What they said: Tim Finchem
MORE INTERVIEWS: THE PLAYERS Championship transcript archive
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to THE PLAYERS Championship for those of you who haven't seen this week. I'll have more to say about THE PLAYERS when these three players depart and we'll answer your questions about anything related to THE PLAYERS.
For the next few minutes we'd like to talk about our charity platform on the PGA TOUR, and I'm delighted to have three of our four Player Directors up here with me. None of them needs an introduction, but I'll introduce them individually as we go through some comments.
The basic reason we're here is today we're announcing a redirection, if you will, of some of our efforts as it relates to charitable activity on the PGA TOUR. We do that with a focus on trying to elevate the impact of what's happening through our tournament structure and also to some extent what's happening with respect to what the players do themselves.
We are bringing forward this initiative under the headline or banner, if you will, of "Together anything's possible" barring some of the language we used to use years ago to talk about our charitable involvement. This program has six pieces, and I'll go through each one, but quickly, they're first of all, communication; secondly, focus on players' activities; thirdly, tournaments and sponsors; fourthly, all of our charities around the country; volunteers and fans.
The effort here is to build upon the tradition of the PGA TOUR and charity, the ability to raise over $1.4 billion to date in our tournament structure, and to redirect, if you will, to give us a bigger opportunity.
Let me go through each one of these six and ask these three guys to comment on a couple of them. The first one is messaging and communications, and this really goes to the question of reaching out and educating people about what does happen with PGA TOUR golf as it relates to charity.
Over the years, countless times I've had people come up to me and say, Tim, you really need to tell the story better about what happens with charity. It's too good a message. A lot of people don't know about it. And we know from experience that when people learn about what's happening and the lives that are impacted, they become involved. They help us more. We're able to grow the impact of what we're doing. So we will be reaching out aggressively to people to educate them and for a call to action to join us at the tournament level or in other ways to assist in what's happening with PGA TOUR charity.
Secondly is the players. Obviously players week in and week out support the charitable involvement of our tournaments, but a lot of players, many players, have charitable activities that they support on their own. Some of them have foundations. Some of them have fundraisers for various causes that they run themselves. Some of them serve on charity boards. Some of them serve on the boards of various tournaments that are dedicated to charity. And by partnering with the players, we think we're better able to interact with the activity of what's happening with the players individually, what's happening, first of all, with our tournaments and also with our communication platform as it relates to those activities.
So we see a partnership that will provide television and advertising support, a repositioned pgatour.com that will catalog the activity of players and their charities, players that are seeking to broaden the breadth and impact of their charities and communities that they serve.
With that let me start with David Toms. David started a foundation in Shreveport in 2003 that helps underprivileged, abandoned and abused children. After Katrina his foundation raised and gave away about a million and a half dollars, and interestingly, David's foundation was recognized by the Wall Street Journal two or three years ago as the leading charity from a cost of operation standpoint of any sports-related charity that gave away in excess of $600,000 a year. So he's raised a lot of money. He's given away a lot of money and done it in a very frugal and effective way, and with that I'll ask David to comment on this development from the aspect of players and what players do.
• To read David Toms' interview, click here.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Thank you, David. Obviously a couple things that David touched on are things that we would focus on in this initiative, the ability to help David's foundation earlier on from a communications standpoint, working with younger players to help them form foundations when they've found an interest in charity and things of that nature.
I'd also like to recognize Amy Wilson, who is the president of the PGA TOUR Wives' Association, and of course the Wives' Association has helped needy children and families through a variety of fundraisers over the years, and thank you for being here, as well.
The third area is that of tournaments, and let me start by recognizing Steve Tims, who is here on behalf of the President of the PGA TOUR Tournaments Association. Tournaments obviously are the bedrock of what's happened from a charity standpoint over the decades going back to the '30s and '40s. 12 years ago we made the decision as an organization from a policy standpoint that we wouldn't accept any new tournaments on the PGA TOUR or the Champions Tour or the Nationwide Tour unless they were organized for a charitable purpose. That started a redirection at that time where we added to our mission statement, the charitable efforts.
Today our focus is to put more energy and resources behind raising the bar for tournaments and giving around the country. We have a lot of tournaments that do a great job, arguably maximize their potential in the markets where we play, and we have a lot of tournaments organized for charity that we don't think are maximizing their potential. So we want to work with them to do so.
