Imagine for a moment that you are PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2009. You are taking a much needed day off at home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., with your wife and three daughters. The preceding year has threatened to destroy everything you've built. The world economic crisis has decimated the financial services and automotive industries, the dual bedrocks of your tour, which serve as the title sponsors of more than a third of your 47 tournaments. Five of those sponsors have gone bankrupt. Another four teeter on the brink. Two lucrative tournaments have been dropped from the schedule and more may follow. Adding to the misery, your tour--which you hold up as a vessel of good--has emerged as a poster boy of postbailout waste, after Northern Trust, a bank that had received a federal infusion, hired Sheryl Crow to headline a lavish party at its sponsored tournament in Los Angeles.
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