In just six years, the Wachovia Championship established itself as one of the premier events on the PGA Tour.

It featured one of the best golf courses in Quail Hollow, which attracted Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and a host of other world-class players. The gallery was among the largest on tour. Tournament officials couldn’t print tickets fast enough.

For now, it’s a good thing they didn’t print any at all.

The tournament that seemed to have it all, suddenly had no title sponsor.

The staff came to work Sept. 29 only to learn that bidding was under way between Citigroup and Wells Fargo to acquire the banking operations of Charlotte, N.C.-based Wachovia, which earlier this year signed a contract extension with the PGA Tour through 2014.

On Friday, federal antitrust regulators cleared Wells Fargo’s $11.7 billion acquisition of Wachovia Corp., capping a weeklong battle for the bank.

“Tickets were within five days of being printed when we stopped the presses,” tournament director Kym Hougham said.

It was a troubling development for a sport that relies heavily on corporate support, with 11 title sponsors and three presenting sponsors coming from the financial services industry, each paying anywhere from $6 million to $12 million a year.

The Charlotte tournament expects to continue, with the contract assumed by Wells Fargo. In a similar case this year, Hewlett-Packard acquired Electronic Data Systems and took over title sponsorship of the Byron Nelson Championship in Dallas.

“We know the tournament will happen,” Hougham said. “We’ll still sell out the tournament, but it may be later than normal.”

Likewise, golf might be off the hook in the short term. All of its tournaments have sponsorship deals through 2010, with some of the deals through 2012 and others, like Wachovia, signed through 2014.

It’s the long term that concerns PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem.

“We have a lot of customers and sponsors in economic sectors that are impacted negatively by the volatility in the economy,” Finchem said. “Thus far, we have not suffered any major damage. But clearly, if the instability were to continue for a sustained period of time, we will have real challenges.”

Some tournaments already are feeling the effects of an economic downturn in the second tier of sponsorships.

The 2009 season starts in Hawaii with the Mercedes-Benz Championship at Kapalua, where tournament host Gary Planos said costs are up, revenue is flat and sponsorship sales have been weak. Then it’s off to Honolulu for the Sony Open, which already is feeling the pinch.

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Zach Johnson was just trying to get his game together for next year. He ended up salvaging this season with an unexpected victory in the Texas Open.

“I had two things in my mind this week as far as going into the week and one was no expectations,” Johnson said. “So, no, I did not expect to be here, but I guess that’s a good thing. The second was just making some commitments to my fundamentals, to my golf swing. … So it’s very encouraging.”

The 2007 Masters champion followed his third-round 62 with a 64 on Sunday for a two-stroke victory over Charlie Wi (61), Mark Wilson (63) and Tim Wilkinson (64).

“First and foremost, this round and this week especially was for the state of Iowa,” Johnson said. “Especially in my home, Cedar Rapids. That community was devastated in June. … I’m dedicating this one to them. They mean a lot to me.”

Johnson entered the week with only one top-10 finish this year.

“I’ve been working on my putting over the last six weeks with my teachers and it really paid off this week,” Johnson said. “I had a tough year, but the putts started to fall into today and that why I’m at the top of the leaderboard.”

The win in the Fall Series event, capped by a 5-foot birdie putt on 18, was his first on the PGA Tour outside Georgia. In addition to the Masters, he won the 2004 BellSouth Classic and 2007 AT&T Classic.

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Officially, the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs, and therefore the biggest part of the tour’s calendar year, ended Sunday when Camilo Villegas won the Tour Championship in a playoff over Sergio Garcia.

Unofficially, the season ended for many fans when Tiger Woods had knee surgery in June, ending his season and sending a lot of casual fans looking for other things to watch.

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On the face of it, the notion that Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson and other members of the USA’s Ryder Cup winning team want to join the European Tour can only be good for the game this side of the Atlantic.

Mickelson would undoubtedly help drive up attendances, at least in the short-term, while the likes of JB Holmes and Boo Weekley, two of America ’s heroes from Valhalla , would help add extra interest to the run-of-the-mill Tour event.

