Editor's note: On Wednesday, PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem met with the media at the season-ending Tour Championship. Finchem spoke about a number of issues, including the 2006 season and the 2007 FedEx Cup competition. Following is the transcript of his interview session, courtesy of ASAP Sports.

BOB COMBS [Moderator]: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tour Championship presented by Coca Cola. I appreciate your attendance here as we always do.

And for those of you that have been with us for many times throughout the year, thanks for the time and attention you give to the PGA Tour.

This is something we've done for the last several years to have the commissioner reflect a little bit on this year, but primarily reflect ahead. He'll make a few remarks, and then we'll have time for Q and A.

COMMISSIONER TIM FINCHEM: Thank you, Bob. Thank you, and good afternoon. Thanks for being with us this week at the Tour Championship presented by Coca Cola. Let me just first of all quickly thank the East Lake Foundation and Tom Cousins for their hospitality this week and for creating something very special here. I think this is our sixth time to visit.

We have a great partnership this week with Coca Cola and the Southern Company, a partnership that we think has made the tournament better every year.

I thought what I'd do is just recap a few things in terms of where we are and where we're going, and then hopefully just a few minutes and then throw it open to questions on anything you'd like to talk about.

First of all, we had a great season during the course of the year. This concludes the official money portion of the season. Certainly Tiger [Woods] had another great individual performance and has a string going. We've also had some other great performances from our veterans, but I think there's been a lot of discussion the last year or two about the extent to which young players are coming up and a lot of talk about the internationalization of the Tour.

I think it's important to note that in 2006 we had a really great rookie class. We had 11 rookies finish will finish in the Top 125. Four of those, Trevor Immelman, J.B. Holmes, Eric Axley, Troy Matteson, all won tournaments in their rookie year, and I think that's an indication of the strength of the young guys coming up.

On the international side, we had an increased percentage of our exempt players from outside the United States, and 12 tournaments were won by our international players. We continue to see a strong interest around the world by upcoming players to come play in the United States, and we continue to see a lot of good young players coming up.

On the Nationwide Tour we had our best year ever, without question, $17 million in prize money, some very successful new events in South Carolina, California, Maryland well, in Maryland and Georgia organized for next year.

It's interesting that the competitive level of the Nationwide Tour is really very difficult to distinguish now from the PGA Tour itself. We had 12 of 21 of 2005 Nationwide Tour alumni were in the Top 125. We had eight players from the Nationwide Tour earn over a million dollars this year on the PGA Tour. To date over 195, 196 I think it's 196 tournaments on the PGA Tour have been won by players from the Nationwide Tour.

As has been the case for the last four decades, really, every year that goes by, there is an increasing number of really good players that can play at this level, and it's just a question of playing at the right level at the right time and being consistent.

The Champions Tour also had a good year. We had a great finish between Jay Haas and Loren Roberts for the Schwab Cup. Charity dollars will exceed $10 million for the third straight year, and we had new winners and veteran members performing well.

I think the important thing about the Champions Tour is that the transition that began in 2000 when [Tom] Watson, [Lanny] Wadkins and [Tom] Kite came over is now almost complete. We said, I think in '01 or '02, that by 2007 you would see just a fundamental redo of the leaderboards on the Champions Tour. And that's certainly come to pass when you consider Jay Haas and Curtis Strange and Larry Nelson, Chip Beck, the players that have come out in the last five or years six.

Fred Funk is off to a good start on that Tour, and we look forward to next year Mark O'Meara and Nick Price turning 50. That will complete that phase, which if you go back and look at the fields from '95, '96, '97, '98, and '99 and compare them to next year and now looking forward to next year, it's just a fundamental evolution of the Tour.

Beyond the competition last year, we reached the billion dollar mark in charity, and we're off to a good start on the second billion this year with it looks like over $100 million. The international growth we're seeing, I think, is largely driven by the number of international players who are playing this Tour is really astounding.

We now are at over 200 countries. Our television passes 450 million homes outside of the United States. The focus of interest in Asia and South America to go along with the historical focus in Australia, South Africa, Japan. And Europe is astounding, really, in terms of the interest level in PGA Tour golf.

And of course importantly, our sponsorship is at an all time high. So that's kind of a brief recap. As we get into questions I'd be happy to talk about 2006, but most of our energy for the last two years has been focused on what's going to happen after 2006: New television agreements, new organizational structure, and new competitive structure.

I know many of you here today are aware of a lot of what I'm going to talk about for the next four or five minutes, but I think it's important that we are in a sea of change, if you will, the direction we're going on the PGA Tour. And I think it's important that we use every opportunity to review some of those details so more and more people really get a handle on where we're headed.

Let me start first with the season long competition, the FedEx Cup. This is a major shift for the PGA Tour. It is designed to really do three things: One, increase the importance of every week on the PGA Tour, and as a consequence we think improve the quality of fields on average as we go through the season; secondly, create our version of the playoffs. Like most other sports, playoffs are the most dynamic portion of the season, and we want to take advantage of the opportunity to create some playoffs that we think will drive fan interest, television interest, and carry our audience somewhat further into the year.

As part of that, we also recognize that in doing that we have the opportunity to, we think, lift the value of the sport as a whole for us across the year. We want to thank FedEx. I think it was a year ago today that we announced our partnership with FedEx. We said, at that time, that not only are they a global brand, but they are incredibly skilled marketers. All the work that's gone on since that announcement confirms, certainly in my mind, that we picked the right partner. We have some people who are dedicated to making this a very special thing in golf as we enter what we now call the New Era.

