"You know, you see that repeated all over the country."

Commissioner Tim Finchem spoke about all things PGA Tour and insisted there will be no schedule contraction. But more interesting were his remarks about the First Tee and the youth movement on the PGA Tour.

Q. Do you have any theories on the 20-somethings, like why they've sort of had this breakthrough? Is it just better coaching at a younger age, or do you have any ideas on that?

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM: Well, yeah, I have my own theory, which is really predicated on it's been 12 years since Tiger Woods stormed on -- 14 years since Tiger Woods stormed on the scene, and I noticed in the couple of years after that an upsurge in the interest among kids, but also an upsurge in the interest of parents in terms of, okay, I have an athletic kid, male or female, and rather than maybe the percentage of parents pushing that kid in baseball and football, basketball, a higher percentage were focused on golf, because golf in many ways requires more of a commitment from the family.

I often tell the story of the doctor that lives down the street from me that when his kid was 12, about seven years ago, he had a swing coach, he had a trainer, and he would go to Orlando once a month to visit with a sports psychologist on how to win. You know, you see that repeated all over the country.

Well, some parts of the country.

Q. Getting back to the question about young people playing, as you described, the people coming onto the TOUR, it's obvious that they come from a different economic background, higher. Has there been any success in getting golf, other than the First Tee, into lower economic segments of our society so that those people might come forward?

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM: Well, the First Tee is that initiative. The good news is it's touched an awful lot of kids, and it's brought the game to a point where it's available to more kids. But it is a herculean logistical task to make the game available to millions more, just because it's not like putting up a basketball net up on the side of a building. You need facilities, and you need access to facilities.

But I think Joe Barrow and his team have done a great job. Almost 4 million kids have been touched with the program now. But as we were just talking, there is a difference between making the participation side of the sport available to kids, which over time will change the demographic look of the sport from a participation standpoint and certainly from a fan standpoint. There's a difference between that and the resources that go into bringing a kid along at a young age to play at this level, because you just go out and talk to players on the Champions Tour right now, all of them between 50 and 65 or so, and virtually all of them started playing when they were six or eight years old, and most of them had some level of resources to be able to go and travel and compete and learn and get better.

It is a real challenge in that way, too. And I don't know exactly what the solution is. We assume that if you can change the participation side among youth, some of that will gravitate to the elite, competitive levels, and I assume it will. But at what speed, that's hard to evaluate.

Well at least he was honest about the prospects for the kids not coming from an affluent background.