E-Mail This Article to a Friend Your taxes, their party Corporate executives treat each other to a great time on the golf course in Concord — and you help pay for it BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
	Related links Bank of America Championship Click on "Corporate" for all the info on the many ways a sponsor can buy goodies for clients and employees. PGA Marketing Center The Professional Golf Associations’ merchandising headquarters. A section of the site labeled "Client Entertainment" offers plenty of opportunities. Sponsorship.com "Fresh news and analysis on the future of sponsorship today." Learn who’s sponsoring what, along with tidbits like this: North American companies spent $925 million sponsoring golf events last year. Saturday Series The PGA Tour now does a Pro-Am event almost every week — for charity of course — that the Web site calls "A Unique Marketing and Hospitality Event." Sign up now for this weekend’s Cialis Western Open Pro-Am!

It was uncomfortably warm out along the 6729 yards of tree-lined fairways and greens at the Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord last weekend, but it was cool and pleasant inside the Charles Schwab tent. There, middle-aged men in chinos and polo shirts — indistinguishable from the golf players competing outside in the Champions Tour Bank of America Championship — reclined on plush sofas and watched three large television screens built into a 10-foot-high dark wood console, drinking free liquor brought by a dark-eyed waitress in a short skirt. A few sat out under umbrellas on the private deck alongside the 18th fairway.

None of these men was paying for any of this — or at least no more than you and I were. The tent is almost entirely tax-deductible for Schwab, which means that about a third of the cost was subsidized by the American taxpayer.

The 25-year-old Champions (formerly Seniors) Tour is a professional circuit for former PGA stars age 50 and over. In reality, though, it is simply a traveling circus staged for the pleasure of corporate executives. Companies like Schwab, Cingular, Philips Electronics, SBLI, and UBS use the events to woo potential big-contract clients, and they pay well for the privilege.

That’s why Schwab drags this massive set-up in a 48-foot semi to 28 Champions Tour events over 10 months, passing out 1000 tickets to select clients and Schwab employees in each city.

"It’s a thank-you for the business, or to welcome you into the fold," says Jeff Hardeman, who manages the Schwab hospitality tent.

The event’s coordinators have come up with a variety of ways to give special treatment to special clients, and to make a whole week’s vacation — excuse me, business trip — out of a three-day sports event. The $50,000 18th Fairway package includes four playing spots in the Championship Pro-Am; eight invitations to the Tuesday-night Pro-Am Draw Party; four invitations to Sunday’s Toast of Champions Party; four playing spots in the Thank You Golf Outing; four VIP "Honorary Observer" opportunities to hang out with the players while they golf; plus options to buy spots in the Celebrity Pro-Am Tournament (featuring local sports celebs such as Rico Petrocelli), Celebrity Poker Tournament, and Celebrity Draw Party, and personal visits from tour players. "The Champions Tour has been terrific about coming up with great ideas and opportunities for us," Hardeman says.

Let us entertain you

Most people in the corporate-hospitality areas represented the Champions Tour spectator demographic: older, upper-middle-class people with high incomes, decision-making executive positions, and lots of assets to manage. In other words, the event was marketed to potential corporate sponsors. A nice, quiet crowd of Verizon Business Links customers sat and watched the action in the Platinum Club, also overlooking the 17th. They had a well-stocked free bar that included Johnny Walker Black, Jose Cuervo, and New Zealand wines.

For serious golf watchers, the skyboxes around the 18th green were the prime location. Six companies had basic boxes, with 20 seats each, cable-television monitors, and plenty of food, but one shared bar. Poland Spring’s skybox was more private and had a much nicer atmosphere, with coffee urns and flower arrangements on the tables.

The nicest skybox of all was tricked out by Columbia Management, an investment-firm subsidiary of Bank of America — which was the only sponsor that asked me to leave its suite. In the back area, executives stood on dark carpeting and ate their lunches from marble-topped counters. In the seating area, about 50 people could relax and watch the putting green just feet in front of them. Several smiling blondes checked people in and provided drinks.

