They held a one-day tournament at Cache Creek Resort”s Yoche De He Golf Course on Monday. Ryan Johnson of St. Helena was one of the golfers in the field. He”s the 16-year-old high school golfer who shot a 64 during a Coastal Mountain Conference match last spring at Adams Springs Golf Course. Jonathan Carlson also was in the field. An all-conference golfer from Kelseyville High School”s class of 1999, Carlson played college golf at Point Loma University, won four consecutive Lake County Amateur titles, and has played in the U.S. Amateur at Pinehurst as well as two U.S. Mid-Amateur Championships.
Also in the field was Doug Quinones, an all-conference linkster at Middletown High School and a 2008 graduate. He played collegiate golf at Kansas University and, like Carlson, has competed on the mini-tours in California as well as on the Dakotas Tour. Just to add a touch more to the local flavor, Jack Lucich of Clearlake was there serving as a rules official. Lucich has officiated on the collegiate, national amateur and professional level but is best known among North Coast Section junior golfers as the guru of all things to do with golf”s rules.
Yet Monday”s tournament at Yocha De He was not some local event for top-notch golfers who went to high school along the Highway 29 corridor. Instead, Monday”s tournament was as big as it gets for Carlson and Quinones and was, without a doubt, the biggest event that the teenaged Johnson has ever played in. The low four scores on Monday got to advance to the opening tournament on the PGA Tour, namely the Frys Open contested this weekend at the Silverado Golf Club and Resort in Napa. All they had to do was beat out 92 other golfers.
The 2014-15 PGA Tour season kicks off this week at Silverado. As of this past Monday, there were 140 golfers entered into the field. They included defending champ Jimmy Walker, just off a rock-solid performance in the Ryder Cup. While there is no Tiger and no Phil at Silverado, the field does include 60 past winners of PGA Tour events and seven major champions, including Vijay Singh, Justin Leonard and Davis Love III alongside such PGA Tour heavy hitters as Hunter Mahan, Lee Westwood, Matt Kuchar and Brandt Snedeker. Monday”s event would completely fill the field with 144 golfers. Each and every week four golfers qualify into a tour event.
Johnson, Quinones and Carlson had a big task at hand. They would need to go super low, shoot way under par, and perhaps survive a nail-biting playoff to get into the field at Silverado where they can tee it up alongside past Masters champs such as Mike Weir and Trevor Immelman. However, the field at the Yocha De He qualifier included an impressive array of name-recognition golfers who are, at least for the 2014-15 season, non-exempt.
Ted Purdy was in the field. He has a win at the Byron Nelson on his golfing resume. Yet nowadays his only professional fallback is the LatinoAmerica Tour where he is a past champion. He won at Albierto last summer. David Gossett is another past champion who was at Yocha De He. He won the Quad Cities and, as a collegian, the U.S. Amateur. Cameron Beckman has a total of three PGA Tour victories and he was the winner of the Frys in 2008.
Scott McCarron also was in the field. A Sacramento kid who was an All-American at UCLA, McCarron has three tour titles to his credit as well as top-10 finishes at the Masters, the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship. I could go on and on with split-second resumes of some of the golfers in the field. They included former Masters runner-up Len Mattiace, who lost the green jacket in a playoff to Mike Weir and a multitude of former exempt players on the PGA Tour including Jason Alred, Jamie Lovemark, Todd Fischer, Jeff Gove, Greg Chalmers, Luke List, Mathew Goggin, two-time winner Michael Springer, John Malinger, Jarrod Lyle, Rod Pampling, Bubba Dickerson, Frank Lickliter, Bill Lunde and Tommy “Two Gloves” Gainey.
So think about it. You”re a multi-millionaire playing under the red-hot glare of millions of television viewers, winning tour events with $1.2 million first-place checks and suddenly five years later you are in the very remote casino town of Brooks, trying like crazy to shoot a 65 or a 66 and beat out 96 other top-notch golfers so that you can play at Silverado. Of course, if you could consistently shoot 65 or 66, you”d still be on the PGA Tour as an exempt member.
When the dust finally settled, Johnson, Carlson and Quinones did not advance. Quinones shot a 4-under-par 68 at a tough course set up at 7,400 yards, and yet it wasn”t good enough. Locally, Windsor head professional Jason Schmuhl also did not advance, nor did Steven Strong of Santa Rosa. For that matter, Gossett, Gainey, Purdy, Malinger and Springer didn”t advance to Silverado either.
A total of eight golfers tied at the top with rounds of 66. After a two-hole playoff, Lovemark, Fischer, Chalmers and John Catlin were still on the outside looking in. The four qualifiers who advance to Silverado include Eric Axley, Mathew Goggin, Jarrod Lyle and T.J. Vogel. Now all they have to do is play well at Silverado, make the cut, make a paycheck, and afterward rush off to Vegas for the next Monday qualifier. Think about it. A score of 66 and you don”t get in the field for the Frys. You slam your trunk, start for Las Vegas and start all over again next week. And this goes on and one until you finally gain exempt status by finishing among the top 125 money winners. Or this goes on and on until you”re dead broke and you have to start giving lessons to bogey golfers back home. Or this goes on and on until you really start to miss your wife and the two kids at home, all of whom wonder why everyone else”s dad is at their soccer games. Or, to be quite honest, you go stark raving mad.
Last Tuesday, Jason Schmuhl was back at the Windsor Pro Shop. Ryan Johnson was back in class at St. Helena High School, perhaps thinking of upcoming trips to some pretty cool universities. Jack Lucich was at Adams Springs, telling the boys about all the great players he saw the day before, all the great players who won”t be cashing a paycheck this week.
In the end, golf is that great meritocracy of the sports world. What have you done for me lately? In the case of a 16-year-old from St. Helena, hope springs eternal. In the case of a former U.S. Amateur champ from Austin, Texas, it”s another long, lonely ride to the next stop.
