Tag: PGA Tour Champions

Stephen Ames rides two final-round eagles to Mitsubishi Electric Classic title

Ames eagled the par-5 sixth and par-4 13th at TPC Sugarloaf on Sunday.

Two of the seven events so far in 2024 have been won by a Steve: Steven Alker at the season opening Mitsubishi Electric Championship in Hawaii in January and Stephen Ames, who won the Chubb Classic in February.

Now, make it a third.

This follows a 2023 in which 13 of the 28 events were won by some form of a Steve, including Alker, Ames, Steve Stricker and Steve Flesch.

This week at the 2024 Mitsubishi Electric Classic at TPC Sugarloaf in Duluth, Georgia, it was Ames riding the strenth of two eagles in the final round to win by four shots over Paul Broadhurst and Doug Barron.

On the sixth hole Sunday, which is his 60th birthday, Ames grabbed a share of the lead after holing out for his first eagle of the day.

Ames took a three-shot lead on 13 when he carded his second eagle of the day after driving the green on the 310-yard par 4 to get to 14 under. From there, he had two birdies and two bogeys to close with a 67 to claim his eighth win but more impressively his sixth in his last 29 starts on the tour.

“Two reasons to celebrate tonight,” Ames said, noting the win on his birthday, which is also his third in this event. “The first day wasn’t that bad, I hit two bad shots, made two doubles. It was like, you know what, it felt good, I didn’t really kick myself down at all. Then I came out the next day and I was like it was a little calm unlike today and I just played golf and didn’t make any mistakes and I made eight birdies. So that just kind of vaulted me straight back up the board there. I was like, hey, now I give myself an opportunity and I took the opportunity in hand, which was nice.”

K.J. Choi and Steven Alker tied for fifth at 9 under.

Chip shots

Broadhurst, who led by a shot after 36 holes, was seeking to be the first to win back-to-back tournaments on the PGA Tour Champions since Steve Stricker won consecutive majors in May of 2023 and also the first to win back-to-back weeks on the Champions tour when Bernhard Langer did it in 2017.

Langer, out since February after tearing his Achilles playing pickleball, has announced his return to the Champions tour will come next week at the Insperity Invitational near Houston.

Jay Haas, 70, beat his age by three shots with a 5-under 67 in the second round. It’s the fourth time he’s shot his age or better during the 2024 season.

John Daly, not in the field this week, turned 58 on Sunday.

Bernhard Langer, just 3 months after Achilles tear, plans to return to PGA Tour Champions

The legend of Langer grows.

The legend of Bernhard Langer grows.

The 66-year-old PGA Tour Champions stalware tore his Achilles on Feb. 1 of this year. He had already announced plans to make the 2024 Masters his last trip down Magnolia Lane but later said he’d make the 2025 one his last, after his recovery. Langer made the cut at Augusta National Golf Club as recently as 2020.

Well, his recovery is coming right along, as Langer has announced he is planning to make his Champions Tour return May 3-5, right around the three-month mark of his injury.

In a video posted on X, Langer recounted how he got hurt.

In the video, Langer said the Achilles tear happened when he was playing pickleball. He went in for surgery the next day and has been wearing a walking boot for several weeks since then.

But if you thought that type of injury was going to be the end of his career, think again.

“I think I can still be productive for a few more years,” he said. “I still think I have a lot of good golf in me.”

The PGA Tour Champions’ Insperity Invitational is at The Woodlands Country Club in The Woodlands, Texas, outside Houston. Two of his record-setting 46 victories on the senior circuit came in the Insperity, in 2014 and 2018.

Annika Sorenstam, John Smoltz and others dish on the time they did (or didn’t) drill a fan in a golf tournament

Even the best players in the world are prone to an errant shot every once in awhile.

Last month at the Valspar Championship, rookie Chandler Phillips was in contention to win his first PGA Tour event when his 4-iron at the par-3 seventh hole during the final round headed well right of the green and into a gathering of spectators.

A husband and wife were sitting next to each other and the ball beaned the wife, bouncing off her head and then smashing into the noggin of her husband, a rare two-for-one special.