But the best spread could be found inside the clubhouse, at the Bank of America corporate-hospitality center. The company slogan, "Higher Standards," was on the wall, and it was no joke: the properly credentialed entering these cool, well-furnished rooms could partake of a buffet, open bars, a practice putting surface, and a deck overlooking the first and 10th tees. "This is the way to live," said one of four men sitting down to platefuls of food.

You could hardly blame them for enjoying the ride and for seeking out similar perks in the future by awarding contracts and accounts to today’s hosts — the best suck-ups — rather than to companies with the best expertise. Nobody can claim that transporting, housing, feeding, boozing, air conditioning, and entertaining a bunch of people at a golf tournament is evidence that Bank of America is a good bank or that Heilind Electronics sells fine equipment. But if the invited client rewards wine-and-dine bribery with a contract, then the bribe was a good business investment, pretty much by definition.

In fact, pretty much the only difference between buying a client an "Honorary Observer" experience and buying him a high-priced hooker, or handing him an envelope full of cash, is that the US government will subsidize only the first one.

Creative accounting

The US tax code limits business entertainment-expense deductions to the face value of the ticket. The marble-topped counters and floral arrangements and Celebrity Poker Tournament entries are not deductible — unless, of course, it’s all to raise money for charity.

The Bank of America Championship, like almost every Champions Tour event, is technically owned by an IRS-approved charitable organization, in this case, Nashawtuc Charities. The net proceeds of the event — after every conceivable expense has been deducted — will be divvied out to Boys & Girls Clubs, the Cam Neely Foundation, and other charities. This is an up-front selling point used to woo corporate sponsors in the Bank of America Championship marketing literature — the tax break, not the charity. "All or a portion of your involvement may qualify as a tax deduction," it reads.

It’s impossible to estimate the tax savings without access to the sponsors’ books, but the basic tax rate on corporate income is 34 percent. So, roughly a third of all the corporate spending at the Nashawtuc Country Club last week was subsidized by a government tax break. That includes everything: the taxpayers paid for about 60 cents of each $2 Snickers bar, $12 of each $35 commemorative shirt, and a buck and a half of each $5 official Bank of America Championship sunscreen in the Souvenir Tents. Only food and beverage deductions are capped at 50 percent of cost, which helps explain why most of the attendees were served cold cuts and tuna salad.

Last year, the Championship gave $350,000 to charities and $1,550,000 in prizes to the golfers. A spokesperson would not provide any breakdown of revenue for last week’s tournament, but out of all the tickets, parking, food, drinks, souvenirs, sponsorships, TV, and advertising, the net profit to charity was about $5 per attendee. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if the guy who finishes 49th gets a bigger check than the group that helps kids with cancer, it’s not a real charity event.

Tipping point

A Boston Coach driver, who had received no tips all day for shuttling rich people to and from the clubhouse area, had a few things to say about the rich. So did others. Event Temps, a Boston staffing company, was so sure that this would be a huge tipping crowd that it convinced its people to work for $7.50 an hour instead of the usual $14. That worked out okay at the cash concession stands, where beers were $4.50 and plenty of people left the change.

But wherever the drinks came free, the drinkers were less appreciative. One woman told me she made $14 in tips serving drinks for 11 hours in the Bank of America hospitality suite. One guy pulled a stool up to her serving station and spent hours drinking Crown Royal Special Reserve and never put his hand in his pocket, she said. A guy tending bar in one of the 18th-green skyboxes had made one dollar in tips as of Friday afternoon.

That was more or less in keeping with the broader theme of the event — money was to be spent only on the wealthy. Not, for instance, on the proles who actually paid $25 for their general-admission tickets. They got to share a few port-a-johns and fight each other for a spot in the shade. They could take their kids to a pathetic Family Fun Zone, a spot of dried grass with empty tables, a cotton-candy machine, and a sheet of plastic where they could whack a few golf balls at targets. It took three sponsors, Cumberland Farms, Ocean Spray, and Pro Swing, to pay for that.

David S. Bernstein can be reached at dbernstein[a]phx.com