We're talking about activities that in addition to the communications and raising the awareness of what these tournaments do, working on programs like Birdies for Charity, Tickets For Charity, affiliating with outside events and bringing them under the PGA TOUR tournament umbrella, sharing best practices and a better use of TOUR assets that we have available, communication-wise, Tournament Players Clubs and other things that we can bring to the table.
As a member of the board of directors of the John Deere Classic, Zach Johnson has been up close and personal with the activities of the Deere Classic as well as their charitable initiatives. Last June when we had the terrible floods in the Midwest, Zach stepped up and took a leadership role in doing some special fundraising to help those people that were impacted by the floods. He did a PSA, and he became really the face of the PGA TOUR efforts in this area, and I'd like to ask Zach to comment on his perspective from the focus of the John Deere Classic and some of the things that you've done.
• To read Zach Johnson's interview, click here.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Thanks, Zach. The next area is the area of our charities. We have over 2,000 charities that receive benefits one way or the other on the PGA TOUR, and we are going to work to bring these charities together as a network for communication purposes so we can share best practices and information so we can promote better what they do directly, and so most importantly we can bring our assets together to impact the relationship and what the relationship is generating.
It takes on a wide range of activities that includes information, communication and best practices. To give you one example in the communication area, we've been -- by the way, this entire rollout is scheduled to be on-line by the end of this year, but some of these areas we've started on. In the last few weeks we've picked out a charity from each of the tournaments. We've focused and spotlighted that charity, the Hilton Head Heroes at Verizon Heritage Classic, the Bayou District Foundation Initiative in New Orleans at the Zurich Classic, First Tee of Charlotte, last week at the Quail Hollow Championship, and this week we're recognizing several charities here at THE PLAYERS, one of which is the Boselli Foundation Youth Life Learning Center, Tony Boselli is here. Tony is a former Jaguar who created this foundation. The foundation is a grant recipient from THE PLAYERS, and with that grant Tony's foundation is having a positive impact on the lives of youth in Jacksonville. Tony's available when we get done here to answer any of your questions about their activity.
As a member of the East Lake Club in Atlanta, Stewart Cink has had the opportunity to see the impact of that foundation over the last 15 years and what it's done for that part of Atlanta. Stewart does his own fundraiser out at Sugarloaf during the course of the year, but he also has -- because the TOUR Championship's leading focus is the East Lake Foundation and Stewart has played in the TOUR Championship a lot in addition to his relationship with East Lake, I think he's in a unique position to talk about East Lake as an example of one of those entities we want to partner more closely with.
• To read Stewart Cink's interview, click here.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Two more areas and then we'll take a couple questions, fans and volunteers. Fans, we have over 100 million fans a year that watch some sort of PGA TOUR golf. Our effort is under the "Together, anything's possible" banner to reach out to those fans, educate them on what's happening, how lives are being changed, how they can help and get involved. The website that we'll be positioning will allow them to come on the site, interact with players and tournaments and make a donation through tournaments or volunteer their time. We want to reach out to the fans and engage them.
And lastly, volunteers. Obviously we exist on volunteers. We have over 100,000 volunteers all over the country. We can't run our tournaments without volunteers, but we want to expand that. And we've reached an understanding and agreement with the Hands On Network, which is the largest generator of volunteer activity in America with 231 affiliates and 70,000 nonprofit organizations affiliated with those entities, and their job is to organize people who increasingly in today's society are raising their hands saying, I want to help out, I want to do something. I've got time, I want to contribute. And that's what Hands On does.
We've reached a strategic partnership with them to perhaps help some of the tournaments, but mainly this is a focus on activating things around the tournaments and in other times of the year in communities that can generate the impact of charitable impact on tournaments. We've started this relationship. I think it's officially being announced today. And our first test case is in Atlanta. We're going to have some activation of charity-focused sponsorships in Atlanta that will be fully ran and managed by Hands On volunteers, and then we'll just go from there. So we're anxious to reach out to volunteerism and increase those relationships.
Let me summarize this and take a couple questions. There are really three pieces to this platform. One is tell the story, engage people in terms of what's happening, how they can become involved; strengthen our partnerships, our partnerships with players, tournaments, charities, fans and volunteers, and as a consequence of those two things, grow the impact of what we're doing in golf and on the PGA TOUR for charity.
I would like to cut these guys loose in a few minutes but if you'd like to ask a couple questions and then I'll come back and take your questions on THE PLAYERS.
