Still stuck in the rough, the GGO switches seasons to get back in the swing of things with top players.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Fall Guys

The golf course at Greensboro's Forest Oaks Country Club is a mess today. With portions of its rain-soaked turf ripped open and its muddy innards spilling onto paved pathways, the course seems more like a patient in surgery than the home of a history-rich stop on golf's PGA Tour. Replacement parts are scattered here and there. Piles of sand bathe in a cold drizzle behind the first tee and along the first fairway. White plastic pipes for a new irrigation system are stacked 10 feet high across the road from the first hole.

The course has seen better days, and so has its PGA tournament, which is run by the Greensboro Jaycees. It's now called the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro. It used to be the Greater Greensboro Open -- many still call it the GGO -- a good excuse to eat, drink beer and watch some of golf's best players go stroke for stroke as winter's chill gave way to spring in the North Carolina Piedmont -- and sometimes before.

Even with occasionally cold and snowy weather in early April, the GGO drew big names. Golf great Sam Snead practically owned it, winning the first in 1938 and seven after that. Hall-of-Famer Ben Hogan won in 1940. Byron Nelson won twice in the 1940s. Other prominent GGO winners include Gary Player (1970) and Seve Ballesteros (1978).

By the 1980s, though, some top players were skipping the GGO. Jack Nicklaus played his last one in 1964, preferring to practice for the prestigious Masters tournament, then held a week after the GGO. The GGO enjoyed a renaissance -- more top players and record profits -- after Kmart became its title sponsor in 1988. But since Kmart quit that role in 1995, the tournament has slipped -- six profit declines in the past seven years. In 2001, none of the tour's top five money winners came. Nor did they in 2002, when the tournament cleared just $51,196. That doesn't include a $241,730 subsidy from a program that the tour started for all its events in 2000.

Now, like the course it's played on, the tournament is undergoing a drastic change. DaimlerChrysler, the sponsor since Kmart left, has engineered a move to the fall, when the PGA Tour is in its waning days. No one will say it is the Greensboro event's last chance for survival, but tournament director Mark Brazil, hired in late 2001 to resuscitate the event, says it desperately needed the change. "We were getting killed in the spring," he says. "Killed."

The reasons for the decline are many: poor timing, a course that has fallen out of favor with top pros, an explosion of prize money that gives golfers the freedom to skip tournaments and Greensboro's lack of glitz, among others. And for too long, the Jaycees ignored their shortcomings as golf-tournament operators. "They kept trying to do it with volunteers and a bare-bones staff," says Tim Crosby, a director of tournament business affairs for the PGA Tour. "That was a perfectly suitable business model, pretty much until the last 10 years. As the business of running a golf tournament grew, the demands of management differed. And they didn't adapt as quickly as some of the other tournaments did."

By 1985, the average PGA Tour purse had grown to about $538,000, nearly six times what it had been 20 years earlier. "It became evident that the leading players weren't going to...