If a golf tournament is canceled and you didn’t notice, is it missed?

The answer is a resounding yes. While the casual golf fan stops watching golf after the Tour Championship and most likely any event that Tiger Woods isn’t in, these PGA Tour “Fall Finish” events have plenty of drama.

In this case, the Viking Classic at Annandale Golf Club just outside of Jackson, Miss., was the victim of Mother Nature this week. Ironically, this tournament survived Hurricane Katrina four years ago? well, sort of. The course was severely damaged and the event was moved from September to October that year and still played.

This time is was heavy rain for the first two days (and earlier in the week) that just left the course unplayable.

PGA Tour and tournament officials will always correctly point out that charitable contributions are among the casualties when a tournament has to be cancelled, but it goes way beyond that. There are the hundreds of volunteers who gave up time to set up and work the event, the loss of money for the local economy and the general sense of disappointment that naturally follows in a large undertaking like this ? and any PGA Tour event is a large undertaking.

And for the players looking to gain an exemption for next year ? the ones hovering around 125 on the money list ? these last few tournaments are critical. Heck, I was looking forward to seeing how guys like David Duval (125), Stuart Appleby (134), Chris DiMarco (138) and Rocco Mediate (141) ? some pretty big names fighting for their tour cards – were going to fare this week.

To me it’s kind of like college football. There are only a handful of teams that can contend for a national championship, but that doesn’t make the other 100 games meaningless, does it? The Viking Classic is not meaningless.

The cancelation of the Viking Classic, by the way, is the first PGA Tour event to suffer such a fate since the 1996 AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am. I’m amazed it doesn’t happen more often.