Last Sunday was the annual promotion-demotion day on the PGA Tour. Professional golf is the ultimate sports meritocracy wherein you are rewarded with exempt status on the tour for a well-played season and find yourself demoted to golf”s minor leagues for failing to reach that magic number of the top 125 in earnings.
The PGA tour concluded its portion of the Fall Finish with the big boys competing at Disney World. Without a doubt the biggest winner of all for a variety of reasons was Davis Love III. The former PGA champion who is now on the downside of his career needed a strong finish in Orlando to stay exempt for 2009. He was one of the bubble boys, and not only did his one-stroke victory get him inside the top 125, but it also earned him a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour as a tourney winner. More importantly, the one-year exemption for the top 125 and the two-year exemption for the win pale in comparison to the lifetime exemption Love received for his win last Sunday.
The PGA Tour has a clause that gives a lifetime exemption to anyone who has 20 wins on tour during his career. Love”s win at Disney was the 20th of a career that began in 1985. Keep in mind, Love was the University of North Carolina student-athlete who turned Michael Jordan on to golf, so the guy has been around for a long time. With his victory, he joins Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh as the only active 20-plus win members of the tour. Still some five years from the Senior Tour, Love won”t have to endure the worry about his exempt status any more.
Tommy “Two Gloves” Gainey came in second to Love and jumped from 228th to 148th on the money list. By finishing in the top 150, he can get into some of those PGA tour events that play opposite the majors and the World Golf championships, but he”ll still need to return to Q School if he wants to be fully exempt for 2009. Gainey, who is best known for his success on the Golf Channel”s Big Break, had a rough rookie season. He missed the cut in 18 of the 24 tournaments he entered, and until his runner-up finish at Disney World, his best tournament prior to that was a tie for 39th at Puerto Rico.
Patrick Sheehan, who was exactly on the bubble three weeks ago, lost his exempt status and will also return to Q School. Over the last three weeks on tour he has had a 34th, a missed cut, and a 52nd. He finished 128th on the money list with earnings of $805,897. Other names of note who lost their tour cards for 2009 include Bob Tway at 132nd, Mark Calcavecchia at 133rd, Jason Gore at 134th, Rich Beem at 140th, and Jasper Parnevik at 142nd.
Of course, for everyone who loses a tour card, there is also a winner to fill that void. As the bubble boys were desperately fighting it out at Disney World, the cream of the crop on the minor league Nationwide Tour was at the TPC Craig Ranch in Texas. The season-long race for a PGA Tour card concluded last Sunday with the top 25 money winners advancing to the big show for 2009.
The top money winner on the Nationwide Tour this year was 33-year-old Matt Bettencourt. Bettencourt is very familiar to local Northern California amateur golfers including Juan Lopez, John Seed, Billy Witt and this columnist because of his stop-and-start amateur career on the NCGA amateur circuit. Bettencourt attended Modesto College and played on the golf team in 1993 and 1994, just a few years before Kelseyville High School golfers Aaron Speed and Shawn Auten attended the Central Valley school.
Bettencourt turned pro for the first time in 1994, struggled on the mini-tours, left the pro ranks and became a reinstated amateur. He was the NCGA player of the year in 2001 and 2002. He rejoined the play-for-pay ranks and has basically floundered until this past July. Playing on the Nationwide Tour with conditional status, Bettencourt missed 11 cuts during the first half of the 2008 season. Since mid-summer, he”s had seven top-10 finishes, a pair of wins, $447,863 in earnings, and was the leading money winner on the Nationwide Tour. Yes, he”s come a long way since being paired with John Berry and Charles Creecy in the San Joaquin County Amateur.
Spencer Levin is another Northern California golfer who earned his tour card via his 22nd-place ranking on the Nationwide Tour. He attended Elk Grove High School outside Sacramento and played in his high school section finals as a pitcher on the baseball team. He was also quite a junior golfer. His dad, Don Levin, was an All-American golfer at San Jose State and played on the PGA Tour in the early 1980s.
Levin won the California Amateur in 2004 and was the NCGA player of the year that same season. He qualified for the ”04 United States Open at Shinnecock and got a lot of television air time when he made a hole-in-one, finished 13th, and was low amateur. He won twice on the Canadian Tour in 2007. The 24-year-old has the potential to make an impact on the PGA Tour and his ranking on the Nationwide Tour bodes well for him.
The 25th and final Nationwide Tour golfer to earn a promotion is Ricky Barnes of Stockton. He beat Hunter Mahan in the finals of the 2002 United States Amateur. In 2003, he was the co-winner of the Ben Hogan Award along with Mahan, signifying the top college golfer of the year. He was the low amateur at the 2003 Masters.
After five years in golf”s minor leagues, the 27-year-old Barnes finally qualified for the PGA Tour. His 25th-place finish was the result of him winning $218,902 and he made it by the thinnest of margins or $3,500 to be more exact. A bad future omen for Barnes is the fact that he ranked 99th in putting this year on the Nationwide Tour. That figure must improve if he is going to survive his 2009 season and keep his PGA Tour card for future years.
The way golf works, for every winner such as Bettnecourt, Levin and Barnes, there is a loser such as Sheehan and Gainey. It”s the world of professional golf, where performance is all that counts.