When Phillips arrived on the scene he noticed he’d gotten an incredible break, his ball kicking out of trouble from a likely bogey to an easy up-and-down for par. That’s when he first saw the ice pack being applied to the husband’s head. A few yards away to the right, Phillips’s caddie, Braden Smith, spied the injured fan’s wife spread out on the ground on her back with a towel drenched in blood compressed to her head.

“Oh, my gosh, that’s not good,” he recalled thinking, and began digging into the bag to get a golf glove for his boss to sign, the go-to way for a player to say, “I’m sorry I hit you.” (Phil Mickelson was known to sign $100 bills.) “I didn’t know what else to do,” Smith said.

Phillips took the bloody scene to heart.

“After that, I wasn’t right,” he said.

Following the round, where he finished a career-best third at a Tour event, he said to the woman who suffered the direct hit, “If she’s seeing this, I’m truly sorry. Obviously I’m not meaning to do that.”

But it happens all the time at professional events. These players are good but they also aren’t immune to the stray shot. At the 2010 Memorial, Tiger Woods hit three spectators in a single day. Just this week at the RBC Heritage, Sepp Straka bloodied a spectator on the first hole at Harbour Town Golf Links and struggled to put it out of mind even if it was out sight.

“That was tough,” he said after his round. “Hopefully I’ll be able to reach out to him this afternoon and see how he’s doing.”

Smoltz: Just a bit outside

John Smoltz could throw a baseball with pinpoint precision from 60 feet, 6 inches. On the few occasions that he hit a batter, he admitted it usually wasn’t by accident.

“I’ve been given instructions to do that,” Smoltz said.

But with a golf ball, it’s a different story.

“I feel terrible if that happens,” he said ahead of playing last week’s Invited Celebrity Classic in Dallas on the PGA Tour Champions. “Luckily, I think it’s only happened one time in my life. And it happened in my very first kind of celebrity golf with Ken Green, Mark Calcavecchia and Lee Trevino. I was actually having the round of my life and I hit somebody who was walking towards the green. I was trying to reach a par five and two, and it hit him and the ball didn’t go on the green so I was a little disappointed about that. But then I saw that it hit somebody and he was laying on the ground and he ended up being OK, but yeah, that’s not a feeling I would even want to have happen.”

Andrade and a cast

Billy Andrade, a competitor in the pro portion of the Invited Celebrity Classic, has struck a couple of fans during his more than three-decade career, including a young girl in the arm at a tournament in Washington D.C.

“She came back the next day with a cast on it and asked me to sign it,” Andrade recalled. “So, of course I signed it, and I gave her like everything I had in my bag. And yeah, it happens and when it does it never feels good.”

Annika and her assistant take one for the team

World Golf Hall of Fame member Annika Sorenstam is considered one of, if not the, best ball strikers of all time. But you’d guess she would have a foul ball or two that’s pelted a fan at some point along the way, right? But Sorenstam claims that she’s never drilled a spectator in all these years.

“Knock on wood, I hope it stays that way,” said Sorenstam, who played in the celebrity division of the Invited Celebrity Classic, too. “But I’ve played in events where somebody has, and it’s not a fun thing. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

In fact, Sorenstam was playing in the LPGA’s Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions event when there was a backup on the par-5 15th hole. “I really didn’t know what was happening and then somebody said that somebody got hit around the green area. And I’m like, ‘Oh, bummer.  I hope they’re OK.’”

After they teed off, Sorenstam found out who got hit: her assistant, Crystal Davis, of all people was the victim. She was out watching her boss with Sorenstam’s daughter, Ava, and she was hit in the leg by a celebrity golfer trying to protect Ava. She succeeded in part of her objective but when her leg swelled quickly, Davis fainted.

“The ball was coming her way, so she jumped in front of (Ava), which is, you know, a case for a raise,” Sorenstam said.

Or at least worthy of an autographed $100 bill.

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Annika Sorenstam (0-for-10) bidding to beat the celebs at Invited Celebrity Classic

“I don’t give up. I am determined one time to get these guys”

Annika Sorenstam has done it all in professional golf. She’s the GOAT, the winner of 72 LPGA Tour events but there is at least one accomplishment that has eluded her – winning her first celebrity golf title.

