A Roundtable Discussion
Three area writers discuss the
details of how it might all unfold
if Chicago were to be awarded
the 2016 games and golf is
added as an Olympic sport.
TIM CRONIN
Covers golf for the SouthtownStar. He is the author of five
books, including the forthcoming history of Beverly Country
Club. He's covered golf, auto racing and the Blackhawks for
parts of four decades.
ED SHERMAN
Covered golf for the Chicago Tribune for more than a decade.
Also wrote a media column for 10 years; other major
assignments previously included national college football
and the White Sox.
LEN ZIEHM
Has covered golf for the Chicago Sun-Times for
38 years. Other major beats have included the Chicago
Blackhawks (since 2001), soccer and Northwestern
University athletics.
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I
n October 2009,
Chicagoans will know
the result of the
effort to land the
2016 Summer
Olympics. At that time, the decision will be
announced regarding the possible addition of
golf to the roster of Olympic sports. In this issue,
Chicago District Golfer presents the second of its
discussions regarding golf as a sport in the
potential 2016 Chicago Olympics.
Clockwide, from upper left: Tiger Woods; Rafael
Nadel of Spain, the gold medal winner in men’s
tennis at the 2008 Olympics; and the clubhouse at
Medinah Country Club. Page 30: Michael Phelps
and Lorena Ochoa. Photos by Getty Images.
W W W. C D G A . O R G
CHICAGO DISTRICT GOLFER: Will Chicago be
excited about the prospects of an Olympic golf
competition? After all, is there anything new about
going to see Vijay Singh, Stuart Appleby or Lorena
Ochoa?
TIM: I think Chicago will be excited if it
gets the Olympics. If you look back to
Los Angeles, even soccer sold out in
the Olympics and back in 1984 people
weren’t that into soccer. Chicago is a
great golf town, always has been, and I
think it will do very well. Folks will be
excited about the Olympics proper,
but can golf carve out a niche within
that two-week time period for people
in Chicago, around the nation and
world?
LEN: I think there’s a real danger with
golf in the Olympics getting lost in the
shuffle with all the other events. I
think the key to whether it succeeds
will be the format they choose for the
competition. It would be good if they
pattern it like an NCAA tournament,
where you have both an individual
and a team (nation) champion. It’s
more important for golf to be in the
Olympics than it be held in Chicago.
Golf needs to be in the Olympics for
the sake of the sport. It will be a tough
sell, it won’t be the only show in
town—it never has been—and with the
Olympics it will be very much a secondary deal.
ED: The example I would use is, can
you name the gold medal winners in
tennis? I think tennis definitely gets
lost in the Olympics and I don’t know
why golf would want to do that. When
I was at the Sydney Olympics (2000),
no one paid much attention to tennis,
even with the Williams sisters playing.
In Beijing, (Rafael) Nadal was playing
and you never saw a word about that.
In swimming and track, the gold
medal is the standard, it’s the No.1
thing. In tennis, it’s winning a Grand
Slam event. In golf, it’s winning one of
the majors. I think when you know
this isn’t the ultimate, I think it’d take
away from golf being marquee in the
Olympics.
TIM: Some people thought when tennis
entered the games in Seoul in 1988,
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008
that it’d be a fifth major, but that just
hasn’t happened. It’s a half-size
tournament with only 64 players.
ED: I never heard about tennis in
Beijing and I know Nadal and some
big names were playing. I know from
being at the Sydney Games, I’d walk
by the tennis center and it’d be pretty
empty, and we all know with the
Australian Open, it’s a big sport down
there. I don’t understand why golf
would want to go down this road,
other than trying to get funding for
emerging countries’ golf programs, but
there are probably other ways to do
that.
CDG: If Chicago were to get the Olympics and golf
were to be added to the roster of sports, what
venues would be considered?
TIM: Since it’s going to
be a big event, the two
places that come to
mind are Olympia
Fields and Medinah.
One thing to consider
is that you know
they’d be able to sell
corporate tents for the
Olympics no matter
where they are, which
works well in golf.
Those would sell out
and you’d have no one
on the course watching
and everyone in the
tents watching other Olympic events. I
know Olympia Fields is interested; it
has had fundraisers in support of the
2016 bid. The name even fits in—
Olympia Fields—they were named that
because Amos Alonzo Stagg was the
first president and wanted to have a
place where you could have the
amateur ideals of athletics . . . and just
happen to play golf.
