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Park
City Tourney Dropped
Thursday,
November 21, 2002
By Kurt KKragthorpe
The Salt Lake Tribune
The newly named Champions Tour will no longer include one of senior
professional golfs oldest tournaments.
Park City's event staged in its 21st year as the Uniting Fore Care
Classic in August, was dropped from the 2003 calendar because of
sponsorship issues, tournament director Bryan Naugle said Wednesday
.
The move, which came after meetings of the PGA Tour's policy board
in Florida this week, leaves the Nationwide Tour's , Utah Classic
in Sandy as the only PGA Tour-brand event in Utah.
The
Park City event's demise will not become final until the 2003 schedule
is released in early December. Jeff Adams, the tour's director of
public relations, said officials are "trying to put the finishing
touches on everything" and could not address the event's status
until the schedule is published.
The
Allianz Champipnship in Iowa, 3, third-year tournament, has been
tentatively assigned the event's former dates in August, the week
after the PGA Championship. The Champions Tour figured to have a
reduced schedule in 2003 because of natural attrition, while avoiding
conflicts with major championships and ensuring that the tour's
stars will play a higher percentage of tournaments.
And now, those players will no longer be coming to Park City --one
of their favorite stops, according to a Sports Illustrated survey.
Dave Stockton, a two-time winner and advocate of the event, described
the August tournament as the best ever in Park City; "I hate
to think it was the last one," he said.
Bruce Summerhays of Farmington, a player director of the Champions
Tour policy board, was particularly saddened by the loss. "I'm
going to miss playing in Utah," said Summerhays, who twice
came close to winning the event in front of his fan base. "It
wrings my heart that I haven't won there."
Summerhays said Gov. Mike Leavitt and other government officials
tried to bring multiple companies together in a sponsorship effort,
but nothing materialized.
Title sponsorships are expensive -- roughly $1.5 million an nually
for the Champions Tour -- and Utah apparently lacks the corporate
base for such marketing investments.
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