Golf

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Winnipeg, we did it: With help from Wie

CN Canadian Women's Open big success

By: Tim Campbell

Posted: 08/31/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Michelle Wie's win brought notoriety to Winnipeg event. (TREVOR HAGAN / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES)

He doesn't have the final say -- that belongs mostly to the title sponsor -- but CN Canadian Women's Open tournament director Sean Van Kesteren left Winnipeg Monday saying the city should be in the running for another Open.

"Absolutely, it was a big success," Van Kesteren said of the just-completed 2010 Open at St. Charles Country Club. "There were a lot of people out on Sunday (17,200). The city wrapped its arms around this tournament and we could tell from all the feedback we received from people who were leaving the event."

The US$2.25-million LPGA Tour event drew 65,000 spectators for the week, just short of the event's record set in Ottawa in 2008.

Van Kesteren said the behind-the-scenes operation worked like clockwork.

"We never ran into any issues whatsoever aside from a little mosquito issue on Saturday," he said. "The city was just wonderful to work with. Everything they did with us to help us get organized was just first class.

"You can't do these events without the support of a lot of people, from volunteers to suppliers and contractors locally and from across the country.

"The $800,000 (for charity) is fantastic. The TV coverage was wonderful and we don't have the numbers yet but we're thinking that on Golf Channel in the U.S. it'll be on the tour's highest numbers of the year with Michelle (Wie) leading the charge.

"We are pretty happy about the whole thing."

The tournament's legacy will be an $800,000 donation to the Children's Hospital Foundation of Manitoba -- $400,000 raised by the community and $400,000 contributed by CN via its spectacularly successful Miracle Match program.

It's just half of what came from the 2009 tournament in Calgary, but Van Kesteren said there's no reason to be disappointed in that.

"This is not a competition," he said. "$800,000 is fantastic. "The good news is that we actually had more individual donors in Winnipeg than in Calgary. In Calgary, which I should note is a larger, more populous area and a bigger market, there were some larger individual donations but in Winnipeg, this still added up to a lot of money and it's going to go to help a lot of kids."

There is another way to look at the charity element. No city that has played host to the Open has also been home to another of the country's largest golf fundraisers in the same the three-month period, never mind the same year.

But Winnipeg and St. Charles were the site for the Mike Weir Miracle Golf Drive for Kids in June. That event put $625,000 into the coffers of the Children's Hospital Foundation of Manitoba, making a total of $1,425,000 from two high-profile Winnipeg golf events in 2010.

It may not be a completely accurate method of accounting, either, but it's reasonable to assume Winnipeg's Canadian Open might have exceeded Calgary's contribution from the Open had most or all of those contributed dollars gone to the Open and been matched by CN's Miracle Match.

As for profile, Van Kesteren said there was only one way a bigger headline than Wie's victory could have been generated by the Open.

"Only Lorie Kane or a Canadian winning would have been more popular for the event," he said. "Michelle's win, just having a marquee player like that, brought a lot of notoriety to the event and it was great for us and great for Winnipeg."

tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 31, 2010 B7

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