Tour Insider: Rick Anderson

HKG: Were you a big golfer before you joined the PGA Tour?
RA: Not at all. I was not a big golfer, and I’m still not a big golfer. But when I came to the Tour, I was single. I took up golf in earnest and got to almost the point where I didn’t embarrass myself. The pinnacle of that was in 1998 when I went to Scotland for a ten day trip, where I got to play some of the greatest venues in Scotland. And that was important to me. I wanted to play, but coming from outside of golf, I really wanted to immerse myself within the game, and no better way to do it than to spend some time in the birthplace of golf.
HKG: What would be a normal week for you?
RA: I’m travelling a lot...so this year my week is usually out Monday through Wednesday at a tournament, talking to players, attending a Players Advisory Council meeting or attending one of our Tour Policy Board meetings. I’m also out at various times, engaged in different business negotiations. Then, when I’m in the office, it’s generally a kind of revolving door, with members of my team coming in to ask about various issues, or other business units or people coming in and wanting to talk about a particular issue or reacting to things that happen and we have to address. The way I’ve described it, it’s a 100 miles an hour on 100 different subjects a day. I love that. I do love that.
HKG: What has been reaction of PGA Tour players to anti-doping?
RA: Overall, very positive. Our players absolutely understand why we need to have a program. They also all feel, as we do, that we don’t have a problem, but you cannot exist in
the world of professional sports today and not address the subject. When we launched the program with a player meeting in San Diego, in February, we had a few players that were very vocally opposed and that opposition grew mostly out of the clash of cultures that anti-doping in golf represents, because of the inherent nature in golf of being a game of honour. So that was understandable. Also an interesting point is that the players who are under 35, largely they are used to this because they were tested in college, and the players who are over 35 really had never been tested and had more anxiety about it. We started our testing process and the first week, I’m happy to report, went very smoothly.
HKG: It is going to be interesting....
RA: It has been! I’m happy that my personal time in it is near over! (Laughs) I’m still responsible for it, but Alison Keller, who runs the program, just does a fabulous job and she’s not going to need my time any more, I think! (Laughs)
HKG: You don’t want it to happen, but the proof will come with the first positive test....
RA: Absolutely. That’s absolutely right.
HKG: THE PLAYERS Championship, is that your biggest week of the year?
RA: Certainly here, in this physical location, it’s definitely the biggest week for us. For the PGA Tour, this is our championship; this is the Players’ Championship, aptly named. And so, in terms of the events that we run, that are really ours and we’re not just associated with, sure it’s absolutely the big week. We’ve done so much to try to elevate the tournament. This building that we’re sitting in, I think is going to wind up being a very iconic symbol, you know, the way you see the clubhouse at Augusta National. I think, over time, this event will fall into that status.
HKG: You wonder how an event gets “Major” status, but it has to be a whisker away here...
RA: Yeah, you would think so. Of course, there is no official criteria, no vote or anything like that, and it’s really about how the players feel about it, how they talk about it. Every year that’s gone by, you see them talking more and more; they focus like it’s a Major. Certainly moving it into its own month, so that you have a Major every month [from] April through August only helps. So it’s all these different things that we do, and then we just turn it over to the media and the players to decide when it’s a Major.
HKG: I think all you have to do is come up the driveway to this clubhouse and see all the previous winners of THE PLAYERS Championship on signs on each lamppost to appreciate the quality of this tournament. Forgive me, but frankly the USPGA Championship has a lot more relatively unknown winners.
RA: Right, right. Also we had a great winner this year in Sergio. That’s just such a good thing both in terms of him, and the competition, but also frankly for business, to have a European winner.
HKG: Commissioner Finchem’s blog mentions golf in the Olympics, and it isn’t news, we’ve been talking about it for years. Is your trip to Beijing connected to this?
RA: My trip in particular is not, actually. I am going over to work on some details of the event that we have at Mission Hills—the World Cup—and we’re going to be adding a new event. We’ll be converting the existing event over to a World Golf Championship event. We are going to have a big announcement relating to the formal structure of our Olympic bid, of golf’s Olympic bid, and we’re going to be doing that out of a newly formed Olympic Committee of the International Golf Federation. I’ll wind up being heavily involved in it. I’m the PGA tour representative to the committee. It’s a significant push for us to get in, and there’s a lot of competition, essentially seven sports that are trying to get in, only two spots, so...
HKG: You have to figure that the reason a lot of sports don’t get chosen is that they aren’t truly global sports...
RA: Absolutely true.
HKG: You assume golf will, apart from the fact it’s global, you are talking about lobbying being key and you have golfers in very influential positions...
RA: Absolutely, that’s very true. I think when you look at baseball and softball, well not baseball so much, but softball certainly had that problem because it’s viewed as an American sport and that’s difficult for them because the IOC, understandably, wants a more ubiquitous sort of sport.
HKG: The PGA Tour has events in Mexico and Canada. Will there be a fully sanctioned event in China?
RA: If by fully sanctioned you mean an official money event, the time of year makes it a little difficult in terms of getting over there and getting back in a way that you can do it within the body of the season. The natural time of the year for us is October and November, which is after the FedEx Cup season. But having said that, I think we recognize the value and importance of an event that was in the FedEx Cup being played in China and in other parts of the world, so it’s one of the things we are studying right now...to figure out is there a way that we could alter our regulations so that that event counted somehow. Could it count for the next year? We are working on all of that, but you know, just from a calendar perspective it’s difficult.
HKG: What would you say has been the biggest crisis during your tenure here?
RA: I guess it was the immediate time after September 11, and the ensuing economic troubles and recession. You know, when we signed up new TV deals in July of that year, the economy had been strong and we were really at a very high growth rate. We did those deals in 2001 for the beginning of the ’03 season, we do them two years in advance, and we didn’t have title sponsors signed up, any of them, for the ’03-’06 period. Well, then you had 9/11 and then the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals and suddenly we had TV deals that were based on the existence of title sponsors buying significant advertising on screen, and suddenly we had no title sponsors signed. And that was a time of crisis where we said, “How are we going to advance and get all these companies signed up at a time when they wanted out and to scale back?” That was a time when literally all hands were on deck in terms of finding and cultivating sponsors, and we came through it well. We’re actually not having any specific fallout from the current recession but we’re preparing for it already—sort of applying a lot of the lessons that we learned. Now, we do our business differently. Fortunately for us our business is very secure through at least 2012, so our hope is that we can get through this time as a whole, and by the time we go back to negotiate again with TV the economy is better.
HKG: On a personal note, what is your record on the seventeenth like?
RA: I’ve put a lot of balls into the water on seventeen! (Laughs) Definitely true! Although then there is other times when it’s just...it’s all mental at 17, except when the wind is blowing, when the wind is blowing it’s real...but most days it’s mental.
HKG: What is your favorite hole on the Stadium Course?
RA: The seventeenth is obviously this kind of mythical thing. I think the eighteenth is just a tremendous hole. I think, as a finishing hole, it’s just outstanding.