Greensboro trying to keep some intrigue in tournament

GREENSBORO -- The Greensboro stop on the PGA Tour survives frosty spring mornings and muddy summer afternoons, wars and recessions, professional popularity and virtual irrelevance.

Sam Snead won the first Greater Greensboro Open in 1938, a year after he won the first Pebble Beach clambake and four years after Bobby Jones invented the Masters. Just a few rounds ago, with the Greensboro tournament sinking into an economic bunker roughly the depth of a grave, the rescue squad cited that long history as motivation.

Traditional aura

Nothing is permanent, as the brush with extinction demonstrated, and everything that carries on inevitably changes. The modern GGO, now called the Wyndham Championship by the resort-properties sponsor, returned to Sedgefield Country Club last year and immediately restored the traditional aura derived from frolicking on the lawn of an old Tudor mansion.

The scene looked somewhat the same if you squinted hard enough and ignored the flapping fact that flip-flops make more noise than Sunday flats.

Snead's tournament

Snead, a high-spirited Virginian, won so often -- eight times, still a PGA record -- that he turned into a local boy. A local boy (contemporary definition) won the Sedgefield revival. Carl Petterson, a Swede who moved to Greensboro when his father accepted a Volvo Trucks transfer, owns a Greensboro Grimsley diploma suitable for hanging in his Wake County den, as well as one of state's most unusual Southern accents.

Golf went global long before Y.E. Yang beat Tiger Woods at the PGA last weekend and secured Asia's first major championship. The Greensboro tournament went youthful four days later.

Going youthful

Justin Thomas, a 16-year-old prep junior from Kentucky, skipped the first full week of classes to write his name on the scoreboard with a 5-under-par 65 in the opening round. He remained two strokes behind the leaders through 27 holes.

Thomas got one of the four sponsor exemptions that the PGA allows each tournament. Mark Brazil, Greensboro's tournament director and a former executive with the American Junior Golf Association, started this tradition last year by inviting the winner of the AJGA event at Sedgefield, Cameron Peck. This year, Brazil announced ahead of time that the AJGA winner would get an automatic exemption.

"I still remember Tiger playing in the L.A. Open when he was 16 and how much buzz that created," Brazil said. "This is going to be good for us going forward. A lot of the best young players in the Wyndham came through the AJGA, and it can't do anything but help when you have relationships with those guys as juniors."

The teen spot supplies freshness in a golf season scarred by the stale economy. The Wyndham sold out its corporate sponsorships but at lower rates than before, sometimes splitting luxury boxes among several companies.

Brazil said that many tournaments have suffered 20-percent drops, but he projects the Wyndham decline at 5 percent or lower. Ticket sales might not fare as well despite some late player commitments (Fred Couples, Adam Scott, Sergio Garcia) that increased the popularity index.

"If you look at guys who move the needle on tour, out of those 10 guys, I think we've got six of them," Brazil said.

Working the schedule

For more than half its life, the Greensboro tournament has debated the value of its date on the schedule. The GGO moved from the week before the Masters to shortly afterward and eventually blamed its lower-voltage fields on the slot. Fall dates nearly killed the event, between the football competition and the short celebrity roster.

As the last tournament before the FedEx Cup playoff, the Wyndham draws players intent on nailing down one of the 125 qualifying spots or determined to improve their points position with an eye on eventually surviving the final 30-man cut before the rich Tour Championship.

"Sometimes it hurts us, and sometimes it helps us," Brazil said. Zach Johnson, third in points, stayed home. Garcia (115th) and Scott (111th) came.

Many tournaments seek better dates, and the PGA obviously can't satisfy everyone. Commissioner Tim Finchem is studying a possible compromise called flexible scheduling, which would let tournaments take better dates once or twice during any four-year period in exchange for accepting weaker dates the other years.

Tough timing

Brad Faxon, a player director on the tour's policy board, likes the theory behind the flex concept but sees complex problems in the execution. One simple conflict: "You could make a huge purse and have no other tournaments around it, but if it's a terrible golf course, many top players aren't going to go there."

The current dead-of-summer position makes it impossible for Sedgefield to maintain hard, fast greens because they require considerable water, but players generally adore the Donald Ross layout.

Faxon discussed the contradiction with Bobby Long, president of the foundation that runs the Greensboro tournament.

"We talked about how this course might play better at a different time of the year," Faxon said. "Overall the players really like this course, but they don't like the softness. Nobody does. But it also has a pretty good field. You get some big-name players here. You have Adam, Sergio, Davis (Love), Lucas (Glover). You might not get those players in the middle of the year.

"This is a pretty interesting date. You're not going to get Tiger and Phil (Mickelson) here, but if one of those players was 35th on the FedEx points list, they'd want to be here. This date is intriguing."

At the 70th Greensboro open, after all those good and bad times, a little intrigue helps keep the juices flowing.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com