Riviera Wants ’09 Presidents Cup
Riviera Country Club is trying to lure the 2009 Presidents Cup, and though a PGA Tour official expressed concerns about attendance problems, the club’s general manager said there was no risk.
“It’s the old thing about Los Angeles being too laid-back,” Riviera’s Michael Yamaki said. “Will Los Angeles support this kind of event? We think it’s tailor-made. We have such a diverse culture, I think the event plays right into our hands.”
The Presidents Cup, which began in 1994, is a biennial match-play event between players from the U.S. and the rest of the world other than Europe. The creation of PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, the Presidents Cup is the tour’s answer to the Ryder Cup, which is also played every other year but features the U.S. against Europe in match play.
The 2007 Presidents Cup will be played in Montreal; the 2009 site has not been chosen. In a letter to the PGA Tour, Yamaki said Riviera was interested, and Monday, he met with Michael Bodney, the tour’s senior vice president of championship management.
Bodney said Riviera is big enough to handle the staging issues of a big-time event, such as corporate hospitality areas and a television compound, but he said he was concerned that the market wouldn’t respond.
“I can take this event to 10 or 15 places and I know for sure 25,000 or 30,000 people will show up. I don’t know if that’s going to happen in L.A.,” Bodney said. “We can’t afford to have a dud. We can go to a lot of places and I know it’s not going to be a dud.”
Neither the 1995 PGA Championship, run by the PGA of America, nor the 1998 U.S. Senior Open, run by the U.S. Golf Assn., were attendance winners at Riviera.
Yamaki said he intends to meet with Finchem soon to discuss such issues. Riviera makes points because of its history and the fact that the September event could be shown in prime time on the East Coast.
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Michelle Wie has accepted a sponsor’s invitation to play in a men’s Asian Tour event, the SK Telecom Open. The $500,000 tournament will be played May 4-7 in Seoul.
Wie, 16, shot a second-round 68 at the Sony Open in Honolulu last month and missed the cut by four shots. It was her fourth attempt to advance at a PGA Tour event.