Paul Lawrie criticised the Seve Trophy stay-aways,
saying he was prepared to walk to Paris to
represent Great Britain and Ireland against Continental Europe this week.
The 1999 Open-winning Scot's most
serious charge was that those choosing to rest rather than play were failing to
honour the late Seve Ballesteros,
after whom the match is named.
Lawrie reasoned that no-one had
done more than the Spaniard to create the lucrative lives now being lived by
Europe's elite golfers.
While I 100% agree with the point
Lawrie makes about how Seve did more than anybody to create the lucrative way
of life for European golfers, I have to disagree with his view about the Seve
Trophy.
This year’s Trophy is the eighth
edition and frankly very few people give a damn about it, myself incl as highlighted by the
fact that so many players have decided not to participate, only three of the
Ryder Cup winners from Medinah are playing.
But there’s also a much more
obvious problem, as the Europeans play alongside the golfers from GB & I in
the Ryder Cup there isn’t a natural rivalry or a sense of any real competition,
if the European Tour want to honour the memory of Seve properly surely the best
thing to do would be to scrap this bi-annual waste of a week and replace it
with a lucrative tour event and keep the name.
An event similar in stature to the
ones that Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer have on the PGA Tour, that to me
seems like the thing to do.
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