Columnist Dean Juipe: As last resort, LVCVA must rescue LVI

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003 | 9:52 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.

If you are like me, you have both loved and despised the Las Vegas Invitational over the years.

You've loved it for the great professional players who make up the field and you have appreciated not only their skills but their stellar, pressure-packed play. Golf, at the top level, really is an exciting sport.

But you've despised the tournament and its sometimes heavy-handed organizers for moving it out to the hinterlands, placing it on an unwalkable course with insufficient parking and continuing to embrace the amateurs who clog the field for three full days.

These latter reasons, more than anything, are why the tournament is in trouble and may cease to be after a 21-year run. Attendance has noticeably declined, and, in all probability, will never rebound if serious changes in the tournament's format and/or location are not made.

But suggestions on how to improve the event have been given here for countless years and have just as routinely been ignored by the powers that be. So if it turns out that Sunday's LVI -- won by Stuart Appleby at the TPC at Summerlin -- is the finale, I'm fresh out of sympathy.

Yet I want to see the tournament salvaged and believe -- even if no changes are made -- that the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority should underwrite the costs to keep it afloat. The TV coverage of the tournament is, in effect, a Las Vegas infomercial that may be worth millions of dollars in publicity.

If the LVCVA's purpose is to promote Las Vegas, it needs to come to this golf tournament's rescue. If a title sponsor cannot be found -- and one hasn't surfaced yet despite a full year of looking -- the LVCVA should allocate the money and sponsor the tournament in the future just as it did this year (on something of an emergency basis).

The tournament has until the end of the year to either find a sponsor, secure the LVCVA's backing or capitulate and not be a part of the PGA Tour's 2004 schedule.

Las Vegas doesn't have any reason to let that happen. As a golf resort community, it needs this tournament and needs its attending publicity.

Whether it can ever reclaim the community's full-fledged support is another matter and hinges directly on the willingness of the tournament's organizers to bend to the public's obvious demands and desires. Ask anyone -- and I've asked dozens of people over the years -- what ails this tournament and the answers do not vary even one iota.

It's in the wrong place, on a course only a mountain goat could love and it is dragged down by the monotony of its amateur participants.

Those who have lived here long enough yearn for the days when the LVI was closer to town, on a flat course that was easily navigable, and stocked with a full field of professional players.

Despite the loss of the Desert Inn (and a couple of other Strip-side courses), one ideal course remains: the Las Vegas Country Club. It is centrally located, it's walkable and it has sufficient parking across the street at the Convention Center.

A conventional four-day tournament with no amateurs at the Country Club would draw infinitely more fans than the event can ever attract in Summerlin.

But you already knew that.

The TPC at Summerlin became the host site for the LVI after it opened in 1992 and things have never been the same. It's a lovely course but it lacks amenities and discourages foot traffic by winding, seemingly endlessly, through canyons and ravines.

Year by year, as golf fans experience the course, they vow to never return. They decide, instead, to watch the tournament on TV and leave the hassles of actually attending to the naive.

The result: Attendance dips a little more each and every year, until you get to where it's obvious something is wrong, as was apparent this past weekend.

It's said if a corporate sponsor emerges, it can not only have its name on the event but it can name the tournament's criteria as well. It can demand that the amateurs be eliminated and it may even be able to demand that the event be moved to a more convenient location.

But let's say that's impractical and that the link between the PGA Tour and its TPC courses is so strong that the tour will never abandon a TPC course. Or let's say the Country Club steadfastly refuses to turn its course over to the pros for a week in October, although its members were willing to do so in the past and they seemed agreeable when the LPGA Tour was here last spring.

Let's say no changes will be made at all, that the Las Vegas Invitational will live or die as it is now. Let's say all the well-meaning suggestions are ignored again.

Even in that case, I still feel the tournament is of such great value to the city that it has to be saved. And if the PGA Tour is reluctant to allow a casino to support the tournament, as allegedly is the case, it falls to the LVCVA to pick up the slack.

I think it not only can't afford not to, it defeats its purpose if it chooses to just sit on its hands and let this event slip away.