Sorenstam is winless in 10 previous attempts. She has come oh-so-close, finishing second three times, third three times, and never outside the top 10. Asked why she still is competing in events such as this week’s Invited Classic on the PGA Tour Champions as one of the contenders in the Celebrity Division, she said, “Because I don’t give up.”

Sorenstam gets her latest chance to win against the likes of Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz, at Las Colinas Country Club in Irving, Texas, from April 19-21.

“I am determined one time to get these guys,” she said. “That’s the main reason. But I also enjoy it. I have a lot of fun. As you know, I don’t play much nowadays, and this makes me practice a little bit, makes me still kind of stay within the game.

“I am competitive and I do enjoy playing and I’m still determined, so I’m going to keep trying.”

Sorenstam finished second to New York Mets infielder Jeff McNeil in January at the LPGA’s Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions. She has finished third the last two years at the Invited Celebrity Classic. Former tennis star Mardy Fish won in 2022 and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo is the defending champion.

“I’ve had a few chances, but I really haven’t been able to put either three rounds, good rounds together or four rounds together. I think that’s kind of been my, my thing nowadays,” she said. “I really feel welcome at these tournaments, and it’s fun and I want the guys to have to fight for something. I appreciate the invites every time.”

Lynch: Chris DiMarco picked a dumb time to make a dumb argument that even his senior buddies won’t like hearing

The flat-bellies might dismiss veterans with ‘get off my lawn’ memes, but theirs are important voices.

In the Oscar-winning Indian movie “RRR,” there’s a bleakly comedic scene in which a tyrannical politician berates an officer for training his gun on a woman from the lower orders, telling him that the cost of his ammunition exceeded the value of the life he intended to take with it. Adopting that ghoulish standard, one wonders why the overworked firing squads of social media even bothered taking aim at Chris DiMarco, who this week joined a lengthy list of professional golfers giving voice to unspeakably deluded notions.

“We’re kind of hoping that LIV buys the Champions Tour, to tell you the truth,” DiMarco said on a visit to the Subpar podcast, as he unfavorably compared prize money at the Players Championship with purses on the Toviaz tour. “Let’s play for a little real money out here. This is kind of a joke when we’re getting $2 million. There were like seven guys last week from TPC [Sawgrass] that made more money than our purses.”

He didn’t define the ‘we’ on whose behalf he claimed to speak, but DiMarco’s comments surely had his peers squirming in the Champions Tour locker room, itself a verdant pasture of conspiracy theories so kooky that even a Lyndon LaRouche-ite might think the crazy train had passed his stop.

It’s easy to cite DiMarco’s performances — a T-33 his best finish in 2024, and no better than a T-15 in 23 starts last season — and ask just how much value he thinks he adds to the Champions Tour, beyond being an amiable pro-am companion for a group of middle managers. Doing so would be a disservice to what was a respectable if fleeting career on the PGA Tour, and would overlook the actual point he was making. DiMarco didn’t say he personally deserves more from the cash spigot now watering every lawn in Jupiter, rather that the tour on which he competes does. But that’s an argument not even his most avaricious senior colleagues are making right now, with good reason.

Talk to most any player on the Champions Tour and you’ll find they are pissed at how the PGA Tour they helped build is being treated by the current generation as wholly their asset to remortgage, at how naked greed is trumping any sentiment about the greater good of the game. The flat-bellies might dismiss veterans with ‘get off my lawn’ memes and eye rolls, but theirs are important voices in any conversation about the Tour’s future. Which is why some experienced hands will find it frustrating that one of their own mounted a dumb argument—that senior purses aren’t adequately financed—and chose a dumb time to do it.

The new for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises, is going to reshape men’s professional golf. Along the way, every budget line in the Global Home will be subjected to close scrutiny and value assessments not rooted in sentimentality. That will include all the tours operating under the mothership’s umbrella. The degree to which the Champions Tour is subsidized by headquarters is often exaggerated. According to one source familiar with internal accounting, it’s no more than a few million dollars annually. That’s pennies for an organization now valued at $12 billion, but pennies are snatched back first in pursuit of dollars, and this is not the time to suggest that even bigger handouts might be in order.

