Once upon a time I was a marginally decent golfer. On occasion I could post an under-par score although more often than not I was a mid-70s golfer. I parlayed my limited golf skills into a 20-year experience of entering tournaments throughout the country and overseas. Without recreating some kind of amateur golf and mini-tour resume, I did cross paths with some pretty unique characters, some who ended up making it and others who probably had less talent than I did and yet were trying to make a career out of professional golf.
I believe it was in 1990 when I was playing in the Sonoma Open on the Golden State Tour. It was a weekday tournament that started out with 128 golfers. After two days there was a cut for the low 60 and ties. The third round was the final day of play on a Thursday morning in August at the Sonoma National Golf Club.
I made the cut on the button and ended up teeing off in the first twosome of that final round with a Taiwanese golfer named Lu. He didn’t speak much English and we communicated our hole-by-hole scores by using fingers. A very young Shawn Auten was my caddie. As we were walking up the final fairway, we looked across at the first tee and observed the three leaders teeing off. I had made the cut at 4-over-par and was way behind the leaders who stood at 12-under-par after 36 holes. As we watched the leaders walk down the first fairway with a gallery of about 300 spectators, Auten asked me if I thought any of the members of that final pairing would make it someday on the PGA Tour. Knowing all three golfers in the group from amateur and mini-tour events, I shook my head and told Shawn that the jump from the Golden State Tour to the PGA Tour was extreme. I didn’t think any of them could improve enough to get to the ultimate level of competitive golf. They were good but they weren’t great.
Some 27 years later, I am ready to acknowledge that I was dead wrong when it came to my assessment. The first golfer was Esteban Toledo, a then 28-year-old who was a mini-tour regular. He would spend very little time on the PGA Tour, spent a number of years on what is now called the Web.com Tour, and won the Lake Erie Classic in 2005. However, his senior tour experience proved to truly be a mulligan for Esteban as he won a pair of Champions Tour events in 2013 and added others in 2015 and 2016. Toledo was the most surprising success story of the Sonoma Open threesome in that he was shooting a lot of high scores on the Golden State Tour. In his case, resilience proved to be his key along with lots of practice.
The second golfer in the pairing was a Napa-area golfer who played very well as a junior golfer and then earned a golf scholarship to UCLA. However, upon graduation he spent the next four years in the business world working alongside his father and competing in major amateur tournaments. Ultimately, Scott McCarron decided to turn pro and had some degree of success on the big tour in the 1990s, winning twice in Atlanta and once in New Orleans. The Champions Tour has also been very good to him with six total senior wins during the past two years. McCarron has four wins this year, including the 2017 Senior Players Championship, one of the five major tourneys on the Champions Tour. For most of this season, McCarron was the second-best golfer among the senior set, just behind the forever ageless Bernhard Langer.
The third golfer in the Golden State Tour final group was Kevin Sutherland. Sutherland was a Sacramento kid who went to Christian Brothers High School. He was a walk-on at Fresno State, got himself a place in the lineup, and ended up being a two-time All-American. He turned pro in 1987 and yet he didn’t find immediate success among the play-for-pay guys. By the time he was in the lead pairing at Sonoma, he was a floundering 26-year-old. His younger brother, David, was having more success, winning the prestigious Western Amateur in 1989, the NorCal Open in 1990, and would earn his way onto the PGA Tour through the Q School process in 1991.
Kevin Sutherland got through Q School in the autumn of 1991 and was a rookie on the PGA Tour in 1992 as a 27-year-old. He had middle-of-the-pack success and was consistently exempt on the PGA Tour as a top-125 player, but he wasn’t a factor atop leader boards. He did earn slightly more than $15 million on tour, played in 447 regular tour events, and had 48 top-10 finishes. In 2002 he won his lone tour event, capturing the World Golf Match Play in 2002. In case you’re wondering who Sutherland beat in the finals that year it was none other than Scott McCarron. His best season might have been in 2008 when he lost in two playoffs and finished in the top 10 on six occasions. However, it was neck and back injuries that started to hamper Kevin and he closed out his PGA Tour career in 2011.
Sutherland turned 50 years old in July of 2014 and one month later a national television audience followed his every shot during the Saturday round of the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open. He tapped in a short putt on the final hole to shoot a 13-under-par 59, the first sub-60 round on the Champions Tour. The senior circuit was a great second mulligan for Sutherland as well, and for the past three seasons he has been a top-10 performer on his tour. Yet if there was one knock on Sutherland it was that he still only had that one 2002 World Match Play win on his professional golfing resume.
All that changed last Sunday at Phoenix Country Club where the senior set was playing its final event of the year, the Charles Schwab Championship. It also was the concluding week of the yearlong race for the Schwab Cup and its $1 million bonus. Sutherland, who started the week in fifth place, shot 15-under-par to hold off Vijay Singh and Brandt Jobe by one shot and David Toms and David Frost by two strokes. Sutherland not only won his first Champions Tour event, but he garnered enough points in the end to win the Schwab Cup and its seven-figure bonus, beating out Langer and McCarron. Most notable was that he prevented the seemingly ageless Langer from winning his fourth straight Schwab Cup.
I’ve known Kevin Sutherland for close to 40 years, from the time he was a junior golfer playing in the Roseville City Amateur at Diamond Oaks, to the Sonoma Open, to the heights of a World Golf Championship victory, to the depths of leaving the tour because of injuries, and now to senior tour success. It doesn’t always work out that way, but sometimes good things happen to good people. Sacramento’s Kevin Sutherland is the Schwab Cup’s yearlong titlist for 2017.
