Austin Country Club members on Thursday "approved the club acting as host" of the WGC-Dell Match Play tournament "for the next four years," starting in '16, according to Kirk Bohls of the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN. The event will run from March 21-27 next year, and the club will be "host of the tournament for three years with the PGA Tour holding the option for a fourth year." The tournament will mark Dell’s "first foray into the golf arena, and a number of the company’s executives are on hand this week" at the WGC-Cadillac Match Play tournament at S.F.'s Harding Park. Austin Country Club President Jim Cahill said that galleries will be "limited to about 8,000" per day. PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem said the Tour “seriously, actively” considered seven to eight venues for the match-play event but settled on Austin with Dell as the title sponsor as “kind of a no-brainer.” He said that the Tour "wanted to keep the date of the tournament in the first quarter of the year." Finchem: “In the last 10 years, everyone’s recognized that Austin is a big-events city. It’s knocking down doors with big events. And it’s not just growing, it’s young" (AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 5/1). ESPN.com's Bob Harig noted the tournament "had been played in Arizona in late February" since '07 and prior to that was in Southern California -- except for a one-year trip to Australia -- going back to its inception in '99. Now, Texas "likely will have five tournaments" on the '15-16 PGA Tour schedule, "matching the number of events in both California and Florida" (ESPN.com, 4/30).
