One Week in April

Heritage, Legends of Golf Share Same Stage

What a week fans of professional golf in the South Carolina/Georgia Lowcountry have to look forward to come April 2011. Separated by less than 45 miles, sharing the same seven days and featuring some of the finest golfers in the world this side and the other side of 50, the PGA Tour’s Heritage Classic and the Champions Tour’s Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf will be played concurrently for the first time ever.  

In a scheduling twist hopefully more happenstance than trend, Hilton Head Island will host The Heritage Classic at Harbour Town Golf Links the same week that The Club at Savannah Harbour stages the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, one of the top limited-field events on the Champions Tour each year. Not only do the two events share the same week, they will take place less than an hour’s drive from one another in a unique and perhaps questionable one-year scheduling move by the PGA Tour that operates both professional circuits.

The Heritage has long enjoyed the week following The Masters on the PGA Tour schedule. Without a title sponsor for 2011 and beyond, however, the Tour gave the Heritage’s post-Masters spot to the San Antonio-based Valero Texas Open, moving the Heritage back a week on the schedule.

It just so happens that week has been the home of the Legends tournament for the past several years, meaning two major tour events are being staged during the same week in a relatively small coastal area. This also happens during the single most important week in the 43-year history of the Heritage. For their part, officials from the PGA Tour, the Heritage and the Liberty Mutual Legends are putting a positive spin on the 2011 schedule publicly, preferring to point out the potential upside of shared week. 

“Playing the same week as the Legends of Golf is a unique situation,” said Steve Wilmot, Heritage tournament director. “We feel like our tournaments are unique from one another and certainly tournaments that everyone can enjoy.”

Call it the new world order for professional tours struggling to find new corporate sponsors or just a blip on the screen that will correct itself, but either way the week of April 18-24 should be interesting along the coastal shores of Savannah and Hilton Head Island. It’s likely not the way the PGA Tour would have preferred it, but two of its signature events will be competing for the same on-course attendance and television audience from a limited regional population center. 

“Understand that a scheduling change is never an easy thing,” said Rick George, who served as the PGA Tour’s chief of operations before accepting the Texas Rangers COO job in early October 2010. “While it provides some unique challenges, it also provides some unique synergistic opportunities between the two events.”

Good spin, but not really reality. The Heritage does draw from Savannah. The Legends, in the past, has enjoyed support from the South Carolina Lowcountry. However, that was when the tournaments were one after the other on the April calendar. Limited discretionary funds on the part of the golf public, distracted regional media attention and split national exposure across two major networks can’t help but affect the net effect of both tournaments’ bottom line.