There’s an understandable disconnect between what the Champions Tour is commercially and what many of its members imagine it to be competitively. Players see a cutthroat circuit where every buck is hard-earned, which is fair enough. But the business of the Champions Tour is essentially that of an elevated pro-am circuit, with 200-odd amateurs paying to play both Wednesdays and Thursdays, with another 100-ish on Mondays, if there’s demand. Television viewership is meager, worryingly so since a decent percentage of those watching could be in danger of expiring during the broadcast window. The value of the Champions Tour lies in being an on-site entertainment platform that can support itself (albeit in orthopedic shoes), not as a product with a monetizable audience of scale and global growth potential.

That might change after December 30, 2025, when Tiger Woods turns 50 years old and becomes eligible to join the circuit. If he can’t or won’t play, then the Champions Tour will never have been less relevant. If he does compete, even sparingly, Woods could boost the Tour’s value well beyond pro-am receipts. But until such times manifest, those who play out there are paid sufficiently within the parameters of what their tour is.

The ‘git me some’ attitude in DiMarco’s comments — which goes in tandem with dismissing fans as an afterthought — is easily derided, but a 55-year-old struggling pro with loose lips, 20-plus years removed from his last win, is a conveniently soft target. If folks want to take aim at professional golfers who express entitlement to greater rewards while adding little to the product or fan experience, there are plenty of Chris DiMarcos on the PGA Tour doing just that.

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This PGA Tour pro with nearly 400 starts had a cancerous lump removed, but he’s back swinging

Recently he noticed a curious bump that was hindering his swing and causing some discomfort.

AUSTIN, Texas — Golf has always come easy to Omar Uresti, a PGA Tour veteran with nearly 400 starts and 14 top-10 finishes on his resume. In fact, he made his first ace at the age of eight, a fact that he still considers among his highlights with the sport.

After a successful collegiate career at the University of Texas, Uresti turned professional in 1991 and played 11 full seasons on the PGA Tour, earning nearly $4 million.

And although he’s only dabbled on the PGA Tour Champions, Uresti still plays frequently and even qualified (albeit controversially) for the PGA Championship five times between 2015 and 2021.

But recently he noticed a curious bump that was hindering his swing and causing some discomfort. Although the 55-year-old didn’t think much of it, he finally went in to investigate.

“I kept kind of hitting and rubbing over this bump on my leg and finally, after a couple weeks, I decided to look at it,” he said. “And when I did I was like, oh, that doesn’t look good. So I decided to go to the dermatologist and they biopsied it.”

Uresti was later told it was squamous cell carcinoma, one of the most common forms of skin cancer. Squamous and basal cells are in the top layer of the skin, called the epidermis. About eight in 10 skin cancers are basal cell cancers, according to the American Cancer Society. While it’s rare for it to spread to other parts of body, if it’s not removed completely then it can come back in the same place on the skin.

After getting the lump removed, Uresti said he feels fine.

2023 RBC Canadian Open
Omar Uresti of the United States hits his first shot on the second hole during the first round of the 2023 RBC Canadian Open at Oakdale Golf & Country Club in Toronto, Ontario. (Photo: Minas Panagiotakis/Getty Images)

“I had to go back in and I missed the qualifier in Tucson so I drove back and got it done immediately,” he said. “There are not a bunch of tournaments going on. And so I had it cut out. I had five stitches or about a five-centimeter-long cut. They had to stitch it together and they told me two weeks with no strenuous activities.

“So, I’m finally back at it and the game still feels about the same. Hopefully, it’ll get a little better.”

Uresti played in five PGA Tour events in 2023, but failed to make the cut in any of them. He did post a 69 in the second round at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship in November, however, and finished at even par, but still missed the weekend by five strokes.

Still, he feels he could break through at any time and add to his career earnings, which are nearly $4 million.

“It’s been kind of inconsistent,” Uresti said of his game. “You know, a lot of good holes and a couple bad holes but they’re making some swing adjustments lately and trying to get it back to where it used to be and it’s just a matter of the body letting it do it.”

As a player who has played in PGA Tour events in four different decades, Uresti is not thrilled with the current golf landscape and the fracturing that has transpired in recent years.

