On the Tours

Nine PGA Tour tournaments were recently honored with 13 “Best Of” Awards by the PGA Tour at the Tour’s year-end Tournament Advisory Council (TAC) Meetings. Here is a list of those tournaments, the awards they received and a brief description of what made them worthy of being honored.

Acting LPGA Commissioner Marty Evans has announced that the Tour will partner with long-time LPGA sponsor Wegmans to conduct the 2010 LPGA Championship presented by Wegmans. It will be among 24 official money events in 10 countries on the 2010 LPGA Tour.

The announcement was made during a press event at the season-ending LPGA Tour Championship presented by Rolex.

The PGA Tour and Fry’s Electronics recently announced the relocation of the Frys.com Open for 2010 to CordeValle in San Martin, CA, with the tournament to be contested in October and televised in 220 countries on Golf Channel. The PGA Tour Fall Series event had been played the last three years at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Az.

Located 30 minutes south of the title sponsor Fry’s Electronics’ world headquarters in San Jose, CA, CordeValle is an 18-hole, par-72 Robert Trent Jones, Jr. design stretching across 7,169 yards of Northern California’s hillsides, canyons and broad meadows.

Just a few days after a deluge cancelled the PGA Tour’s Viking Classic at Annandale Golf Club in Madison, Mississippi’s only premiere professional golf tournament, the skies brightened with the announcement that Biloxi’s Fallen Oak Golf Course would host a new Champions Tour event starting in 2010.

The tournament will be called the Mississippi Gulf Resort Classic and is scheduled for April 26 – May 2 at the Tom Fazio-designed Fallen Oak Course which is ranked No. 19 by Golf Digest in the publication’s latest installment of America’s 100 Greatest Public Courses.

The 2010 PGA Tour schedule will again feature 37 regular season events to be followed by four PGA Tour playoff events for the FedEx Cup.

The season-long FedEx Cup competition will open the week of Jan. 4-10 with the SBS Championship at Kapalua, Hawaii, and will conclude the week of Sept. 20-26 at The Tour Championship presented by Coca-Cola in Atlanta.

Golfers who dream of one day reaching the pinnacle of their profession on the PGA Tour and a course overshadowed by its world-famous next-door neighbor will be the main attractions at the Nationwide Tour’s newly created Winn-Dixie Jacksonville Open.

The tournament will be played on the TPC Sawgrass Dye’s Valley Course sometime in October of 2010, either one or two weeks prior to the season-ending Nationwide Tour Championship. The dates of the event will be finalized in the coming weeks as the PGA Tour’s little brother determines its official schedule.

The Justin Timberlake Shriners Hospitals for Children Open will be played at the TPC Summerlin from Oct. 11- 18, 2009.  This year marks the second year for Timberlake and the Shriners to sponsor the event and the 27th consecutive year that the Tour has made a stop in the “Entertainment Capital of the World."

A stellar field has committed to participate including six golfers ranked in the top 50 of the Official World Golf Rankings: Kenny Perry, Jim Furyk, Hunter Mahan, Nick Watney, Brian Gay and Rory Sabbatini. Furyk is a three-time winner in Las Vegas. 

HOUSTON - President George H.W. Bush's passion for the game of golf and his hometown of Houston, Texas are both well documented, and he and First Lady Barbara Bush are looking forward to combining those passions this Fall as they serve as honorary chairpeople for the LPGA Tour Championship presented by Rolex.

The LPGA Tour Championship presented by Rolex will be hosted by The Houstonian Golf & Country Club, the sister club to the Bush's home club, Nov. 17-22, 2009. 

The LPGA State Farm Classic has renewed its contract with title sponsor, State Farm through 2011, Executive Director Kate Peters announced. The tournament will celebrate a milestone 35th anniversary in 2010, making it one of the longest running tournaments on the Tour. The 72-hole LPGA State Farm Classic will be held June 10-13 at Panther Creek Country Club in Springfield.

"State Farm has been a generous sponsor and strong partner of this tournament for 17 years, helping us make the LPGA State Farm Classic more successful each year," Peters said. "We are grateful for their continued support and look forward to celebrating 35 years in 2010." 

The PGA Tour and Heritage Classic Foundation, host organization for the Verizon Heritage, have jointly announced that Verizon will not renew as the tournament’s title sponsor after the current contract expires following the 2010 event, and that they will immediately begin the search for a new sponsor.

"The Heritage is a well-run, terrific event that includes the wonderful charitable work of its Foundation," said Becky Carr, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon Business.  "Although we've enjoyed an outstanding partnership with the Heritage, we decided that given the global scope of our business, it made sense to restructure our future involvement with the PGA Tour to focus on select PGA Tour events that will provide Verizon Business with more opportunities for business development throughout the year.