Back On The Veej Beat

Both Alex Miceli and Rex Hoggard have posted on the week from hell being experienced by Vijay Singh.  From Alex's lede:

Have you seen this man?

Vijay Singh has played in 21 consecutive Players Championships, but that streak is in jeopardy on the eve of the Tour’s flagship event. As third alternate, Singh awaits a call from the Tour while he practices this week at nearby Sawgrass Country Club. 

There’s plenty of irony in Singh’s tenuous position. One year ago this week, Singh initiated what has become a protracted legal battle by filing a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against the PGA Tour. Singh contends his reputation was smeared regarding his use of deer antler spray.

We spent some time in the deep end of the pool on this story, here, here and here. but perhaps enough time has passed that you'll have forgotten my seeming Veej obsession.  There is a certain poignancy in both accounts of Vijay's plight, as he lives in Ponte Vedra Beach and is a fixture on the players' side of the range at TPC.  But then again Veej can be a less than sympathetic character, and we can't forget this telling detail:

It was a year ago Wednesday that Singh stunned the golf world when he announced on the eve of the 2013 Players that he had sued the Tour for, among other things, the “reckless implementation of its anti-doping program.”

In filing the lawsuit on the eve of The Players, he had to know he was irreconcilably poisoning the well, no?

Vijay admits that the lawsuit has been a distraction, but of course his day in court must be coming soon....errr, maybe not:

According to an adjusted conference order, all of the depositions will be completed by Dec. 19

and the deadline for the discovery phase of the lawsuit is June 30, 2015. 

The “note of issue,” which is used to have the court’s clerk enter a case into the calendar for trial, is due by Aug. 31, 2015. Which means the lawsuit will not likely go to trial until the end of next year or the beginning of 2016. 

It is a long, drawn out process that at least partially explains Singh’s pedestrian play.

I'd feel better if I were sure that Vijay got an honest assessment of the time frame of such a case, but ultimately that's between he and his attorneys.  But the gist of his case is that he was treated differently than others similarly situated, which doesn't sound appropriate, does it?  But here's a taste of the positon of the Tour on that issue:

Regardless of how the Singh case might be resolved, one of the biggest issues for the Tour could be Finchem’s role as sole arbiter of the drug policy. In oral arguments during discovery, the Tour’s lawyers disclosed that Finchem has the discretion to treat players differently. 

“Because each and every drug case is so entirely unique and limited to its own specific facts of that individual and what he did and how it relates to the program, the commissioner of the PGA Tour is expressly given discretion under the drug program to determine in each separate case what he considers to be the most appropriate outcome,” argued Jeffrey Mishkin, an attorney for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, the Tour’s New York-based outside counsel, according to the court transcript. 

“There is not requirement of uniformity of treatment under the drug program. There couldn’t be. The commissioner has every right to treat different cases differently. That’s what he does, and that’s what Mr. Singh agreed to when he signed his membership renewal form.”

Hmmmm...that seems to make sense to me, as knowledge and intent are appropriate considerations at least in the penalty phase of a disciplinary action.  We all understood why Alex Rodriguez received harsher treatment than Franco Cervelli, so the key would seem to be transparency.  Yeah, for the umpteenth time, there's that word again.  The Commish, he's not so big on the T-word, as this excerpt from Miceli makes clear: 

Only Finchem, 67, who has been commissioner for 20 years, is believed to know how the violations are handled and how similar situations may have been addressed. Players have grumbled that inequity pervades Tour oversight, including administration of the drug policy.

During a news conference July 2, 2008, at the AT&T National, which was the week when the Tour’s drug policy took effect, Finchem said he saw no reason to disclose information about the testing, not even the names of players being screened. 

“We will probably provide some gross statistics on the program at the end of this year or sometime next year in terms of numbers of people, numbers of tests,” Finchem said. “We may do something like that. This is just the way we set the program up. We feel like it’s the best way to go about it, and we’re not trying to give it a high, high profile.”

Finchem said twice in the same news conference that once all appeals were exhausted, the Tour would disclose something about any violation. 

“As I said earlier, at the end of the process, we will in all likelihood, I don’t know exactly what information we’ll provide, but we would provide information that there’s been a positive test and there’s been an adjudication of that as a result,” Finchem said. “The form that that takes exactly, we have not finished, that would be my guess. As soon as we get a positive test, we’ll get right to work on it.”

Guess that work is ongoing, because again per Alex: 

Since the program took effect in mid-2008, the PGA Tour has supplied no statistics regarding the players tested, number of tests administered or the cost of the testing. 

However, one year after testing began, Finchem told the media at the 2009 AT&T that there had been no drug suspensions and that the Tour did not have a doping problem.

Wouldn't this be much more believable if the data were shared?  One's image is of a Commissioner that very much wants this issue to go away, and therefore making it impossible to accept anything he's telling us at face value.

That's why I'm so solidly in Vijay's camp, the old enemy-of-my-enemy thing.   Given that the Tour immediately "cleared" Vijay after the WADA change of heart, his treatment in isolation doesn't seem inappropriate.  But I'm all for shining a million-candlepower spotlight on Tour disciplinary practices and let the chips fall where they may.