I'll make comments in two other areas and then throw it open for questions. One is on THE PLAYERS, I'd say generally we are ecstatic about just about everything. The golf course is in, according to these guys, the best condition it's ever been in; we've got a good weather forecast. We like the changes we've made in staging and fan enhancements for this year. We like some of the things we're doing for the fans on-site. We continue to benefit from the strong partnership of our proud partners, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, JELD-WEN and UBS, in allowing us to continue to improve staging as we go forward.
We're excited about having President Bush 41 here tomorrow evening to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and to help us recognize the military in the community who are so supportive. So we think it's shaping up to be a great week. Henry Hughes and Jay Monahan I think have done a fantastic job this past year preparing us, and we're delighted about that.
And then secondly, since we're at sort of the halfway point in the FedExCup season, I'll just say that we are very pleased with the way that competition is moving forward. We have I think increasingly now the second half of the season we'll be seeing more focus on who's in the Top 5, who's in the Top 15. With the changes that we've made at the end of the season if you're in the Top 5 and you win, you control your own destiny I think will become more and more of a focus by the players and the fans.
With that said, I'll be happy to answer any follow-up questions you may have on these or other generally related subjects.
Q. Just curious, with the tradition like no other, what's the purse this week?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: The purse this year will be flat to last year. No change.
Q. $9.5?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: $9 something. $9.5.
Q. I was listening to you talking about the new initiative. One of the things that I've seen is that I've seen players do some very kind and gentle things for the handicapped kids on-site. Would kind of highlighting some of that, like there was an issue with Tiger with a little boy named John Paul George which never reached the press but it was something that happened at Arnold Palmer's tournament a couple weeks ago. I've seen a lot of that but I've never seen that softness that the players have actually exposed to the general public.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: That's a good comment. I think the criticism that we've had over the years, if it is criticism, or at least advice, is that we need to humanize the charitable impact because it has more of an attraction for people to get involved. Listening to these kind of stories and understanding where these guys really are and the impact that they had on what they do and how committed they are is I think a big part of it. But also if there's a way we can kind of capture what you're talking about, that would help us a lot, too. We just have to get better at our overall effort to convey what this is all about. You're exactly right.
Q. What they do for charity and what you will do for charity in the future is fantastic, but one of the things the players could help is simply to show up more, play more tournaments. And according to a couple surveys I've seen, and one of them I've done myself, they're not doing it. They're not kind of heeding your call that you made in the off-season. Is there anything more you can do about that, and is there any possibility of getting close to that LPGA rule?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, I think you sort of have to separate these two things. Honestly I don't think field quality has a lot to do with charitable impact. It might have some. But if you look at the biggest focus in today's world is, is Tiger playing or not. That's always the question I get. If you go down the list of which tournament's raised the most to charity, you have to go down the list a bit before you get to the tournaments in which Tiger is playing.
On the subject of what we're talking about today, it's a question of not who's playing the tournament but who's involving the tournament in the community, because when the right people are involved in the community and they're organized right and they're executing best practices, this platform, this brand and this enterprise can do marvelous things for charity. Just look at John Deere. I mean, the week before the British Open, arguably a very weak field, and yet a huge success story in that part of the country for charity, and right on down the list. A tournament that's going to be played next week, coming on the heels of Charlotte and THE PLAYERS, but if you were to estimate the quality of field there, you'd say over the last five, six years they've had reasonably poor quality of field, but to the community it's a huge event and it's the No. 1 generator of charity dollars.
Q. As it relates to the TOUR's health --
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, to the TOUR's health, we're talking about sponsors. Now, to the other part of your question, actually the players have stepped up. What I expect a player to do is help us in one of a number of ways. I don't expect all players to do the same thing. I don't know of a player that hasn't done more this year than last year in a range of things. But when it comes to scheduling, I'm almost more interested in moving schedules around than I am in adding events. We've had a number of players that have done that, and it's had a desired effect. It doesn't solve the issues with field quality; I didn't expect it to. But the players you may be thinking about on the other hand are doing some other things for us that are sometimes even more valuable. I'm very comfortable with what's happened.
Q. Do you know roughly what percentage of your members have some type of a dedicated charity?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, we look at it from the standpoint of either a dedicated event, some of them have foundations, some of serve on the boards of charitable entities, so it takes on different forms. If you add all those together, we feel like it's a fairly high percentage. But we've never really catalogued effectively the information that would allow us to correctly answer your question, and that's one of the things we're doing now. We're in the process of doing that as we speak.
