Results tagged “tigerwoods”

In case you've been following - or not following as closely as you wanted to - the HSBC Champions, Asia's World Golf Championship, our intrepid founding editor, Dan Washburn has been covering the event and what it means for China on ESPN.com. Check it out:

Hint: Tiger Woods is not one of them. Check out the whole list here.

The WGC-HSBC Champions tournament is starting up tomorrow, and today, the big players were on the China publicity warpath by doing their mandatory "Look at us! We're taking part in Chinese culture!" bit. The part of Shanghaiist that's actually interested in this sport says this happens every time pro-golfers come into town: three years ago there was a ping pong match.

Already properly leaked, rumored and reported, the International Federation of PGA Tours made it official Tuesday morning at a press conference at the Shangri-La Hotel in Pudong: Shanghai's HSBC Champions golf tournament has been elevated to World Golf Championship status. To many in the golf world, this immediately makes the HSBC event, which has called Shanghai home since its 2005 debut, the most prestigious golf tournament outside of the United States and the United Kingdom. That China — which opened its first golf course in 1984 and currently has no professional golfers in the global top 100 — has been chosen as the locale for such an event speaks volumes about China's role in the current global marketplace. It's also a strong indicator that golf's governing bodies realize globalization, with Asia being the primary focus, is the key to the sport's survival in an increasingly harsh economic environment.

Wow, CCTV has some real influence. After it declared Tiger Woods Chinese earlier this week, the golfer announced that he plans to play in China's HSBC Champions tournament in Sheshan this November, according to ESPN. He has not played overseas since 2007. We're glad to hear Tiger's making a trip to China, but hope that golf fans here won't be disappointed that he can't speak Chinese and is not into using cremes to lighten his skin.

Dear CCTV,

    

The new Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 game for Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, and PSP, which was released last week, has put Shanghai golf on the (digital) map. Finally, you can afford to play Sheshan Golf Club (seriously, we think an Xbox might be cheaper than a round there).

Golf in China: All growing, all new, all raw [ESPN.com] In China, the sport of golf is younger than Tiger Woods himself. But the game has grown exponentially in recent years, leading to more courses and the development of some pros through the Omega China Tour. But as Dan Washburn reports, all is not without struggle.PM Manmohan Singh meets Chinese counterpart in Singapore [Times of India] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday met Chinese premier...

So, will anyone go?

If you attended the first round of the HSBC Champions Golf Tournament today out at Sheshan International Golf Club, you are likely stuck in traffic trying to get back into the city. If you didn't attend, you may find it interesting to know that someone associated with the tournament is live-blogging the whole thing (from the media center). And we're not just talking making a few posts each day, this is minute-to-minute stuff. Here's a segment of today's post selected at random:

This week’s editions of SH and City Weekend, summerviewed. (That’s a combination of summary and review. Look it up.)

After we heard about this magazine, we figured we should pick up a copy just in case this magazine meets the same fate that as the Chinese Rolling Stone. Flipping through the articles, we see that the cover is Yao Ming and that the magazine, while having snippets of other stuff, is fairly basketball heavy this issue, no doubt because of the FIBA competition currently being held in Japan. Aside from pieces on Yao Ming and teammates Wang Zhizhi and Yi Jianlian, there are also pieces on Lebron James and the US basketball team.

The rules state that all dogs which enter public areas without a proper reason such as medical treatment or a public performance can be killed by public security bureaus or other units entrusted with the task.

Shanghaiist, filing this from the media center at the HSBC Champions golf tournament, is sleep-deprived and feeling kind of lazy right now, so instead of trying to be original we will copy and paste from something we wrote last night for ESPN.com:

The opening day of the HSBC Champions tournament at Sheshan International Golf Course was … well, wet. But that didn’t deter a gallery of 500 or so (that’s our guess ... some said later in the day the figure approached 2,000) traipsing around for 18 holes to watch world number one Tiger Woods. In contrast, world number two Vijay Singh, playing in the group ahead of Tiger, had just a couple of dozen spectators watching on. Such is life.

His feet had hardly hit the tarmac after a long flight from the US to Shanghai and Tiger Woods was off to the Sheshan International Golf Course for a quick nine holes. The man doesn’t know when to stop!

We will soon find out. The HSBC Champions golf tournament hits Shanghai's Sheshan Golf Club -- which touts itself on its website as "Shanghai's first truly private and exclusive 'members only' golf club" -- November 10-13. Private. Exclusive. That about sums it up. Tickets for the tournament are RMB 500 (around $60) for Thursday and Friday and RMB 1,000 for Saturday and Sunday. A tournament pass that includes all days is RMB 2,000, just RMB 319 more than the monthly income for the average Shanghai household. Not exactly the best way to grow Chinese interest in golf from the bottom up, as is necessary. But who cares about that? Tiger is coming to town!