Is the Tail Wagging the Tiger?

So Tiger Woods is locked in a dispute with the PGA Tour and we don’t know what the results are going to be. What is this, Florida?

Before things get nasty, it’s probably a good time to take a step back and look at what this is really about.

What it’s not about: Woods wanting a percentage of the tour’s television revenue. Of course, he certainly deserves it, the way ratings are spiking upward.

But what’s he going to do if the ratings drop?

Give the tour a rebate?

Yeah, that’s going to happen about the same time Tiger starts playing with a square ball.

Let’s move on.

This dispute is also not about the use of Tiger’s image by tournaments sponsored by companies with which he isn’t associated.

Buick, which is a Woods sponsor, does not care if Mercedes, which is not a Woods sponsor, congratulates him in print advertisements for a tournament victory that makes him eligible for the next Mercedes Championships.

Buick and General Motors are getting their money’s worth from Woods.

Besides, according to the PGA Tour’s Player Regulation Book, the tour and sponsors of tournaments are free to use players’ images to promote the tour and tournaments--as long as there is no implied endorsement involved.

There’s more. American Express, a Woods sponsor, does not care if PricewaterhouseCoopers sponsors the so-called “Fall Finish,” which boosted prize money in the year’s last eight events by $200,000 and then awarded a $200,000 bonus to the player who did the best in them.

No, but American Express does care when Woods decides not to play the MasterCard Colonial. That makes American Express very happy.

To find out the real issues between Woods and the PGA Tour, you have to peel back the edges of the dispute. When you do that, you find that what we really have here is a smoldering, bickering power struggle between International Management Group, one of the world’s most influential management and marketing companies, and the PGA Tour.

Woods is IMG’s most famous and most powerful client, and while there is no doubt that he is genuinely ticked at the tour, IMG is even more upset with Commissioner Tim Finchem and the blue suits.

Why?

Try money.

It’s not as if IMG sent Woods on a mission to blast the tour--it wouldn’t risk that with him--but you can be sure that IMG is overjoyed that he is doing it.

The bottom line is that IMG is losing its grip on the golf establishment and resents the heck out of it. At last month’s Cisco World Match Play event in England, a tournament begun and run by IMG, company founder Mark McCormack accused Finchem of being too heavy-handed and not acting in the best interests of international golf.

IMG is irritated that the tour is raising tournament purses in the United States so much that top players don’t need to play anywhere else. Worse than that, at least in IMG’s opinion, is that it must increase prize money at its events to keep up with the tour’s purses. That cuts into IMG’s bottom line.

For example, IMG had to nearly double the Match Play purse from last year, $800,000 to $1.5 million, and still had only one U.S. player in the field--PGA runner-up Bob May.

And there’s another money issue that IMG doesn’t like, involving the rights fees it had to pay the tour for two U.S. events involving Woods. IMG paid the PGA Tour $400,000 in rights fees for last year’s Showdown at Sherwood, the Woods-David Duval made-for-TV match. This year’s rights fee that IMG paid the tour for the Woods-Sergio Garcia Battle at Bighorn was nearly four times that--$1.5 million.

Woods is playing the part of the heavy, but that’s not exactly fair. He says it’s not about the money, which ordinarily means it’s about the money. But this time, it’s not really his money but IMG’s that’s in jeopardy.

Where do we go from here? As usually happens in golf, it’s going to blow over and just go away, probably with a few alterations in policy.

Meantime, Finchem clearly needs to have a better relationship with the top star in the game. So, Tim, play a video game with Tiger or something.

And if they studied it, there probably is a way to alter the rules about implied endorsements in the Player Regulation Book that would make all sides happy, or at least not as unhappy.

What IMG needs to do is keep Woods happy, sign some of the new, young stars that are going elsewhere and thus create new revenue streams.

What Woods needs to do is to avoid any hint of selfishness--that he would set himself apart from the other players, because he isn’t exactly in tournaments by himself. Tiger is one of the guys. He’s the best and the richest, but he’s still one of the guys.

As for the chances that he would break away from the PGA Tour and start his own tour, or renounce his PGA Tour card, that’s extremely farfetched, although he is smart enough to retain that threat as a possible chip in this game.

Look at the facts. Woods must play 15 PGA Tour events to continue as a member. If he plays four majors and accepts the maximum of seven sponsor’s exemptions, that’s 11 tournaments. Yes, there is a tiny loophole. If you finish in the top 10 of a tournament as a sponsor’s exemption, then you’re automatically in the field for the next week. That hardly seems a good way to plan a schedule for someone who wants to win majors.

What’s more, if Woods relinquishes his PGA Tour card, he cannot join again for five years.

There’s always the European PGA Tour, which is such a great setup that most of the top players--except Colin Montgomerie--abandon it as soon as they can find a boarding pass so they can play for the bigger purses and on the better courses and against the best players on the PGA Tour.

Chances are, you shouldn’t expect any time soon to see Tiger battling it out with Pierre Fulke and Ian Garbutt for the championship of the Moroccan Open in front of four people, two caddies and an oil well.

What Woods could do is play 10 or 12 times around the world for $2-million appearance fees, but while that would be financially rewarding, it would not satisfy his competitiveness or move him closer to the place in the golf record books that he wants . . . right on top of Jack Nicklaus.

And the notion that Woods would start his own tour is preposterous. What top players are going to turn their backs on a tour that will offer nearly $185 million in prize money next year? They simply can’t afford to.

What they can afford to do is watch Woods raise some legitimate issues, see how much juice he has and then wait to see how it all shakes out.

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NICK OF TIME

On a windy day at Valderrama, Nick Price shot a 72 that was good enough to keep him ahead of the pack. D6

PICKET UP

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