Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Ron Kantowski: It’s a good bet this sponsorship puzzle could be solved

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.

And so it has come to this: Las Vegas' future as a long-term PGA tour site may come down to whether or not a guy wearing a tire suit leaves the TPC at Summerlin on Sunday with a big smile on his face.

So if you see a bunch of country club types going out of their way to make sure The Michelin Man remains properly inflated during the course of the 72-hole championship that bears his name -- for now, anyway -- you'll know why.

It was just six weeks ago that Bibendum (which apparently is French for Michelin Man) arrived at Las Vegas Founders Club headquarters in Summerlin thanks to directions scrawled on PGA stationery.

Apparently, golf's sanctioning body believes the sport and Las Vegas are an ideal match. Why else would it put its Tournament Players Club brand on not one but two developments in town?

But you don't have to be Johnny Miller to figure out there has always been a relationship between golf and Las Vegas. Like the guys carrying the jars of peanut butter and chocolate who collided at the Reese's company discovered many moons ago, some things are simply meant to be together.

Hopefully, its hastily arranged, pro-rated sponsorship of this year's tournament will help Michelin sell some tires. If not, it may take another another industrial accident like the one at the Reese's plant to save our tournament, which hasn't had a major benefactor since Invensys, a London-based production management company, left in 2002.

It's a sad commentary that tournament organizers and the PGA had to knock on doors in Europe -- or worse, hit up a widow in the Bay Area -- to keep the tournament solvent. Actually, the widow, Helen Morton, knocked on the Founders' door with a check for $5 million, her way of saying thanks for the enjoyment her late husband derived from playing in past pro-ams here.

Were it not for her generous gift (to be spread over three years) and Michelin coming on board, the tournament was in serious jeopardy of going from TBD, the way it was listed on this year's PGA schedule, to DOA.

The search for a sponsor on the home front was starting to resemble Jean Van de Velde as he chased his ball around the 17th hole at Carnoustie a couple of years back.

"I don't know that I knocked on every door," longtime tournament director Charlie Baron said on Thursday as the Michelin Champinship got under way. "But I knocked on a lot of them."

He should have had to knock on only one.

If the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority would just renew its commitment from the bygone days of the Panasonic Las Vegas Invitational, I could have used this space for something more thought provoking. Such as questioning Phil Mickelson's decision to switch clubs on the eve of the Ryder Cup and then blowing off practicing with them, for instance.

When I asked tournament officials about the reluctance of the resort corridor to step up in a sponsorship capacity, they sidestepped the question as if it were a recently seeded fairway.

"Our goal with the Founders at the end of the day is to promote Las Vegas as a golf destination and to raise money for local charities," said tournament chairman John Sullivan, choosing his words carefully. "I think the casinos would agree with us on the first of those two."

Sullivan said a sports sponsorship still has to make business sense for a company, even one with a license to print money, such as a hotel-casino. But what about the idea of giving something back to the local community and spreading a little goodwill in the process?

When I asked Sullivan if that had become a romantic notion in a day and age where seemingly every decision is made with an eye on the bottom line, he said it probably was.

"For them, it's (about) the business of bringing people to Las Vegas. So any investment they may make in the event is part of a business decision."

Well, it's a good thing they don't think like that in places such as Houston (Shell Open) or Memphis (FedEx St. Jude Classic) or Charlotte (Wachovia Classic) or Atlanta (BellSouth Classic) or Detroit (Buick Open) or Dallas (EDS Byron Nelson Classic) or even the Quad Cities (John Deere Classic). Because if they did, there might not be a PGA tour.

Each of those tournaments are sponsored by big businesses located in the very cities in which they are held.

In that any casino interested in attracting high rollers and/or Paris Hilton already has its own golf course and/or upscale nightclub, it probably doesn't make sense to become involved at the title sponsor level when a hospitality tent or a few entries into the pro-am would suffice. According to tournament officials, the LVCVA is still involved in this year's event at the "six-figure" level.

The problem is that at the going rate, it takes about seven figures times 5 or 6 to put on a PGA tour stop.

As the official representative of the tourism industry, the LVCVA is like an ATM. It can fix almost anything. In May, its fiscal budget for 2004-2005 was approved at $196.7 million. That'll buy a lot of fiscals.

Officials at the LVCVA and Las Vegas Events, its marketing partner, did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday because they were -- get this -- hosting their own tournament, the Hospitality Golf Classic for casino invited guests, in another part of town.

But if you're a local golf fan, don't fret too much.

That just means any additional hot air expounded in this space can be used to keep The Michelin Man pumped up about golf.

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