The recent storm that battered our neck of the woods this week was simply an early indicator that the golfing season has just a handful of weeks left before we start dealing with persistent rain, unplayable course conditions and early morning frost delays.
For all intents and purposes, the PGA Tour has concluded its calendar year with the completion of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and last week”s American team victory in the biennial President”s Cup at San Francisco”s Harding Park. As long as the four major championships are still around, the Fed Ex Cup will never be golf”s version of the Super Bowl or the World Series. Nonetheless, it does have some very positive points as it relates to its placement on the PGA Tour schedule.
In the past, a number of big-name professionals would close down their competitive season once golf”s final major, the PGA Championship, concluded in mid-August. Regardless of the millions at stake, high-profile golfers such as Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson even went so far as to kiss off the 30-man field at the season-ending Tour Championship. Nowadays the big guns stay around through September and compete. The added caveat is that the three hottest golfers during the Fed Ex Cup series, namely Woods, Mickelson and Steve Stricker, were nothing short of dynamic during the Presidents Cup with a combined record of 13-1-1. The Fed Ex Cup has lengthened the golf season for the big boys and for the fans of golf as well.
Of course, for some 70 or more seasoned golf professionals, there”s still another month of job auditions in their personal quest to maintain a PGA Tour card for the 2010 season. We”re talking about former major champions and we”re talking about relative unknowns. What we”re talking about more than anything else is money and prestige. The leading money winner on the Nationwide Tour plays in Boise and in Hayward and makes less than half of the amount of the 125th-leading money winner on the PGA Tour. On top of that, the PGA Tour also-ran is teeing it up every week at Pebble Beach, Riviera and other courses of note.
This weekend the PGA Tour”s Fall Series is in Las Vegas for the playing of the $4.2 million Justin Timberlake Shriner”s Hospital tourney. Next week the show moves to Scottsdale for the $5 million Frys.com Open. The following week the tour returns to Madison, Mississippi, an event on the PGA calendar since 1968, for the $3.6 million Viking Classic. The season concludes in mid-November in Orlando at Disney World. That tournament has a $4.7 million purse.
Last year we followed Patrick Sheehan, who was 125th on the money list with four weeks to go. Sheehan made three out of the last four cuts but didn”t have any high finishes and fell out of his exempt status. This year he plays part-time on the Nationwide Tour and gets into whatever PGA Tour events he can. He”s in 38th place on the Nationwide Tour, won the Athens Regional in April with its $99,000 first-place prize, has made seven of 11 cuts, and has banked more than $137,000. In 14 B-level tournaments on the PGA Tour, Sheehan has made nine cuts, earned more than $250,000, and is in 16th place on the money list with two top-25 finishes. Yes, life on the PGA Tour is better bang for the buck.
Currently one spot out of 125th place is 34-year-old Bill Lunde of San Diego. Lunde is one of those guys who has the background to be a successful touring pro. He grew up playing golf with Charley Hoffman under the mutual direction of his grandfather. He played collegiate golf at UNLV and was one of their big guns on their 1998 NCAA championship team alongside Chad Campbell. He”s gotten his beak wet on the Butch Harmon, Gateway and Hooters tours. His game travels well as evidenced by his second-place finish in the 2005 New Zealand PGA Championship. Lunde kept getting progressively better over the last few years on the Nationwide Tour. Last year he finished fifth on its money list, won the tournament in Columbus, and earned a promotion to the PGA Tour for 2009.
When the season began, Lunde showed he was ready for the big stage. He came in 14th at the Bob Hope and finished sixth at Pebble Beach. Sad to say, but the West Coast swing didn”t last long enough for Lunde”s sake. He has made $579,461 thus far but he has missed a disproportionate amount of cuts lately and now has made 13 of 25 for the year. While the big boys were in Scotland and Akron, Lunde was missing the cut in Milwaukee and Akron. Two weeks ago he missed the cut at Turning Stone. Lunde needs to start making cuts and win about $80,000 in the next month to safely secure his tour card for 2010.
Of course, Lunde is not alone. If you flash back to the leaderboard at the United States Open in June, the names of David Duval and Ricky Barnes were a big part of the weekend excitement at Bethpage Black. Since then it”s all been downhill. Both men made $560,000 during Open week for their tie for second. Yet that was the high-water mark. At this moment, Duval is in 119th place and has made just six of 19 cuts. Barnes is in 117th place after surviving nine of 20 cuts. Barnes accumulated 86 percent of his winnings this year at the Open. One wonders how you can excel on the toughest course setup of the year and miss cuts at Reno and Turning Stone?
The answer, of course, is that it”s a tough and strange game. After all, what happened to recent major champion winners such as Rich Beem and Todd Hamilton? They won majors by beating Tiger Wood sand Ernie Els, respectively. Now they”re in the same boat as Lunde and Barnes. Professional golf is sports” ultimate meritocracy and over the next four weeks it will be the last chance for a number of gifted performers to prove that they will get back for another year on the PGA Tour. If they want to find a way to get to Pebble Beach and Riviera next year, they need to come through in Madison, Mississippi, and Scottsdale.
