"It has died a death."

Tuesday produced a rivetting Q&A exchange between the scribblers and Tim Finchem, with tense back and forths on subjects of little interest.

At least someone asked him to flesh out how The International met its demise:

 Q. Was there always, "We would like to be involved but we want to do it on the East Coast?"|

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM: There was never a discussion about -- I think in my preliminary conversation with Tiger, maybe there was some discussion about Florida or the southeast, but it never got that far. There just wasn't really any talk about it because we didn't have any schedule flexibility.

And even then when we got the -- with The INTERNATIONAL, and we waited until the 11th hour trying to marry them to a sponsor, we still looked at two other alternatives because we were not certain that all of the stars would line up here in terms of a place to play, a great title sponsor.

Does this mean he's for marriage between sponsors and tournaments, or just civil unions? 

Because if you're going to do an event with Tiger Woods, and he's going to land his persona and his energy, it's going to be a pretty special event.

And so that's the way we felt, that's the way the Foundation felt. So it had to all come together and so we were looking at two other markets with two other sponsors for a period of three weeks.

And...

 Q. Is the modified Stableford scoring system just going to die a slow death, or do you have an emotional attachment to having that on the TOUR?

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM: It has died a death. I mean, it's not on the TOUR right now. So it would be would have to be resuscitated to come back to answer your question. I suppose it could be. It seemed like that concept, at first -- the first few years, it was a bit of a struggle for the fans to get their arms around it. Then it generated some interest for a few years, and then it kind of lost its appeal. I don't know exactly why that was.

The INTERNATIONAL was hit with the perfect storm. There were three or four different factors to led to us finally concluding that we should move forward; it wasn't just any one thing, but a number of things.