It is, of course, no coincidence that some of the top names from the PGA Tour are looking towards Europe just as the Race to Dubai replaces the old Order of Merit.

Instead of players’ winnings counting over the course of the season to the Merit title, instead a Fed-Ex Cup-style conclusion will conclude with the Dubai World Championship next year

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Even with his golf done for the year, Tiger Woods found something to celebrate Tuesday: His wife is pregnant with their second child.

Woods said on his Web site that Elin is expecting in late winter without being more specific on a due date.

He has not played since his U.S. Open victory in June, and two weeks later had reconstructive surgery on his left knee that put him out for the year. Woods’ first child, daughter Sam, was born on Monday after the 2007 U.S. Open.

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Assuming he finishes — i.e., doesn’t have a disqualification (DQ) or withdrawal (WD), or doesn’t play (DNP) — he needs to have a 10,501 point lead over second place to guarantee he’ll win the FedExCup. As of now, his lead over Sergio Garcia in second is 12,225, so the only way Singh can control whether he clinches in St. Louis is to win. Then, even if Garcia finishes second, Singh will have at least a 15,825 point lead and will be the FedExCup champion even if he doesn’t earn any points in THE TOUR Championship presented by Coca-Cola.

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The joke on the driving range at TPC Boston on Tuesday concerned the new week-to-week volatility in the FedEx Cup playoffs. Scuttlebutt said that a player could advance all the way to the 30-man Tour Championship and still fail to finish in the top 125 on the money list, thus losing his Tour card.

But is that actually true?

Lee Janzen is the low man on the money list (149th) among those in the field at the Deutsche Bank this week. He barely made it into the field at last week’s Barclays, the first stop in the four-week playoff series, and then made the cut to get to 119th in FedEx Cup points. Again, that was barely enough to make it into the 120-man field at the Deutsche Bank, which starts Friday.

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The LPGA boasts players from all over the world, and it wants all of them to be able to speak English.
 
The LPGA will require players to speak English starting in 2009, with players who have been LPGA members for two years facing suspension if they can’t pass an oral evaluation of English skills. The rule is effective immediately for new players.
 
“Why now? Athletes now have more responsibilities and we want to help their professional development,” deputy commissioner Libba Galloway told The Associated Press. “There are more fans, more media and more sponsors. We want to help our athletes as best we can succeed off the golf course as well as on it.”
 
The tour held a mandatory meeting with South Koreans last Wednesday at the Safeway Classic to inform them of the new policy, which was first reported by Golfweek magazine. There is no such rule on the PGA TOUR.

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Australia’s Katherine Hull won the Canadian Women’s Open on Sunday for her first LPGA Tour title, taking advantage of Yani Tseng’s final-round meltdown for a one-stroke victory at Ottawa Hunt.

Michelle Wie, using the last of her six LPGA Tour exemptions this year, tied for 12th at 3 under. She had rounds of 75, 70, 69 and 71.

The 18-year-old Stanford student had to finish first or second to guarantee a spot on the 2009 LPGA Tour. Having fallen short, she said she hasn’t decided whether to go to Q-School in a bid to earn an LPGA Tour card.

“I feel like I gained a lot of confidence in myself again this year,” Wie said. “Being pain-free in the later part of the year, I started feeling confident. From May on, it’s getting better and better and now in the offseason, I know what to work on for next year.”

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Justin Rose and Oliver Wilson, eighth and ninth in the European Ryder Cup race entering the penultimate tournament, will go head to head in the first two rounds of the KLM Open starting Thursday.

Rose’s failure to make certain of a place in the Nick Faldo’s side has brought him back from America, where he had been planning to play the first leg of the FedExCup playoff series with its $7 million jackpot.

“It’s a frustrating situation,” he admitted. “I don’t know whether I have done enough yet to get into the team. I hope so, but I might not have.”

Last season’s European Tour No. 1 is about $90,000 ahead of Wilson, who in turn is about $5,000 ahead of Dane Soren Hansen in the 10th and last automatic spot. The closest gap, though, is between Hansen and 11th-placed Martin Kaymer. Just about $500 separates them.

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