We will begin the FedEx Cup at the Mercedes Benz Championship in Hawaii. It will provide players the opportunity to accumulate points throughout the year going through the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, which is the weekend after the PGA Championship. At that point we will take that points list and convert it and re seed it based on finishing position in Greensboro to begin the playoffs -- four weeks of playoffs played on good golf courses in big markets, starting with Barclays Classic in New York, going to the Deutsche Bank Championship in Boston and BMW Championship, which will be in Chicago and alternate out of Chicago, and then back here to Atlanta for the Tour Championship presented by Coca Cola.

Additional points are awarded based on the seed position, and then players accumulate additional points in the playoffs. The top seed going into the playoffs is awarded 100,000 points to start, and then in increments going down from there. The fields will be full field events the first three weeks, and each of these events will carry significant purses in their own right.

We think that the idea of having all the players play week after week is unique in the game. It's going to create a lot of interest, and we feel comfortable that we can carry our audience a couple weeks into the football season to make this season finale in Atlanta very special indeed.

The second thing I would comment on is The Players Championship. Obviously moving The Players Championship to May is something that's been talked about for a decade. A lot of you throughout the last few years have been vocal in the value of moving The Players to May from a timing standpoint with the Masters in April and the [U.S.] Open in June, et cetera, especially the members of the print press.

I think you've indicated the ability to focus more on The Players in May. Our hesitation over the years has been agronomic, and we are just about to complete in 10 days a total rebuild of our golf course, the stadium course at Sawgrass, now called the Players Stadium.

I think most of you are aware of the details. We rebuilt the drainage, we sand capped all the fairways, we've put sub vac, push pull systems under all of our greens, we regrassed all the surfaces, and we will open for play on Nov. 13.

We just happened to pick a year to do this work when we had zero hurricanes, almost no rain, and I don't believe, with the exception of an inch and a half of rain from Ernesto, we didn't lose a day in construction time. We made a few tweaks here and there that we'll talk about another time, but substantially we think it will continue to enhance the golf course, but it's very, very special.

We tore down the old clubhouse and rebuilt a new clubhouse. It's on kind of a different schedule. It's on schedule, that's the good news. The bad news is, as I've said over and over, that the schedule has an opening about two hours before the first tee time of The Players. It's a little tight to the tournament, but we think we'll get it done. It's just spectacular, and it's going to be a great addition to the quality and texture of The Players.

The third thing I'll mention is television. We had NBC officials here today, and we're going into a new environment. Again, another change for us with a two network partnership as opposed to three, and a single platform carrier for all of our early rounds with The Golf Channel. CBS and NBC, we think, are ideal partners for this arrangement.

The Golf Channel not only will telecast all of our early rounds on Thursday and Friday live, but will replay it prime-time every week all year long on Thursday and Friday evening, plus a lot of ancillary programming. And, of course, the four round coverage of our first three tournaments early in the year as well as the Fall Series.

It's a very different direction for us. I might just pause here. This is the last official money event that we're doing with ABC, ESPN, and comment that they've been a great partner for us for a good number of years. We are indebted to them for the energy they put into this partnership.

I would also point out, however, that they're still our partner. We have an ongoing relationship with ESPN. The world has changed. There are a lot of different distribution vehicles for media and telecasting messages, and we are partnering with ESPN and utilizing some of those avenues, but our tournament coverage will be with CBS and NBC, and totally from a cable standpoint on The Golf Channel. While we thank ABC and ESPN, we look forward to this new environment.

The next thing I'd mention I should mention, also, HD television. Every weekend we'll be on HD next year. Sixteen or 17 percent of American households today are HD capable. By the time our network agreements run in 2012, that will be in the 60 percentile. If you just go down to your local electronics dealer and look at where the prices are going on HD television, it's becoming it will be mainstream in a very short period of time.

And of course I think for our sport in particular, perhaps only hockey rivals, I think, the impact that HD television will have on viewer enthusiasm for a sport on television, and we're very excited about that development.

We conclude the season next year with the Fall Series, seven good events, $32 million in prize money, finishes out our eligibility for the following FedEx Cup season, as well as access to a lot of tournaments the following year.

Let me just I get a lot of questions about the Fall Series, and I think the only way to understand the role of the Fall Series is to really step forward in time and consider what PGA Tour golf is in the FedEx world. It's no longer about the calendar year as much as it is a FedEx Cup competition that lasts from the Mercedes Championships to the Tour Championship in Atlanta, and then a Fall Series that means a separate set of things in terms of the import to the players and the character of those tournaments and their impact on charity.

Lastly, I would just say, to talk about next year and the following year, is that we made a lot of other changes in the schedule. We've moved away from a couple of tournaments, we added a couple of tournaments, we have a number of new sponsors, and we have a number of new golf courses. We've changed some dates around.

If you just walk through our schedule week in and week out next year, a significant percentage of the schedule is better. And we like that direction. We want to make every tournament as good as we can make it, and right here in Atlanta the BellSouth Classic will enjoy much better weather and agronomic conditions next year than they have the last few years, just as an example.

Let me conclude by saying that as it relates to the future, we're extremely enthusiastic. We have begun to get a terrific reaction from what these changes mean to presenting the best players in the world to play in this kind of competitive format.

We are going to put enormous amounts of energy with all of our partners behind bringing this forward in aggressive fashion, and we're looking forward to the results.

With that, I will pause and be happy to try to answer any of your questions.

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