Under a new name, an old golf tournament is back at Silverado

There it is, pinched between the Tour Championship and the Presidents Cup. The reference is to the annual PGA Tour event at Silverado in Napa. The one with almost as many name changes as it has years of history.

It returns this week, now called the Procore. As opposed to the Fortinet, which it was called last year. And before that, the Safeway and Fry’s.

Yet, to rework that golf phrase, it ain’t what, it’s who. The place is important, however the players are more important.

The major problem for what we will list as a semi-major event held around the time of the harvest moon—the grape harvest that is—and certainly the start of the football season.
  

There’s a reason the Tour holds the Tour Championship the week before the NFL games get underway. Pro football not only dominates TV, it overwhelms every other sport out there.

Cleverly after the Tour Championship, the Tour disappears for a week. Give Scottie Scheffler his $25 million paycheck, and then take a full seven days off. For a while there, the lords of golf believed they could fool us, choosing to describe the event at Silverado as the start of the schedule hoping the big boys would enter to get their high-finish points as early as possible.

No longer. 

Now it is merely the resumption of the “Fed-ex Fall” schedule.  And unfortunately there is not a lot of interest compared to the spring and summer schedule. To the minds of some, incorrectly, golf doesn’t mean much until the Masters.

Golf and tennis, which lack the advantage of home games, are built on personalities. It’s been that way forever. Sponsors would complain that writers and television too often would emphasize who weren’t entered in a tournament, particularly when it wasn’t Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus in an earlier day, or Tiger Woods or Phil Michelson in recent times. 

“Why don’t you talk about other people,” I was asked for years. 

“Then they would become famous, like Arnie,” I was told for years.

Sorry, fame is earned and the star system is all too prevalent. That doesn’t mean the other guys don’t deserve attention, particularly someone like Sahith Theegala. He won at Silverado last year and finished third in the Tour Championship, behind Scheffler and Collin Morikawa. He will be a member of the U.S. team that play the international squad in the Presidents Cup the end of September in Montreal.

During the third round of the Tour Championship a week ago Theegala gained recognition for calling a penalty on himself when virtually unseen by anyone else he moved the sand with the club before taking a swing. That cost him a double bogey, but earned him appreciation. Honesty is at the very essence of golf and Theegala displayed it along with an ability to compete.