Americans have miles to go for World Tour

It took nearly five months for the five PGA Tours of the world to select Metropolitan Golf Club in Melbourne, Australia, as host of the 2001 Match Play Championship. That may turn out to be the easy part.

The real challenge will be persuading the top Americans to show up.

"You think I'm going to go? I mean, really," David Duval said recently.

Getting the top 64 players in the world for the inaugural Match Play Championship at La Costa Resort in Southern California was no problem. The lone holdout was Jumbo Ozaki, who rarely leaves Japan and would be on the Senior Tour if he did.

Getting them to Australia the first week of 2001 is another story.

While $1 million in official money awaits the player who can win six matches in five days, a mere $25,000 is there for the 32 players who don't get past the first round. Most can easily make that much at a one-day corporate outing in their hometowns.

And as La Costa proved, even the best players in the world aren't guaranteed more than one round when it comes to match play.

"I can't see myself going to Australia and potentially playing one round of golf -- two, counting practice rounds," said Mark Calcavecchia, himself a first-round loser in February. "As that type of event goes all over the planet, eventually I think you'll see less and less players from the top 64, because of the potential one-and-out factor."

With a $5 million purse, the World Golf Championships will never be confused for the Quad Cities Classic or the Qatar Masters. In terms of prestige, they should be one notch below The Players Championship and the four majors, and well ahead of everything else.

Still, there is no guarantee the WGC will completely fulfil the mission of bringing together the best players in the world -- at least not all of them.

The eligibility for Match Play is the top 64 players available from the world ranking. If Duval or anyone else decides not to go, that's good news for the players ranked 65th and down.

But should Americans bail out en masse whenever a WGC event is staged somewhere beyond their shores, their message will be clear -- a world tour is a great idea, as long as we don't have to go all over the world.

And that message will reek of the spoiled Americans syndrome.

Shigeki Maruyama came to the Match Play from Japan. Stephen Leaney travelled from Australia. Colin Montgomerie and Lee Westwood spent more time on the plane from Britain than they did between the ropes at La Costa.

Why should Americans balk at playing in someone else's back yard?

And it's not just Australia, which is still too far down the road for Duval or anyone else to make a concrete commitment.

Already there are rumblings that not everyone who is eligible for the Stroke Play Championship in November will go straight from the Tour Championship in Houston to the southern coast of Spain.

Granted, there are valid reasons for wanting to skip Australia. The 2001 Match Play will start Jan. 3, the first tournament of the year after a two-month break from official events.

Because it takes two days to get there and two days to recover, that means leaving home right after Christmas, spending New Year's Eve in another hemisphere and playing for a $5 million purse with a game that may be more suited for a shotgun scramble that early in the season.

Even Lee Westwood of England is having second thoughts about Australia.

"It's not all about the money, is it?" he said. ``You want to win majors, and those are in the middle of the year. You need time off, and that time off is January for me."

Even if it were about the money, Duval considered the prospect of 40 hours in the air for a possible $25,000 and couldn't make it add up.

"They take 40 percent out for the country tax. Now you're at $15,000," Duval said. "Two airline tickets are $20,000, so now you're $5,000 in the hole. It wrecks the week before and the week after, so it's really like a three-week trip.

"I'm not going to tell you I'm going for sure."

Eight non-PGA Tour members checked out in the first round at La Costa, and six of nine Europeans were beaten.

"I don't think they're at a disadvantage here," Craig Stadler said after his win over Montgomerie. "They got beat. And they've got a long flight home."

Is it too much for Americans to take that same risk?

TRW