Tiger, Please Come To Our Tournament

John Romano in the St Pete Times pens a kind of funny, certainly sarcastic column pleading with Tiger Woods to play in the PODS Championship in Tampa at Innisbrook.

I told this source - we'll call him Bryan - I was there to offer Tiger a ride to Palm Harbor in case transportation has kept him out of Tampa Bay tournaments for the past decade. That's when this highly placed source revealed this bombshell:

"He has his own transportation."

Thus, I can only conclude that Woods has intentionally snubbed us. Snubbed us when the tournament was called the Chrysler Championship and was played at the end of October, and snubbing us again now that it is the PODS Championship in March. If you're counting, Woods is 8-for-8 on Tampa Bay snubs.

How many times have we been over this? Tiger's tour is set in stone until he retires. You're not on it - for whatever reason he does not like Innisbrook, or his training regimen does not line up well with the date. Get over it. The interesting thing is that Romano does get over it.

In other words, we're not the only geeks in Tiger's world. He blows off better-looking golf tournaments than ours every week. The PGA Tour requires players to enter a minimum of 15 tournaments a year. Last season, Tiger played 16. The year before that, he played 15.

When you figure in the four majors, the Players Championship, three World Golf Championship events and four FedEx Cup events, his schedule fills up pretty quickly.

Then he has the charming habit of playing events that carry the name of products he endorses, such as Buick.

And then Romano goes on to cite the LPGA Once Every Four Except Once In Your Career Rule. The bottom line is that the Tampa event is in trouble and an appearance by Tiger every once in a while would make getting a new title sponsor much easier. The problem is that Tiger doesn't need Tampa. Tampa needs Tiger.