[PHOTO: Tony Ding/Icon Sportswire]
There are at least 60 people from the City of San Diego’s staff who work on staging the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open at the municipal Torrey Pines golf courses. They toil long hours for months in advance and then all but collapse onto their couches when the final putt drops.
This year, they’re going to have to keep their energy up and motors running after the PGA Tour announced on January 17 that the Genesis Invitational, normally staged at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, will be played the week starting February 10 on the Torrey Pines South course, three weeks after the Farmers Insurance Open that has just been contested at Torrey Pines. The move was necessitated by the devastating wildfires experienced in Los Angeles County during the past two weeks.
“Really, we’re going to be cramming six months of work into about a week-and-a-half,” John Howard, the city’s golf manager, said last Friday. “We’re in unprecedented territory.”
Indeed, no venue in modern PGA Tour history has hosted its regularly scheduled PGA Tour event and then, three weeks later, held another one – let alone the second being a $US20 million signature tournament hosted by Tiger Woods and his foundation. The closest to this is the private Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio, hosting back-to-back tour events, the Memorial Tournament and quickly created Workday Charity Open (which replaced the cancelled John Deere Classic), during the pandemic in 2020. The big difference there: the tournaments were played in a COVID-19 bubble with no fans.
At Torrey Pines, two different host organisations, the Century Club of San Diego and Tiger Woods Foundation – with their separate staffs, operations teams, volunteer armies, and even agronomy contributors from across the US – will work to stage two world-class golf events in short order. “Herculean,” Marty Gorsich, the Farmers Insurance Open’s executive director, said of the task.
Ultimately, it became clear that, despite the obstacles, Woods, his foundation and Genesis wanted to keep the tournament in southern California, if possible, so as to hold the connection to the thousands of people affected by the fires. Woods’ legacy, of course, is tightly bound to Torrey Pines, where he’s won seven PGA Tour events and the 2008 US Open.
As for the possible building excitement of Woods returning to compete at Torrey Pines, which he hasn’t done since 2020, that is still unknown. One PGA Tour source said Woods may not have planned to play in the Genesis, even it was played as planned at Riviera. Woods has opened his past two seasons in the Genesis, but he still is recovering from the back surgery he had last September. Woods passed on playing in the Hero World Challenge that he hosts each December, and other than walking with son Charlie while they competed over 36 holes in the PNC Championship in December, Woods hasn’t walked a course in competition since the Open Championship six months ago. Torrey Pines is playing at its most stout at the moment and is a tough walk.
Of course, because government is rarely light on its feet, there were potential complications in moving the Genesis to Torrey Pines because the City of San Diego runs the facility through its golf division. But Howard said it was only a few hours from the time the Century Club and city were contacted by the tour only 10 days ago, on January 17, that all of the stakeholders, including San Diego mayor Todd Gloria, were on board. Other entities that had to agree were Torrey Pines Club Corp, which runs the pro shop; the University of California San Diego, owners of the nearby property that accommodates tournament parking and the television compound; the Lodge at Torrey Pines, where the locker room and scoring room are located; and the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, site of the media centre. Both hotels on-site house many players and officials during the week.
Gorsich said last Friday that the PGA Tour is extremely impressed with how it all came together on San Diego’s end. “To a group, everyone emphatically said yes, and if one of them had said no, this would have been a house of cards that we couldn’t have put together,” he said.
There will be a lucky few who will play at Torrey during this unprecedented time, but there are many more who are going to miss out on their chance for what is to some a bucket-list experience. Among the biggest issues Torrey Pines faced in the circumstance is the fact that only Bethpage Black in New York rivals it as the busiest golf facility in America, with both courses usually fully booked every day from 6:30am to 2pm during winter. There is a 90-day reservation system that accounts for many of those tee-times, with out-of-town golfers paying $US50 per person to make a tee-time (with green fees running up to $US306 on weekend to walk the South). Howard said there are at least 1,000 transactions that have to be refunded by the city due to the Genesis, in addition to three 100-plus player shotgun tournaments that have to be postponed or cancelled.
“I can understand that people are going to be disappointed by not being able to play at Torrey Pines those two weeks,” Howard said. “But when he had the potential to host this in San Diego… there’s only so much we can do for the fire victims down here. And I think being able to assist in some sense with creating some sense of normalcy to put this on is a great thing for the everyone.”
The city’s listed rate to buy out the South course for a single day is $US108,817, and for the 15 days it will be closed for the Genesis, that could translate into $US1.6 million in costs for the PGA Tour and Genesis. But San Diego, as it does for the Farmers Open, is renting the course at a heavy discount, in part because it counts the hours of television as essentially free advertising for Torrey Pines and the region. Howard said the city has calculated the loss of per-hour revenue for tee-times at $US800,000 and is charging half that rate, or $US400,000. Adding in additional charges for staff overtime of $US137,000, and the approximate total cost to the tour event is $US537,000, Howard said.
Moving a tournament between venues that are 200 kilometres apart on Interstate 5 is an enormous challenge. As Gorsich pointed out, the tournaments are different in their operations, vending, volunteers and ticketing. Even the colour schemes of their signage – Farmers is blue, Genesis is black – is different and has to be altered. The suites and skyboxes currently being used by the Farmers will remain, but even the tables and chairs in those areas have to be moved or covered because the salt air will damage them.
As of last Friday, Gorsich was doing anything he could support the Genesis Invitational while also overseeing his own tour event with 75 golfers playing into Saturday’s final round, towards an overall purse of $US9 million and a winner’s cheque of $US1.67 million.
His apt analogy was like he was throwing his own party at a rental house, owned in this case by the city. and then turning over the keys to the next group.
“They’re used to us throwing a party every year,” Gorsich said. “We throw the party, clean up and treat the neighbours well. And then there’s a new group that wants to throw a party and we’re asking the homeowners to help be the party planners. They welcome the party but are asking us to leave it nice when you’re gone and please help them along the way.”
As sports fans understand, Los Angeles and San Diego are heated sports rivals, particularly among Dodgers and Padres fans. (The teams eliminated the other from the MLS playoffs in two of the past three years.) But the cities are physically and emotionally bonded, including their experiences with natural disasters. Under different circumstances, the Farmers Open might be seeking refuge at Riviera.
“We all call ourselves Southern Californians,” Gorsich said. “We all have had our own fires and own tragedies, and know the roles could have been reversed. It’s important to be selfless here, and ask how I can help you? Among our own Century Club members, it hasn’t been, ‘What’s in for me; it’s what can we do?”