Hazardous Decision Costly to PGA Tour

Fed up with the PGA Tour’s continued insistence on players entering 15 tour events a year, Bernhard Langer says he is leaving the organization for good, and that he expects fellow Europeans Sandy Lyle and Nick Faldo to do the same. Seve Ballesteros has been a non-member for three years.

“I will officially resign my PGA (Tour) card by the end of this year,” Langer said Sunday at Greg Norman’s Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities Invitational at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks.

Like Ballesteros, who has feuded with PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman over this issue for years, Langer strenuously objects to being obligated to make 15 official tour stops yearly to retain his membership. Living in Europe makes such a commitment a tremendous burden to golfers such as Langer, 32, who lives in Anhausen, West Germany.

So, the 1985 Masters champion has had enough. From now on, Langer said, he will play in the United States only in the majors and in a few selected events at which he already has exemptions.

“That will be it, and I know that Seve and Sandy and Nick feel exactly the same way and intend to do the same thing,” Langer said.

Begging the question: How stubborn will the PGA Tour be? The potential loss of Langer, Lyle and Faldo along with Ballesteros--that’s really taking a divot out of the PGA’s field of great players. These four men won five of the 10 Masters championships in the 1980s.

Someone such as Norman spends more time at home in Florida than in Australia, so for him it’s not such a jet-lag drag. These players with European addresses, though, do not care to establish residences in the U.S. or spend endless hours on airplanes just so they can enter 15 events and keep their PGA Tour cards.

“Fifteen is just too many,” Langer said. “I played more here in America this year than I did at home. It’s time to reverse that.

“The European Tour has grown and we need to support it. I am a German and a European. I like America and the tour and the people here, but when I have to stay here two or three months at a time, I get homesick. I’m getting older and I have a family now. Ten years ago my life was golf, golf and more golf. But that has changed.

“I do not want to grind and grind like I did as a rookie. The American tour forces you to do that. So, I will miss all this and some of the friendships and some of the tournaments, but I had to make a decision, and I have made it.”

A unified movement by Langer, Ballesteros and other top European players could be construed as an attempt to force Beman’s hand. Langer freely acknowledges that “if they would just drop the requirement to 10 or 12 tournaments instead of 15, I would come back, and so would the others. But the PGA won’t accept any changes, any compromises.”

Langer played in 14 tour events this year. He is winless--in fact, he hasn’t won a PGA Tour event since 1985, having been hampered by a back ailment--and ranks 73rd on the money list, as well as 70th in all-time earnings with close to $1.4 million.

Abroad, Langer this year has won the Spanish Open and German Masters, and he has 31 international victories since turning pro as a teenager.

Lyle and Faldo, the 1988 and 1989 Masters champions, respectively, managed to reach the PGA Tour’s cutoff point. Lyle entered 16 tournaments, Faldo 17. Ballesteros played in eight tour events.

With Lee Trevino turning 50 years old next month and Jack Nicklaus doing likewise in January, the PGA Tour stands to suffer the loss of some of its most prominent players. So far, Beman and his organization have made weak attempts to change the 15-event qualifying demand.

The PGA Tour had offered to lower the demands to 12 tournaments, but in return wanted players to commit to at least three events from a predetermined list. Those tournaments would have been among the weaker events on the PGA Tour. That idea was rejected by the PGA policy board.

Specially staged shootouts, such as Norman’s RMCC charity event and next week’s tour-sanctioned Skins Game in La Quinta, should continue to appeal to large galleries and television audiences thanks to their celebrity headliners.

The weekend’s activity here in Thousand Oaks consisted of alternate-shot, scramble and best-ball play by two-man teams, but was televised by ABC-TV nationwide and was well-attended. People want to see Trevino, Nicklaus, Langer and other names of fame on the leader boards, no matter what the format.

The PGA Tour is pressing its luck if it lets many of these get away. Golf lovers gladly will keep watching the Masters and U.S. Open. It’s the other tournaments that have some potentially serious hazards--occupational ones.