Q. Just curious, and bear with me in case I muddle through another question, but a couple players I spoke to yesterday don't really have a dedicated charity. They do things either that moves them or comes across their desk that they just want to get involved in. How do you balance the need of storytelling and letting people know how much good these players do with those who prefer to not -- for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing sort of thing.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Yeah, it's kind of up to the player. If a player is more comfortable -- some players who have foundations, they've got development going on, starting with Tiger Woods Foundation right on down the list if you went through the list of players and are interested in being able to broaden whatever their enterprise is. Some others may take a different view. Some players one year might not do anything and then the next year a cause pops up in their community and they get engaged and go do a fundraiser so it takes on different forms.
To the extent they want to take advantage of the platform interfaces probably will vary and we'll deal with the players individually. It's not intended to be sort of a cookie cutter approach. Although the ones I've talked to are very interested in being able to have an entity adjunct to our website that catalogs activity, shares a lot of information, perhaps provides video support, and we like that because if we get to the point if we're doing a telecast in that part of the country sometimes we can pull out footage and something to promote what the player is doing. Players may very well have different attitudes about how much of that they want to do.
Q. Lastly, how much of this is a response to the publicity, I guess, around Northern Trust and everything that came out around that time of the year?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: None.
Q. None at all?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: No. I mean, the general question of conveying to people that might be misinformed about the economic impact or charitable impact is something we need to address, but that's -- if we're talking about the public sector, we're talking about a couple hundred people. So this is a broad-based outreach program nationally.
In the case you're talking about, there were two -- at least best I'm able to decipher, two members of Congress that got all the headlines, and all the other members of Congress, a lot of who not only know about what we do but are involved in some of the things we do or are supportive, in today's environment those voices don't always get heard. We may have a little bit of work to do there.
This comes on the heels of several years of thinking through how we can elevate what we're doing.
Q. Specifically what are some of the things and some of the resources that the TOUR might bring to bear to a player who comes to you and wants to have TOUR involvement in his charity or his foundation in a community?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, the first thing, and I mentioned this to the rookies -- we meet with the rookies every year when they finish qualifying school. This year we had dinner with the rookies at Sony in Hawai'i, and I mentioned to the rookies because I wanted to gauge, even then, and these aren't guys coming back to the TOUR, these are rookies, if the PGA TOUR had a capability to assist you in developing a fundraising capability, even perhaps a foundation development, is that something that interests you guys. And they're already interested because they know so much about what the charitable impact is.
So providing a player that capability, nurturing it, providing some consulting support, how you go about -- there are different ways to do fundraisers in golf. Some of them are done really well, some of them are done poorly, some of them are priced well, some of them are priced poorly, some of them create a great experience, some of them it's a lousy experience and tough to resell, whatever you're trying to do. We can certainly provide support in that area. And then once it's up and running, we think we can provide a lot of support through this website we're talking about.
Q. So some of the other assistance might include using the resources of the -- your broadcast arm to provide footage and so forth that they would get --
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: We like the idea that, for example, last week we did a piece on the new First Tee opening in Charlotte. But if there's a particular player activity going on in that part of the country or playing in Hartford or Boston, we might want to showcase what Brad Faxon and Billy Andrade do with CVS and interweave it in addition to what the tournament is doing. And Tournament Players Club, the assets in certain areas can be brought to bear in some of these cases, as well. We already do a lot of them, but engaging in a more regular way and really making it a partnership, so working with the players, I think would be a healthy thing, helping them do a better job of what they're trying to accomplish.
Q. The one-in-four proposal has been floating around for a long time --
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: 20 years.
Q. Arnold earlier this year said he's in favor of something like that. He kind of lived his TOUR career that way. Run us through where you fall on that. Has it ever gotten traction at board meetings? Do you think it's necessary? If not, is there a plan B? What are your thoughts on that?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, it's been discussed a lot. Every two or three years it gets discussed. We've never gotten excited enough about it to bring it forward. I don't think a lot has changed on that, but I think we'll talk about it some more in the next year.
I think that equally -- and it has real issues with it, not the least of which is it's a change in our culture. I mean, our culture is players play where they want to play. Our job is to create a mix of tournaments and schedule them in a way that makes the most sense so we can capture as much of that play as we can.
My own view is a more effective way to deal with the pockets of field quality issues that we have might be a more flexible schedule, because if you start in Hawai'i and go through the year, just about every one of our tournaments has a good golf course, great agronomic conditions, good operations, good player support. There aren't any weak tournaments anymore. I don't know of one. But there are pockets given the flow of the schedule where it's very difficult to attract a field.
