Clinton On New Tour Event: "Keep your fingers crossed for us. This might work."

Ron Sirak reports on Bill Clinton and Tim Finchem's sitdown with select scribblers to plug the new Humana Challenge (aka Bob Hope Classic) and the tour is boldly planning on making days other than Thursday-Sunday spectator and media friendly. Cutting edge these people are!

...the real news is that the Humana Challenge, as it will now be called, will be a week-long educational effort to get people to live healthier lives. The Tuesday before next year's tournament -- Jan. 17 -- will feature a conference on health and well-being with Clinton delivering the keynote address.

I wonder how many players will show for that? I might just have to go and do a head count!

Helen Ross has the state-run news' take on the new event and Clinton's remarks, plus a disturbing image of America's leading golf scribes getting uncomfortably close to a former president.

Since the transcript is not posted, check out Steve DiMeglio's wrap up of the highlights. A couple of my favorites:

•His dream foursome: "Hmm? I would like to have played a round of golf with Harry Vardon, whose golf books I have read and actually have two of them in the first edition. He was a smart rascal. And Bobby Jones and probably Sam Snead. I never got to play golf with Sam Snead. When he was 82, he wanted me to play with him, and he said he would not take more than a $1,000 from me."

Vardon! How about that out of left field?

•What is on his bucket list of golf courses? "I have never played some of the greatest American courses. I've never played Augusta National. I've never played at Pine Valley. I was invited. But I never played Augusta because I had too many secret service people. And I have a wife and daughter that don't like the No Women policy, so I dealt with that for several years. But I'd like to play those courses. I've never played in Bandon Dunes in Oregon."

I was lucky enough to get a transcript emailed and as you can imagine with Clinton and Finchem, it's a long one. But it is fun to read how Clinton can take even the strangest questions (Couples' Presidents Cup pick of Tiger, really?) and treat them like they were the most important thing he's ever been asked.

Here are a few highlights, starting with the former President tipping us off to plans for early week activities:

We also have tried to increase the number of young children who can have access to preventive health care to try to avoid the kind of problems that I and tons of other Americans face later in life.

And Humana was one of our first insurance partners agreeing to cover preventive trips to doctors and dietitians for these kids, and it had never been done before.  Now we have a couple more kids with insurance coverage to provide that.  But we're trying to push and get more people to do it.  But it really pushed a lot of other insurers to look at the economics of this and see if they could do it.

So Tim and I have been friends since Jimmy Carter was president, and so we're excited about this.  But as far as I know, the PGA (TOUR) has never done anything like this before.  We're going to have Tuesday before the tournament begins Thursday, we're going to have a summit on the health of young people.

I'll watch that over the normal Tuesday Golf Channel faire!

Of course, Commissioner Excitement sounds a little reluctant to be doing something a bit different. He's such a risk taker that Tim is:

I think it is a different direction for us, because historically our tournaments are organized for charity.  We do an awful lot of things to support what they do for charity.  They give knowledge to an awful lot of charitable causes.  But we've never really taken an opportunity to reach our fan base with messaging that asks for change or things that would impact behavioral change.

I think everybody in this room is aware that our audience, our fan base is by far the strongest fan base when it comes to decision makers, corporate leaders, public sector leaders across the country.  It's also a big fan base of 140 million Americans that tuned into our program at some point this year already.

Translation: we have a lot of Republicans who don't want to take health advice from a Democrat.

It is a departure for us, but I must say we're really excited about it.  At the PGA TOUR, our employees for the first time this year entered into a new program with Humana called Tour Health.  They all get scanned.  It's voluntary, but over 90% of our employees now have been scanned.  And their scannings identify health problems.

We estimate that our company and our employees will save almost a half million dollars in the first year because of that program.

Almost enough to pay a low-level VP's salary for a year!

Q. Will there be healthy options at the food court?  I mean, sports events don't generally have the healthiest foods.  Can you talk about that?

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM:  Well, that right there is the kind of thing that will happen.  So we're talking about it at the Humana Challenge, and it makes sense.  It's stuff that we'd want to do across the Tour.

This doesn't bode well for the Hope Classic's annual visit from the In-N-Out truck, I take it?

COMMISSIONER FINCHEM:  But look, the thing about that tournament is it has to do with golf courses and formats.  But I don't know how much work we have to.  I've heard a number of players that know what we're doing here, and Mike is very popular with players and the President's involvement in and of itself.

A lot of these guys remember in 1995 when the President went and played with President Ford and President Bush, and they appreciate his support for what's happened over the years.  So I've had a number of players call and say, look, I'm going to be there without even asking.

I think we'll have a solid field.

We'll check back in early January on that one.