It's free money, bestowed upon the lucky few by TV networks looking to fill time in their winter programming.

The PGA Tour is affiliated with six of these unofficial events and first up is the Wendy's 3-Tour Challenge, which will be taped today at the Dragon Ridge Golf & Country Club while not being broadcast until Dec. 21-22 on ABC.

But as the 3-Tour Challenge unfolds in Henderson, at least two Las Vegas-based professionals who could use the money will face a far more daunting task. Edward Fryatt and Bob May, both recent staples on the PGA Tour, have lost their exempt status and will be hard at work on their games in preparation for a return to the dreaded Q-School.

When the rain-delayed and season-ending Southern Farm Classic was terminated Monday in Madison, Miss., the tour officially ended its 2002 season and both Fryatt and May finished out of the top 125 money winners. As a result, each heads for Q-School with an onerous burden: Play well there and gain a tour card for 2003 or spend the year in exile.

"We've got to shorten his swing," Fryatt's coach, Jimmy Bullard, said of the task before them this week during training sessions at the TPC at Summerlin. "There's only one guy who can get away with a swing like that, and it's John Daly.

"For almost everyone else, less is more."

Fryatt -- as detailed in a Sun story during last month's Invensys Classic -- has endured a lengthy slump. In fact, he is so exasperated by it that he didn't even enter the Southern Farm Classic, coming, as it did, one week after he not only missed the cut at the Buick Challenge but was dead last after two rounds.

"I was a little surprised by that," Bullard said of Fryatt not teeing it up in Mississippi, given the stakes and the outside chance he could win and hang on to his tour card. "Golf is a funny game: Sometimes out of nowhere you can play good.

"But Ed wanted to get away and clear his mind and get ready for Q-School."

It'll be his first trip there since 1998. And it'll be May's first since 1999.

A third area player on the tour, Craig Barlow, shot 69-75 to miss the cut in Mississippi but he retained his card, finishing at No. 124 on the final money list.

For Fryatt (No. 170) and May (No. 138), the road is far more difficult and it might be doubly demanding today with the 3-Tour Challenge in town dispersing extravagant riches to its already-wealthy participants. I liken it to a casino promotion in which a royal flush winner's jackpot is doubled or tripled, while the poor guy who plunked in $500 and couldn't even get a four of a kind leaves the building empty-handed.

It's an old bias but a valid one: It just doesn't seem fair that the rich are continually finding ways to get even richer.