LEN: I’d like to toss Cog Hill in there. I
think it’d be good if they had the
men’s and women’s competitions at
different venues to spread it out a bit,
but I don’t think it matters where you
have it.
ED: I think that brings up an excellent
question. You would need two courses
for men’s and women’s; you couldn’t
set up for men one week and women
the next. You wouldn’t want a
tournament one week and have it all
trampled down, then bring in whoever
is next.
ED: We might be looking at men’s at
one place and women’s at another,
like a Glen Club, where it isn’t as long,
or a top country club where you don’t
need 7,500 yards. I think the women
would have a lot more alternatives
because they don’t need as much real
estate.
TIM: That’s why I think Medinah or
Olympia Fields would work. You
could play on No. 1 and No. 3 on
Medinah or North and South at
Olympia, but where do you put all the
“If Tiger were to play, it’d generate
some interest, but again, it’d be a
secondary sport, and using tennis
as the model, you wonder why golf
would want to go through this
exercise and be overshadowed.”
—ED SHERMAN
infrastructure? At Medinah you could
put it on No. 2.
ED: I don’t think it’s as big as the U.S.
Open.
TIM: It’s the first time since 1904, so we
don’t know.
CDG: If golf in the 2016 Chicago Games does
materialize, what kind of changes would that
create? You wouldn’t want to play that year’s BMW
Championship in Chicago, would you?
TIM: They’d have seven years to figure
out their schedules. So they’d be able
to know that they need to move our
regular tour event out of town or to a
different time of year. And it really
depends when the Olympics are. Are
they in July? Do you play them in the
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A Roundtable Discussion
dog days of August? The television
networks would probably have a lot to
do with that. I’d think you’d want it to
be the only event in town. If the PGA
Tour is behind this as they say, they’d
want to move everything out of the
way so that the spotlight in Chicago
golf was on
one thing, the
Olympics.
LEN: It’s an
interesting
concept, but
I’m not sure it’d
be necessary. The
Olympic golf
movement would
be a lot different. I
can’t picture it being
like this year, where
we’re moving events
because of the Ryder Cup;
we can’t have a BMW here
because we’ll have the Ryder
Cup in 2012. I think the
Olympics would be so much
different, both different
players and scope.
You’d certainly want to
schedule away from it.
TIM: The WGA might want to
move it, just to be sure.
LEN: Yes, just to schedule away
from it, but I don’t think it’s
necessary to say we won’t
have a PGA event here
that year.
ED: I think it’d be a no-brainer,
they’d absolutely move it out
of town. I think the PGA Tour
has some commitments that
they need to fulfill to other places and
that’d be a good excuse to do it. I can’t
see any way the BMW would be here.
If you just go by when we had the
PGA Championship or U.S. Open, the
Western Open was severely impacted
with ticket sales and I don’t think
they’d want to go up against the
Olympics. And concerning Medinah as
a venue, they’d only be four years
removed from the Ryder Cup and you
know they’ll be in play for more PGA
Championships and such, so I don’t
know if they’d necessarily be a player,
though I guess they’d rather have the
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Olympics than another PGA event.
That’s only four years—a lot of
championship golf at a private club.
TIM: It is but it’d be the first golf in the
Olympics in 112 years, since they had
it in St. Louis, and the prestige of
saying, “Here we are and we hosted
the Olympics.”
ED: I agree, but I don’t see a way the
BMW would be here in 2016.
CDG: What kind of format would you like to see in
the Olympics?
TIM: Everyone seems to say that we
need to play 72 holes of stroke play
if only to get the star players on
weekend television, where somebody
would pay attention. I’d like to see
something like the Western Amateur
format, where you have three days of
stroke play, with 36 holes on the third
day, and then you have a 16-player
match play tournament. Maybe the
team championship is set up through
the low aggregate score in the 72-hole
stroke play, then the top 16 go for the
individual gold in match play. Again,
it’s the Olympics, so do something
different. And for television purposes,
it might be easier for some networks
to highlight the final match in 15
minutes rather than showing four
hours of golf when you’ve got so
much else going on.
LEN: Yes, I think the Western Amateur
format would be absolutely perfect for
the Olympics.
ED: Talking about match play, it’s
always a dicey proposition because
you could end up with Henrik
Stenson against Geoff Ogilvy in the
final match when everyone wants
Tiger vs. Phil.
TIM: For the Olympics, that
might work. Maybe some guy
from Thailand gets hot
and is now in the
Olympics. That builds
golf internationally,
which is why all these
associations want to
get golf in.
