It’s the self-inflicted headaches that are the worst

My Charles Osgood viewing on Sunday morning was interrupted by a commercial starring Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was stumping for Nassau Legislator Craig Johnson, who is hoping to fill the state Senate seat vacated by our new Homeland Security czar, Republican Mike Balboni.
I read an interesting twist on the story in the Albany Times-Union, which reported that Spitzer told Balboni he wasn’t allowed to get involved in the race to succeed him. Not that Balboni listened. His wife, Stephanie, appears in an ad for the Republican candidate, Maureen O’Connell, so all’s fair.
With a win, Johnson, a Democrat, would take a seat in the mostly impotent Democratic minority in the Senate, but more important, he would leave a vacancy in the county Legislature. The Democrats and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi will appoint a successor, but that Democrat will have all of six months of incumbency — which Long Island voters seem to view as the sole measure of a candidate’s worth — when he runs for a full term in November.
Assuming the rest of the Legislature is re-elected — again — the winner of this seat will give control of the Legislature to his or her party.
Suozzi can thank Spitzer for his latest headache. Several of his other headaches, alas, are self-inflicted.
On Sunday afternoon, some friends and I attended the golf expo at Queens College. Hidden in the back, next to the Koreans offering massages (no kidding), was the booth sponsored by Commerce Bank, title sponsor of the Commerce Bank Championship, played on Eisenhower Park’s Red Course.
Not that the people manning the booth knew anything about the golf tournament. For starters, they couldn’t tell me when it would be played. “June, I think. It’s too soon to tell,” said one guy, sounding like a sixth-grader who hadn’t done his homework.
The Commerce Bank Championship is supposed to be the big payoff for all the tax dollars pumped into the Nassau County parks department. In a year with no New York-area U.S. Open, this event on the PGA’s over-50 Champions Tour — played the last weekend in June — is the biggest thing around. Yet it’s remarkable in that it fails to create any buzz beyond the community of golf addicts. This is the nation’s largest media market, and the Commerce Bank event has only the Barclays in Westchester, on the PGA Tour (which Tiger typically skips), to compete with.
Few senior tour events draw much interest in terms of who’s winning. It’s all about the personalities of the players, and last year the Commerce Bank had a pretty decent field, including Gary McCord, who is on the CBS broadcasting team at the Masters and a total hoot, and Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion who delighted the fans by making the cut last year at Augusta at age 54. They were joined by such Champions Tour headliners as Hale Irwin and Curtis Strange, who have five U.S. Open titles between them, and Rick Rhoden, the former Yankees pitcher.
Yet the publicity pictures we at the Herald receive leading up to the event inevitably feature Tom Suozzi, Commerce Bank executives and Parks Department commissioners. No word on when they’d be signing autographs.
It’s not fair to talk about attendance or TV ratings, since it poured rain all weekend last year. A better gauge is all the Eisenhower Red Course swag you see. We’ll cut to the chase: It barely exists.
Since Bethpage State Park hosted the U.S. Open in 2002, everyone who’s ever hoisted a golf bag owns at least one (and usually several) Bethpage Black Course hat, shirt, towel, visor and jacket. Those goodies, for sale in the Bethpage pro shop and online at fantastic markups, bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, which funds not only Bethpage’s upkeep but the other parks under the state’s control. The other golf courses at Bethpage — the ones for the rest of us — are kept in peak condition despite maximum use, thanks to the dollars Bethpage Black merchandise brings in.
Golfers are addicted to labels and are notorious showoffs. Offer us stuff and we’ll buy it.
But Eisenhower’s Red Course, which once hosted the PGA Championship, doesn’t even have a logo, let alone a clothing line. This unclaimed revenue costs everyone. Improvements to the other courses at Eisenhower, the Blue and the White, have been steady but slow. The greens are smooth and the fairways pristine, but last summer the sand traps on the Blue Course still felt like gravel.
I asked Suozzi about this during his re-election bid, but he dismissed the issue as unimportant. With all the issues he has to deal with, I suppose, it probably would seem like it.
But for people like me who pay a fortune in taxes and ask little in return in services — my child is not yet in school, my wife and I pay for our own health insurance and we’re rarely arrested — public parks are the only government service we use.
The county can do us a solid by promoting the famous players who will be at the Commerce — Hello! Seve turns 50 this year! — and coming up with some kind of a merchandising plan.
The extra revenue could offset whatever other self-inflicted headaches that are on the horizon.