I still get reminded about a crass remark I made following a round of golf about 13 years ago. I”m not sure if it was due to the brilliance of the comment I made or because I put a damper on the occasion, but when I played in the Lake County Open Golf Championship last month, others mentioned the comment and brought up the subject once again.
On that day in May of 1998, one of the county”s better golfers, an amateur with a single-digit handicap, was expounding upon his five-year master plan of golfing greatness. We were sitting around the Triple Bogey Saloon following the competition of a tournament round, and the golfer in question stated that he was going to fully dedicate the next five years to his golf game. He was approximately 45 years of age at that time and his contention was that by the time he turned 50 years old, he would be ready to be an impact player on the PGA Senor Tour.
A lot of the other golfers were very positive that day. They agreed that a 2-handicapper could dedicate the next 60 months to working on his golf game, gain tournament readiness, enhance his skill level, and turn himself into a professional golfer on the over-50 senior circuit.
I simply sat, listened and watched. Out of the corner of my eye, I was keeping up with the final round of the golf on the television, namely the Colonial Invitational. The Colonial is a longtime tour event that was first played in 1946 and was won by Ben Hogan a record five times. As the tourney came to its conclusion, 48-year-old Tom Watson was sealing the deal on a two-stroke victory over Jim Furyk.
As Watson was reaching the final green to a thunderous ovation, I made the following comment to the 2-handicapper with the five-year plan. I told the assembled group that our friend with the plan for golfing greatness had absolutely zero chance, regardless of how hard he worked and how much he improved. I pointed to the television screen and commented that if he couldn”t beat Tom Watson on that very day, then there was no way he was going to be able to tee it up with Watson and the others five years down the line.
True, the PGA Senior Tour has a history of new faces playing some pretty great golf, but while there are merely a handful of those types, they”re also club professionals with some pretty special golfing resumes. A good case in point was Jim Albus, who won a senior major and five other events even though he was never an exempt PGA Tour golfer in his formative years. Instead he was a head pro and raised a family. He also dabbled in professional golf, winning the Metropolitan Open twice and finding time to qualify for the United States Open on six different occasions and getting into the field at the PGA Championship seven times. Albus had real game and once his kids grew up, he took to the senior circuit. He wasn”t some amateur who won a club championship or two and then decided to work on his game at age 45.
Yet the dream to make it on tour continues to this very day, even though the thinking is nothing short of flawed. We”ve had two recent examples of that on the Nationwide Tour.
Jerry Rice is arguably the greatest wide receiver in the history of the NFL. A member of the Hall of Fame, Rice played in the Pepsi Quarterback Shootout some seven years ago at Buckingham, and at that time he sported a 3-handicap. Watching him back then, I wasn”t sure that he could play to that 3-handicap, but he was a pretty good amateur golfer. Nonetheless, Rice fancies a second career as a professional golfer. He is even the sponsoring host of the Nationwide Tour event that is held at Stonebrae Country Club in the East Bay Hills above Hayward.
In 2010, Rice received a sponsor”s exemption and got into the field at Stonebrae. Usually sponsor”s exemptions go to non-exempt name professionals such as John Daly in the hope of adding interest to the tourney, with the end result being the sale of more tickets. I believe that was the reasoning behind exemptions given to Annika Sorenstam at the Colonial, Michelle Wie at the Hawaiian Open, and 16-year-old Tiger Woods at the Los Angeles Open. However, with galleries at less than 5,000, I”m not sure about a spike in ticket sales at a minor league golfing event such as the one at Stonebrae.
Rice shot rounds of 83 and 79 for a 162 total at Stonebrae last year for an 18-over-par aggregate. He missed the cut by a bundle. This year went even worse as Rice open first-round play with a 92 and then was disqualified in the second round because his novice caddie used a GPS device to determine distances, contrary to PGA Tour and Nationwide Tour rules.
Not to be outdone, Atlanta Braves pitching great John Smoltz has many of the same aspirations as Jerry Rice. A sure-fire Hall of Famer with 3,000-plus strikeouts, 213 wins and 154 saves, the eight-time All-Star and 1996 Cy Young Award winner teed it up in mid-April at the South Georgia Classic, also a Nationwide Tour event. Like Rice, Smoltz received a sponsor”s exemption. Smoltz shot 84 and 87 for a 171 total and missed the cut by mere light years.
Aside form the fact that Rice and Smoltz should probably be trying to win tournaments such as the Oakland City Amateur or the Valdosta Amateur, there”s a bigger issue here with celebrities playing in professional tournaments. Rice and Smoltz are taking away a spot from a young, up-and-coming pro who has conditional status on the Nationwide Tour and would be in the field if a sponsor”s exemption weren”t given away to a former wide receiver or a former pitcher. Rice and Smoltz are way out of their league, as evidenced by their scores. Yet there”s a former college All-American who didn”t play at Stonebrae or South Georgia who could have used the experience as well as the chance to make some money. As of now, the Toledo Mud Hens aren”t going to let Phil Mickelson pitch AAA minor league baseball. Until Rice and Smoltz can hang in there with Phil Mickelson, they shouldn”t be playing AAA minor league golf.
