Time to find a better way to start the season

With awards season upon us, I thought a good metaphor would be this: Winners-only tournaments are the golf equivalent of Oscar goodie bags.

I like Members Only jackets better.

How's this for an idea? Let's gather together the most successful among us, somewhere where the weather's warm and everyone's tan, and offer them more money and more prizes.

No thanks.

Geoff Ogilvy won the Mercedes-Benz Championship on Sunday, taking home $1.12 million for beating 32 other players in the PGA Tour's season-opener in Hawaii. The event is reserved for the previous year's winners.

Now, you're going to tell me that just because a player won a tournament doesn't mean they are among the most successful golfers in the world or undeserving of additional perks.

After all, the field at Kapalua included Mark Turnesa and Ryan Palmer and Greg Kraft and Parker McLachlin.

You'll say that just because so-and-so earned an Oscar nod for playing the hooker with a heart of gold, or the English widow with a heart of gold, or whoever, doesn't mean she is a highly-paid actress undeserving of a bag full of expensive gifts.

Fiddlesticks, the bishop would say. Guess what? I don't care.

There are already so many exclusive tournaments in golf, beginning with the four majors and the ultra-lucrative World Golf Championships, do we really need to start the season with such a small event?

Sometimes, the players we want to see the most don't show up anyway. Consider that the Mercedes-Benz Championship was missing the top four players in the world rankings -- Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia, Phil Mickelson and Padraig Harrington -- who were all winners last year.

Vijay Singh, the world No. 5, was the top-ranked player in the field, but Vijay shows up everywhere. He's like the guy you knew in high school who would sit anywhere in the cafeteria.

The tournament, like every one since the U.S. Open, lost Woods due to an injury. Usually, though, when a top player decides not to make the flight to Hawaii, it's because he doesn't feel like it, plain and simple. Woods hasn't shown up in Hawaii since 2005.

As for those second- and third-tier players who win to make the field, the ones who always seem to show up at Kapalua? They rarely title in the season- opener.

Excluding Daniel Chopra's victory last year, all of this century's Mercedes Benz Championships have been won by stars: Ogilvy, Singh (2007), Stuart Appleby (2004-06), Ernie Els (2003), Garcia (2002), Jim Furyk (2001) and Woods (2000).

The rich are getting richer off this tournament -- when they show up, anyway. And the biggest reason they show up, when they do, is the riches. It's time to open it up to everyone else.

Me? I mark next week's Sony Open, also in Hawaii, as the real start of the PGA Tour season. A hundred and forty players and a cut line. That's more like it.