Champions Tour qualifying

MARCROTH · October 3, 2006

Tim Finchem has put the final nail in the Champion's Tour coffin. With the new qualifying, the top 30 at Q school will only get the opportunity to play in Monday qualifiers while has-beens like Rocky Thompson and Jim Colbert can go out on the road to try to hold on to their pasts and shoot 80 while doing it. The top 20 or 25 are the only competitive ones but seeing the same guys every week just makes it repetitive, non-sensicle boredom. I thought this tour was supposed to be a competitive sporting event, not the snorefest it has become. This isn't much better than going to a local 50+ community and watching retired guys play a $2 skins game

Steve_FLA · October 3, 2006

That is bad news. I am 38 and a 7 handicap. I have dreams (yes, I know it's a pipe dream) to get my game down to a level where I could try and go through Q School for the Champions Tour when I turn 50. Not much incentive if I actually pulled off that miracle and was the top 30 out of Q School, then had to try and qualify for their tournaments every week. Is the PGA afraid that fans would not want to see 50 year old rookies play on the tour? I would think if the golf was good and competitive fans would like and maybe even relate to old guys follwing their dreams and finally making the tour.

Ohh well...it's nice to dream anyway.

-Steve

kurob · October 3, 2006

Is the PGA afraid that fans would not want to see 50 year old rookies play on the tour?

Yes, and they're probably right. There are bigger crowds to watch the names shoot big numbers than to watch unknowns that are in the mix at the Champions event here.

Mikolar · October 3, 2006

First of all, the Champions Tour is not about competition as much as it is, retirement.

When the television contract change occurred 5 years ago, the amount of dollars on the regular tour increased substantially. In fact with this increase, the salaries of caddies (earning 10% of their players earnings) became comparable to the top 10 leading money winners on the tour from just a few years before.

The tour also began a deferred compensation program for players so that when today's crop of regular players retired, they would have money deferred tax free to fall back on -- in fact, a great deal of money.

But, that raised the question of how to treat so many of the older players who had played golf for a pittance of today's purses and had little retirement savings to fall back on. The idea of the Champions Tour was born as a replacement for what was then, the Senior Tour.

The name was changed to the Champions Tour. At the time, the tour said the name reflected an effort to improve the marketing of the tour and the competition. In reality, the change was the first to reflect the qualification for the tour of exempting players who were on the PGA tour in years past, but were considered "winners" by a somewhat cloudy formula. Today's better senior players from around the country (but not previous professional tour players) would not be part of that group based on the reasoning of the policy board that these players had done little to make the tour what it is today.

The Champions Tour would offer professional tour players from years past an opportunity to collect dollars well into their retirement years, regardless of their ability to 'play'. Simply show up -- there's not cut and everyone will get a check in today's Champions Tour fields.

Two others things I would argue...

If you play one of the courses that are due to host a Champions Tour event in the next week or so, see what you think the bounces/distances you get on fairways that have not been watered in a week. Greens will be well watered so that your ball will bite as well.

And every once in a while, watch the average Champions tour event. You will see that despite the 'names', the event draws virtually no 'paid' gallery or crowds. In fact, if you watched this past weekend's event won by Andy Bean, the announcers seemed almost surprised that there were galleries at all. They're not used to seeing many folks.

Dollars for the events come primarily from corporate sponsorships (mostly local) and one would hope that those companies start looking at their small tournament ROI as they would any advertising effort.

I guess my point is that things happen for a reason and todays older players probably deserve some of the money being thrown at today's modern tour. However, I'm not going to confuse too many of those players with the best senior players in the country today.