Finchem also said he was not concerned with Woods being linked to a Canadian doctor being investigated because his assistant was found transporting drugs, including HGH, into the United States. The doctor, Anthony Galea, said he treated Woods with “blood spinning,” who help his recovery from knee surgery.

“There’s a lot of doctors linked to HGH,” Finchem said. “There’s no reason for me to be concerned because I have no information to trigger a concern.”

Finchem sprinkled some good news into his conference call: The tour has renewed title sponsorship with the Sony Open in Honolulu and plans to work with the company on a 3-D broadcast; the same is planned for one of its playoff events, the BMW Championship outside Chicago.

That makes 10 title sponsors with new contracts this year — seven renewals and three new sponsors. Finchem also said the presenting sponsor of the season-ending Tour Championship, Coca-Cola, is finishing up details on its contract renewal.

Finchem also chose to use a different measure of television. While Woods has shown to spike ratings — they were down about 50 percent at 2008 tournaments he did not play in because of the knee surgery — Finchem said the cumulative number of viewers for a PGA Tour event over four days is second only to a three-hour NFL game.

He said the tour had an average of 26 million viewers each week in 2007, and the number was roughly the same in 2008, when Woods played only five tournaments. The number increased to 29 million this year.

Finchem said PGA Tour events raised $125 million for charity in 2008, and it dropped to $109 million this year, mainly because of the economy. Projections are slightly higher for 2010.

“I don’t see corporate America backing away from golf over Tiger’s issue, and I do think at the end of the day after all the media scrutiny, if he can successfully deal with those issues and come back and play golf, that will be a positive thing,” he said.

“I’m not suggesting that his popularity level is going to soar again. I don’t know where that’s going to be,” Finchem said. “But I think people generally are going to want him to succeed. They’re going to want him to deal with his issues. They’re going to want him to come back having dealt with those issues. And I think he’ll find, eventually, a significant amount of support.”