Join drops variable if it is not common to both tables - php

Question

I have two tables and the commonality is the tid. the $tid is the primary key for tourneys and if it is in team_tourney then the team selected it. The code below echos everything if a team selected it but drops only the variable $tid for every non selected item. How would you suggest I work around my delema.
tables
team_tourneys
tourneys
my sql is
$myChoice=#mysql_query("SELECT *
FROM tourneys
LEFT JOIN team_tourneys
ON tourneys.tid = team_tourneys.tid
WHERE tourney_state = '$region' AND tourney_start_date >= now()
GROUP BY tourneys.tid ORDER BY tourney_start_date ASC
");
if (!$myChoice)
{
die('<p>Error fetching Tourney details: ' .
mysql_error() . '</p>');
}
while ($choice = mysql_fetch_array($myChoice))
{
$tid = $choice['tid'];
$tourney_name = $choice['tourney_name'];
echo ''.$tourney_name.'</div>'
}

Answer 1

Since you are fetching into an associative array you only have one slot for any selected column name (or alias). In other words, you can not have:
array(
"tid" => 1,
"tid" => 2,
);
Your query is going to return all columns of all referenced tables in the order the tables are listed. Since the both tables contain tid and team_tourneys is the last table referenced, $choice["tid"] will contain team_tourneys.tid which of course can be NULL due to the LEFT JOIN.
Probably the easiest way to resolve this is to read the tourneys table last:
SELECT team_tourneys.*, tourneys.*
FROM tourneys
LEFT JOIN team_tourneys
ON tourneys.tid = team_tourneys.tid
WHERE tourney_state = '$region' AND tourney_start_date >= now()
GROUP BY tourneys.tid ORDER BY tourney_start_date ASC;
You should really enter each column name individually, however. It's bad practice to use *.