Buick ended more than 50 years of PGA Tour sponsorship Tuesday when it announced that it no longer will sponsor golf tournaments in Michigan and California because of the court-ordered restructuring of parent General Motors.
The decision came two days after Tiger Woods won the Buick Open in Grand Blanc, Mich. Woods acknowledged the end of the tournament, which he won for the third time, by heaving his golf ball toward a massive gallery after his final putt.
The additional blow came with the end of the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines, where Woods has won a record six times. The Buick Invitational is among the top tournaments in the early part of the PGA Tour schedule because it typically is the first event on network TV and has the highest TV rating because of Woods.
"While this is disappointing news, both the PGA Tour and Buick remain in discussions regarding future sponsorship possibilities," Buick and the tour said in a statement.
The Buick Open will be replaced on the schedule next year by a new tournament at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, according to two officials with knowledge of the deal. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the tour does not plan to announce the new event until today.
Buick was the oldest, continuous corporate sponsor on the PGA Tour and once had its name on four tournaments.
The PGA Tour now has lost four title sponsors this year -- Buick's two events, U.S. Bank in Milwaukee and Stanford Financial in Memphis, which was played in June without a sponsor.
It has extended contracts with Zurich (New Orleans), Accenture (Match Play) and Travelers (Connecticut) through 2014, and found a new title sponsor for Kapalua in SBS, which has signed up through 2020.
At least 10 other tournaments have title sponsorships that expire after 2010.
Buick had been the title sponsor at Torrey Pines since 1992. The tournament is run by The Century Club of San Diego, and president Tom Wornham said he was optimistic about finding a new sponsor. He also said the 2010 tournament would he played regardless.
The Augusta Chronicle ©2010 Morris Communications, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Obama Motors with chief PBO in charge....this is CHANGE we can take to the bank. Oh...he owns them too. Oh well. Where is the America I know?
What a hack
So it doesn't make sense to you that if a company is losing money, billions of dollars, they probably shouldn't sponsor a stupid golf tournament? Hello! The government had to step in because the American car companies couldn't run themselves and were losing money out the wazoo. Do you not realize that our government did this so the car companies would NOT go out of business? OUR American car companies? Get a grip. Frankly, if it were up to me, I would have never bailed out poorly run, bad car companies, period. They didn't deserve it. But when the market played out and they should have ALL gone under, our government decided it was important to America to keep them.
Whose driving Buicks anymore anyway?