PGA Tour Moves Event From Donald J. Trump’s Course at Doral.
| GOLF |
The tournament chairman of the former Cadillac Championship, one of the four World Golf Championships that attract the best players in the world, said the PGA Tour informed him the event was leaving next year for Mexico City.
Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, said as much Tuesday night in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. He said he had just heard the PGA Tour was taking the tournament out of the Miami area.
“They’re moving it to Mexico City, which, by the way, I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” Trump added.
PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem was on his way to Ohio for the Memorial and was expected to discuss the change Wednesday afternoon.
Butch Buchholz, brought in last year as the tournament chairman to help promote the event, told The Miami Herald that the tour was leaving for Mexico because it could not find a title sponsor. Cadillac’s sponsorship ended this year, and it chose not to renew.
Doral has been the longest-running PGA Tour event in Florida, dating to 1962.
“I believe they are sincere when they said they didn’t want to leave an event with a 54-year history,” Buchholz told The Herald. “They’ve got an obligation to their board and they couldn’t find a sponsor, so they had to move.”
Trump purchased Doral in 2012 and poured $250 million into renovations. He also brought in Gil Hanse, the architect chosen to design the Olympic course in Rio de Janeiro, to redo the course long known as the Blue Monster.
The tour signed a deal with Doral through 2023, though there was a provision in the contract that a new title sponsor had the option to move it elsewhere.
The tour has spent a year trying to find a replacement for Cadillac, and it became more difficult as Trump gained notoriety with his caustic comments during his presidential campaign. That began with Trump’s announcement that he was running, when he said Mexico was sending its unwanted people to the United States, and that in many cases they were “criminals, drug dealers, rapists.”
Golf quickly distanced itself from Trump, though not entirely.
The P.G.A. of America canceled its Grand Slam of Golf that was scheduled for Trump’s course in Los Angeles last fall, and golf organizations stood behind a statement that said Trump’s comments were not consistent with golf’s commitment to be diverse and welcoming.
But the United States Women’s Open and the Senior P.G.A. Championship next year are still scheduled for Trump properties, as is the 2022 P.G.A. Championship.
The Cadillac Championship had been at Doral since 2007 after being one of the World Golf Championships that moved around the world. It was played in Spain, Ireland and England until 2007, when all the WGCs moved to the United States. Now there is one in Shanghai.
Doral had been a regular PGA Tour event before that.
The PGA Tour already has one tournament in Mexico in the fall, the OHL Classic at Mayakoba, held at a beach resort south of Cancun.
The tour has had problems in Mexico City in the past. When a PGA Tour Champions event was held there in 2003, six players were robbed at gunpoint in a restaurant, and thieves got away with expensive watches. No one was hurt.
source: nytimes
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