ED: I like your
thinking, but I
believe they’ll
think it is too
dicey. You just
don’t know what
you’ll get and
they’ll go with
stroke play.
Obviously with
match play,
everyone talks
about how great
it is, but the
World Match
Play hasn’t been
an unqualified
success because
all the favorites
lose so early, but I do like the concept.
They’d have to be creative with it
because you can’t go in with a regular
72-hole stroke play event and think
it’s going to be unique. There’s too
many possibilities they could use and
it needs to be unique.
CDG: Would the average viewer understand the
Western Amateur format?
TIM: I think if it’s the Olympic games,
they go for it. It doesn’t take that long
to figure out.
ED: I sit and watch the gymnastics and
I have no clue how they calculate
CHICAGO DISTRICT GOLFER
things, but people get into
it because it’s the Olympics.
Will they get into it? I think
you need to give them
something different to
pique their interest a little
because you’re competing
against so much other stuff.
The hottest tickets are
going to be the track,
gymnastics and swimming
events.
“I think if he is healthy, he’ll have 23, 24 majors under his belt
and would love to play the Olympics. He has always wanted to
win everything and it’s the one thing he won’t have.”
CDG: Does Tiger Woods need to compete in order
to make this a success?
ED: Golf will be down the pecking
order, and that said, we’ve seen what
happens when Tiger is out. If they
don’t get Tiger—he’s never a guarantee
to play anything—it’s going to be a real
roll of the dice whether it’s successful.
TIM: I think if he is healthy, he’ll have
23, 24 majors under his belt and
would love to play the Olympics. He
has always wanted to win everything
and it’s the one thing he won’t have.
ED: And I don’t think you can
underestimate the power of being able
to walk in in the opening ceremonies
under the U.S. banner and flag, and I
think that’s something all these golfers
have never had a chance to do. I think
that’d be a pretty heavy incentive for
him to be able to do that once. I doubt
more than once, but the first one I
think he’d do it.
LEN: No doubt if the Olympics were
this year, Tiger would need to be there
to make it work for golf, but I don’t
know if that’d be the case in 2016.
He’ll face intense pressure to
participate, which would be very hard
to turn down, but I’m not too sure by
that time, when he gets all his goals
accomplished with the majors, that he
might not relegate to be a ceremonial
golfer.
TIM: At 40, when Jack won two majors,
you know Tiger will still be strong.
ED: He’ll have accomplished pretty
much everything by then. I think the
incentive to be able to walk in those
opening ceremonies would probably
entice him to play four rounds of golf.
TIM: Especially if you can carry the
flag like Nadal did for Spain. He
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008
—TIM CRONIN
looked pretty happy. There are several
18-year-old golfers out there around
the world that will be 25-year old stars
in 2016. They will be part of a new
generation of golfers whose names we
don’t even know right now.
ED: I don’t think Tiger will ever be a
ceremonial golfer unless his knee is an
issue. It’ll be interesting to see what
kind of shape he’s in, but I think if
you assume he’s still going to be a
powerful player, I think he’d play just
to say he played in the Olympics.
TIM: By then, Michelle Wie will be 25
and leading the American women’s
team. Maybe.
TIM: It’d need to catch on with the
players. If the players didn’t think it
was important and withdrew or didn’t
want to play, the International
Olympic Committee would look at it
and say, “Why are we doing this?”
That’s why baseball is getting tossed,
because the major leaguers don’t play.
The Olympics crossed the line from
amateurs to professionals quite some
time ago and it’s not going back. If the
players go for it, the audience
appreciates it, and the IOC sees folks
in the galleries, I think it’ll make it.
CDG: Certainly this is a subject that makes for an
interesting discussion. What are some of your
closing thoughts you’d like to leave with people?
TIM: It’d be fascinating if someone
decided to restrike the original
Olympic cup, which was the team
competition trophy the Western Golf
Association won in 1904 that was lost
in a fire at Memphis Country Club in
1923. There’s pictures, maybe
someone could build a new cup and
hand it to the team champions.
ED: Wouldn’t you want the gold
medal?
TIM: It’s inside. It’s like the check in the
green jacket at Augusta.
ED: I think it’d be interesting, I just
think that from what I’ve seen, it’d
be lost in the shuffle unless Tiger
would play. That’d be the only thing
to save it.
LEN: I think it’d be a valid addition to
the world sports scene if we had a
Western Am-style format with the style
of the old George S. May tournaments.
It’d be a celebration of golf in the
Olympics. I think it’d be fun.
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