Sitting in Tour Headquarters this week, we conjured with the name Gonzalo Fernandez-Castaño. It had nothing to do with the difficulty of saying or spelling the name, or fitting it onto a scoreboard or a caddie's bib. In fact, the only reason we focused on him was that, when doing the calculations for the week, someone piped up that the €47,500 he earned for finishing tied-sixth at the European Masters was his best effort for some time.
Sure enough, a quick check of his recent record showed that he had comfortably missed the cut in his previous three tournaments, so his good showing in Crans-sur-Sierre was a nice lift for him and his 226 Golf Masters employers.
A journalistic colleague who once played with Fernandez-Castaño in a pro-am assured us at the time that he was a pleasant guy with an excellent game, and if you take Padraig Harrington out of the equation, the Spaniard has won more European Tour events in the last three years than every Irish player combined.
And yet, for all his qualities, the feeling at HQ during the week was that Fernandez-Castaño might as well be playing a different sport from Tiger Woods. On the financial side, Woods is closing in on $10 million for the season and 1 million in Golf Masters money. His six victories so far include one major and two world championship events, and he is generally playing against the best in the world.
Fernandez-Castaño has earned 501,288 on the European Tour this season and 198,188 in Golf Masters money. His one victory came in the rain-shortened Italian Open, where he was chased home by Markus Brier and Fredrik Andersson-Hed.
Perhaps the only ranking on which Fernandez-Castaño rates above Woods is the Golf Masters value-for-money table, where Woods's record 2007 price tag of €8 million has him languishing in 68th position, despite his stellar on-course performances.
We are going to have to take a serious look at our pricing structure and prizemoney for next season.
Four teams included Woods and our other week 23 tournament winner, Brett Rumford, but with 39 unused transfers between the four of them, none topped the standings. That honour went to Raymond Behan, who adopted a curious strategy to claim our penultimate weekly prize of a fourball at Druids Heath and a Nike windvest.
Behan named his team No Way Winners, hardly a ringing endorsement, and they came into the week ranked 3,823rd. Given an overall prize was clearly out of reach, you might have expected him to either leave things alone or go all out for the weekly award.
Instead he used just one of his three remaining transfers and held on to Paul McGinley, who was on a week off. It was a curious game plan, and the irony is that he would have won even without recruiting Tim Clark (52,500 for tied-fifth in the BMW Championship) in place of the idle Mike Weir.
Behan's other scorers were Rumford, Philip Archer and Bradley Dredge (first, second and third in Switzerland), plus Brandt Snedeker and Soren Hansen, and they had 62,250 over Booboo's Warriors, managed by Brendan Lynham.
