Newt Gingrich is taking off after the welfare system, deadbeat dads, congressional waste, federal funding of the arts, the deficit and the breakdown of the family.
The Clinton administration is taking off after Arnold Palmer and Howard Twitty.
That explains why, amid official Washington’s obsession with the “Contract with America” and partisan fencing, citizen Tim Finchem quietly slipped into and out of town to defend a far-from-anxious class: professional golfers.
Finchem, 47, a Virginia-trained lawyer who looks like a short, sinewy, tough former college wrestler, is commissioner of the PGA Tour, the combination major league-trade association of professional golf.
Nearly all the men’s golf you see on TV is overseen, and must be officially sanctioned, by the PGA Tour, which runs 123 tournaments yearly on the PGA (the blow-dried, polyester-clad younger players), Senior (the 50-and-older crowd, like Jack Nicklaus and Palmer) and Nike (very young wannabes and struggling older guys) Tours.
It has flourished in recent years, with prize money soaring to $111 million last year from nearly $30 million a decade earlier. When you see the hotshots like Greg Norman, Nick Price and Fred Couples swing each weekend (with the likes of Twitty usually trailing well behind), they’re playing for purses now averaging $1.4 million, compared to just under $250,000 in 1980.
But success is not just based on the nation’s appetite for golf. There’s also savvy management, which puts sports such as hockey and baseball to shame, and what amounts to a seemingly benevolent monopoly.
Golf doesn’t have an antitrust exemption like baseball, in which owners do have a legal monopoly and still seem to screw things up. But its rules do make it hard for any hypothetical competitor: It bars members from playing in an event simultaneous to one of its own without Tour permission, or from showing up in a non-Tour, made-for-TV event, such as the Skins Game, without its sanction.
For the members, who tend to be pampered, middle-class suburban white kids, it’s a pretty nice life, though they play for their pay to a greater extent than baseball and basketball players, inasmuch as there are no long-term, guaranteed contracts. They must play well to win money.
The lack of a competing league seems to be of scant relevance to a group whose upscale backgrounds don’t suggest any inherent renegade impulses. Still, the Federal Trade Commission began an investigation into the PGA Tour during the Bush administration, wondering whether its rules on sanctioning players and events are anti-competitive.
The investigation, Finchem said Thursday, has involved interviewing more than 100 witnesses, including players such as Nicklaus, tournament sponsors and network-TV officials, as well as inspecting 10,000 pages of internal documents.
The Tour has spent several hundred thousand dollars in dealing with the FTC, including relying on a Washington law firm, Stein Mitchell & Mezines, and the big-ticket consulting-lobbying firm of Cassidy Co. So far it’s been for naught.
The FTC staff is recommending that the five-member commission bring antitrust charges against the Tour. It’s likely those commissioners will decide whether to do so in the next month, raising the prospect of several years of adversarial administrative wrangling and, possibly, litigation.
The Clinton administration’s track record in the regulatory sphere is spotty, even abysmal in areas such as workplace safety and health, when contrasted with promises of tough enforcement by candidate Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign. And though the PGA’s rules would seem to have an anti-competitive tinge to them, you could wonder, so what?
There is no coterie of frustrated prospective leagues or promoters champing at the bit to lure advertisers, networks and players into the fold of a rival endeavor (a recent hint of a Rupert Murdoch-assisted challenger seems negligible). Given the FTC’s broad jurisdiction, there would seem to be bigger fish in other industries to fry.
But noooooo! as a fabled cultural observer, John Belushi, might have opined.
“I can’t preclude a new tour being set up,” Finchem said in an interview. “If a tour is set up and appeals to players, it can attract them. But I don’t think there should be a law that says I have to compete with (myself).”
Frustrated, and convinced that this is much ado about nothing, he’ll now meet with the commissioners, as well as with key members of congressional panels that deal with the FTC-the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee.
Which, of course, led me to a final question: Really and truly, which city has the most high quality golf courses?
“Chicago,” Finchem said. “If only the weather were better.”
Chemical burn
“We are inviting selected members of the media to request their involvement in a new learning methodology,” the letter stated. “This learning endeavor will be used to help DuPont establish new policies regarding pesticides: their use and information important to consumers, the government, farmers and the press.”
Very interesting.
About two weeks ago, Washington’s Olchak Market Research invited reporters who mostly specialize in agriculture to an evening gathering that it claimed was “NOT a focus group,” but a “unique way of learning” that “makes subjects of interest (such as, in this case, pesticides) into people, novels, etc.”
They paid the reporters a minimum of $250 and, if they came from out of town, flew them in, put them up and gave them $300 instead, along with $50 for local transportation and meals.
Reporters who showed were from the Financial Times; radio station WHO in Des Moines; a syndicated TV news service in South Bend, Ind., called Ag Day Television; Michigan Farm Radio; and Farm Journal (which is owned by Tribune Co., parent of the Chicago Tribune), among others.
According to Bob Quinn, who runs the agricultural department at WHO, “it was a focus group” in which four teams of three reporters each played odd games and answered questions while research folks studied their answers behind a one-way mirror.
They began with “ice-breaking” games, Quinn said, including blowing bubbles and playing Nerf basketball, just to get to know one another better.
Then, each three-person team was given scraps of paper with one-liners on them. One of them, recalls another participant, was something to the effect that, “DuPont makes very wonderful chemicals, and people need not worry.”
They were asked to “personify” each line, meaning if that phrase were a person, what would it be like? An ogre? A nice guy? The three teams watching were told to applaud their colleagues’ conclusions (“I felt disgusted,” said one participant).
Many pesticide-related topics were broached, and when the silliness ended, a DuPont executive indicated all this would help the firm formulate a product strategy.
Quinn said taking money from DuPont was not a problem for him, though he might give it to charity. He noted that in TV and radio, there’s a long tradition of reporters giving speeches to, or reading on-air commercials for, agricultural firms and products.
“Our on-air farm department guy does on-air commercials for companies we report on,” Quinn said. “Broadcasting is not as black and white as print on this stuff.”
Rent-a-Wolf
There are, says the brochure, 10 great reasons to attend the 17th annual convention of the American Car Rental Association in Las Vegas, April 9-13. They include:
“Learn from the best selection of expert speakers.”
“Win prizes at expanded product fair & vehicle display.”
“Help make the car rental industry’s event of the year the best one ever!”
“Meet and hear Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s senior White House Correspondent.” His topic will be “Inside the White House-What’s Really Going On.”
Hey, forget the White House stuff. When he gets back from this gig, let’s ask him a question:
Are we better off with Budget or Alamo?