Even in weeks where we may have a historically weak field and we go to players to help us, it's very difficult. It's not a question of the caliber of the tournament in some cases, it's not a question of the golf course. It's just a question of juxtaposition in tournaments. We're looking for ways to flex up the schedule, maybe move tournaments around a little bit more in the out years. But it's just the beginning of a work in progress and it'll be three or four years until we get there.
Q. I'll ask a crystal ball question about the kind of adaptations that the TOUR will make with the economic climate changing, what kinds of things will you have to change on the TOUR, not only for this tournament but also the TOUR at large.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, the change we're talking about today isn't because of the economic climate. We think it's timely because of the economic climate, because our charitable dollars are going to go down this year, and we've gone up every year the last 20, and we're going to down now. At least at the halfway point now, or almost the halfway point, it would appear that we're not going to go down comparatively like charitable giving generally is off or other certain charitable activities, so that's good. That means we can perform in a bad time reasonably well, but we're still going to be down. So it's timely, but it's not the reason we came to this point. We've been talking about a number of these issues for two or three years.
But we do need to address it because we want to be in a growth mode, so we think this will help if we execute properly, there's no question about it.
Q. Down by how much roughly?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: It's a little early to say, but we were $124 million last year. I've got to believe we'll be off as much as 16, 18 percent. I think if we're north of $100 million in this environment, it's pretty good. But obviously we're doing everything we can to come out as well as we can, and I think this week we're going to have a good week. I don't know where we're going to come out, but the tournament has performed well in this environment and hopefully we'll meet our number to avoid contributing to any falloff this week. We've had some tournaments that are flat. We've had some tournaments that have lost a lot of revenue and they've resold a lot of stuff effectively. That's a good sign. That means we can still generate new sales out there and are generating new sales.
There's a lot of positives in this. And the other thing about it is there's always a silver lining in every bad situation, and one of the silver linings is you work harder, you think about it more creatively, and when you come out the other end, assuming this is a reasonable cycle, you're stronger because of it. We certainly hope that that's the case here.
Q. I'll ask you to put your International Federation of PGA TOURs hat on. Last week the HSBC Champions became kind of a quasi-WGC event --
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: There's no quasi. It's a full-bore WGC event.
Q. Can you walk through that process a little bit in terms of did tournament organizers lobby you for that status? Was that subject to a vote by the members of the Federation?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: The creation of the WGC?
Q. Yes.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Well, I mean, we haven't made any bones about the fact for the last three years that we'd like to have a WGC played outside the United States, and our focus was Asia. I mean, we've been talking about that for a couple of years. The real question was the schedule -- and everybody agrees with that. I don't know of anybody that doesn't agree with that. So from a Federation standpoint, this wasn't something where we had to argue about it. The question is how to get it done, really.
Our schedule changed, and then the European Tour schedule that includes, as you know, co-sanctioned events in Asia, changing, as well, and then after it changed they added Dubai and they changed it around again. So there were a lot of moving parts to it in juxtaposition with our fall schedule. So it just got to the point, what's the right vehicle and how do we do this. We wanted to couple it, not just with being in Asia, but preferably a vehicle that would help drive growth in China. We're really pleased -- this adds a little bit different eligibility format to the retinue of WGCs, which we think is healthy, tournament winners primarily, and it's going to be in China and it's got a good sponsor. So we think it's the right thing, and it'll balance things a little bit here for the next few years until we figure out what we're going to do long-term.
Q. I called it quasi because the money is not official.
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Yeah, and I get that question. Inside baseball, U.S. golf, it seems to be an issue. Globally we felt it was premature to ask for it to be official money. We recognized that it was going to be a significant purse, it was going to have a good format, and if it achieved, attracted the players that are eligible, it achieves significant World Ranking points, so we were very comfortable with that.
I think it's an open question, though, on official money. We could convert it to official money at the right time if it makes sense. I think sometimes we all forget that the British Open didn't become official money until ten years ago, so it isn't like it's the end of the world. I think the main thing is the quality of the competition, a globally sanctioned event in China is an exciting thing for them.
Q. Any discussions on changing the date of it or venue down the road, which would make it more appealing to American players?
COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Yeah, I mean, we're set here for a couple of years and then we're going to get into that 2013 environment, which is after this television cycle. We're a ways away from deciding our fundamental schedule in those years, and then we'll see what emanates from that.
Thank you very much.
End of FastScripts
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