Golf is the ultimate merit sport on its professional levels. It’s all about “what have you done for me lately?” While top-notch golfers such as Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy earn five-year exemptions on tour because of their major wins, most of their peer group lives from year to year. Because golf offers no such thing as guaranteed contracts, signing bonuses and the like, a top-five golfer is just an injury away from ending his/her career as in the case of Jerry Pate. It could be he or she simply loses the totality of their game as happened to Ian Baker-Finch.
The top 125 golfers on the PGA Tour’s points list qualify for another year on the world’s richest circuit. The courtesy cars are a nice perk, the free buffets are top notch, and you play the world’s greatest courses in places such as Hawaii, San Diego, Pebble Beach and Florida. Every year, the first goal of a circuit regular is to play well enough to stay on tour for the following year. The mini-tours offer a much more rugged lifestyle with less money on the table.
Zac Blair is the first of this year’s outsiders, having finished in 126th place on the PGA Tour’s Fed Ex Cup points list. He earned a very substantial $880,000, but it just wasn’t good enough to keep up with the rest of his tour brethren. However, Blair and 149 others still have a final, final chance to secure the last 25 PGA Tour cards that are available for the 2017-2018 season. Beginning this weekend in Columbus, Ohio, and extending for three more weeks to Boise, Idaho, Beachwood, Ohio, and Atlantic Beach, Florida, the Web.com Tour has its Qualifier for next year’s PGA Tour. The top 25 money winners from this four-tournament series will earn their way back to the big show.
Those pros who were ranked 126th through 200th on the PGA Tour combined with the top 75 from this year’s Web.com Tour have a chance to get back to the money, the competition and the exposure. One of those professionals who will have that final, final chance is Rob Oppenheim. Oppenheim has been on the wrong side of the seaso-long cut line for the past three years. In 2015 he finished 126th on the PGA Tour money list. Last year Oppenheim finished 26thon the Web.com Tour money list. This year he took a minor step backward, coming in 27th on the final Web.com ranking. A collegiate golfer at Rollins College at the turn of the millennium, Oppenheim is 37 years old with $706,117 in winnings in 28 PGA Tour events during the course of a couple of years. He has $869,417 in his bank account from the Web.com Tour although he had to play in 165 tournaments to get to that number. If these next four weeks don’t work out for Oppenheim, at least he has a home on the Web.com Tour for 2018.
On a positive note, Brice Garnett and 24 of his fellow competitors did find a place on next season’s PGA Tour following the conclusion of play last Sunday in Portland at the Winco Foods Portland Open. Garnett had a great weekend as he shot 71-67-63-65 for an 18-under-par total, a $144,000 paycheck, and the No. 1 ranking on golf’s top mini-tour. Brice had total earnings this year of $368,761 as well as a victory in the Utah Championship and four top-10 finishes.
Garnett returns to the PGA Tour, a place where he spent four seasons while playing in 75 tournaments and earning just more than $1.7 million with four top-10 finishes. Maybe Garnett’s game has steadied to the point where he can stay inside the top 125 next year.
Of the 25 Web.com Tour graduates, a total of 18 of them will be PGA Tour rookies next season. That is an especially large percentage when you consider that historically the majority of Web.com grads are returning veterans looking for a second, third, or perhaps fourth chance.
Some of the names on this year’s Top 25 listing jump out at you. Beau Hossler was the star of the 2015-16 University of Texas team and won the Haskins Award as the top collegiate golfer in 2016. Aaron Wise was one of the stars of the 2016 Oregon team coached by Casey Martin that won the NCAA title that year. Nate Lashley played for Arizona in 2015, spent the 2016 season as the top golfer on the PGA Tour LatinoAmerica, and got some great experience this year, finishing 11th on the Web.com money list.
On the other end of the experience scale is PGA Tour veteran Ted Potter Jr. Potter was a top junior golfer in Florida, decided to turn pro as a teenager instead of playing on the collegiate level, and found himself as a 19-year-old competing on the Moonlight Tour in Orlando. The following year he finished 74th at the final stage of Q School and found himself on the Nationwide Tour as a 20-year-old. It was too much too soon as Ted missed every cut that year.
Potter Jr. bounced back and forth between the Nationwide Tour and the Hooters Tour. He was the Hooter player of the year in 2006 and 2009 while in between he faltered on the Nationwide Tour in 2007 and 2008. He had a breakthrough win in 2011 at the South Georgia Classic, won again that September at the Sobota Golf Classic, and graduated to the PGA Tour where he took another great leap forward and won the 2012 Greenbrier Classic during his rookie summer, winning a three-hole playoff over Troy Kelly with a birdie. To get into that playoff, Potter Jr. had to birdie the final four holes that Sunday afternoon.
It all came to a screeching halt two years later when Potter Jr. broke his ankle. He wouldn’t play for two full years and even then he wasn’t ready. He returned to the Web.com Tour where he finished 58th last year and came in 14th this time around. It’s all about a second chance for the only past PGA Tour champion to be part of this year’s top 25 graduating class.
Finally, two of this year’s graduating golfers initially competed on the PGA China Tour in 2016 and parlayed their success into an exempt year on the Web.com in 2017. Zecheng Dou finished 16th and his fellow countryman, Xinjun Zhang, came in 20th on the season-long money list. Both are age 20. Dou has a win this year. While the Chinese government has had a recent crackdown on Western values such as playing golf, obviously Dou and Chang got their junior golf and mini-tour competitive experiences before the recent Communist Party action.
There are just four weeks of tournaments for those final 25 professionals to secure PGA Tour cards for 2017-18. With all the big money you can make on tour just by staying in the top 125, the pressure to survive might be just as great as major championship golf is for them.