“It’s really a bummer that we’re having this war go on between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour,” Uresti said. “I think the commissioner may have overreacted a little bit and panicked. You know, I think if he’d have come out and said, ‘You have six release forms to go play other tournaments, on any other tours, and if you play any more than that, that’s it.’ If he just would have said something like that, I think it would have been OK.

“That way they would have had the big names, and we’d been able to have them as well.”

Chris DiMarco spouts off that the PGA Tour Champions deserve to play for more money

Professional golf’s growing entitlement problem extends beyond the PGA Tour and LIV Golf.

Professional golf’s growing entitlement problem extends beyond the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. Just listen to Chris DiMarco, who joined the Subpar podcast with Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz this week and his comments came off as anything but humble.

The ongoing discussions between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – the financial backers of the Tour’s rival, LIV Golf – have hung over the game like a cloud for nearly a year now. When asked about the current state of the professional game, the three-time PGA Tour winner from 2000-2002 didn’t waste any time and unloaded thoughts on the money being thrown around and why the PGA Tour Champions, of all tours, deserve more of it.

“We’re kind of hoping that (LIV Golf) buys the Champions Tour,” DiMarco said. “Let’s play for a little real money out here. I mean this is kind of a joke when we’re getting $2 million. There were like seven guys last week from (TPC Sawgrass at the Players Championship) that made more money than our purses.”

A joke? That’s funny coming from the 55-year-old who hasn’t finished in the top 10 on the senior circuit since 2020. Overall, across 114 starts on the Champions tour, DiMarco has earned 17 top-25 finishes and just four top-10s.

The PGA Tour Champions offers over-the-hill players the chance to still compete for a little scratch on the side once they’re unable to keep up with the young guns on the PGA Tour. The over-50 tour has 28 events on its schedule for 2024, with $67 million up for grabs. That’s not a bad second career for a group of guys who spent their prime earning well more than the national average.

And yes, with more than $400 million on the line across 38 events, the PGA Tour plays for five times more cash than the seniors. And they should. It’s a better product that garners more interest and produces better TV ratings (though ratings for the men’s game have gone down in 2024).

Golf fans are fed up with players, at any level, who demand more when they haven’t done anything to earn it. DiMarco had a few great summers in the early 2000s and hasn’t been heard from since. If he wants to play for more money, maybe he should focus on finding the top half of a Champions tour leaderboard instead of finishing a few scrolls down.

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Until there’s a PGA Tour-LIV Golf resolution, Padraig Harrington suggests player transfers, outside teams in LIV events

“It doesn’t look like there will be any sort of golfing marriage in the near future,” said Harrington.

TUCSON, Ariz. — There appears to be no end in sight to the PGA Tour-LIV Golf rift and this past weekend was just another example of the prolonged standoff.

It was one of the four weekends in 2024 where a LIV event overlapped a signature event. There are 12 times in all this year where the two leagues will intersect.

Scottie Scheffler won the Arnold Palmer Invitational – a PGA Tour signature event that took some criticism for only having 69 players – and banked $4 million.

Meanwhile, Abraham Ancer hoisted a trophy after winning the LIV Golf Hong Kong event and pocketed $4 million.

“It doesn’t look like there will be any sort of golfing marriage in the near future,” said Padraig Harrington ahead of the 2024 Cologuard Classic on the PGA Tour Champions, who had some general thoughts about what can be done in the meantime.

“Why not have it a little bit like the old European Tour-PGA Tour, where there’s a little bit of competition. Certainly it’s good for the fans when there’s rivalries.”

Harrington played both tours for several years. Nowadays he plays mostly on the Champions tour but does dabble in some PGA Tour events. He’s already played twice on the “regular” tour in 2024 and so he sees firsthand the fallout.

“I go back to the PGA Tour and I’m right in amongst it,” he said. “A lot of my friends went to LIV, so I also have a good few guys out there who I would be friendly with.

“So I can see both sides of it. You know, in the end of the day, I played the majority of my career when there was two strong tours and there was a bit of rivalry and a bit of competition, so I’m not, I wouldn’t be averse to that being in the future where there’s two tours and who doesn’t love a little bit of competition?”

It could be argued that it’s not really a competition. The PGA Tour is a league that had to make its own money to pay its bills, whereas LIV Golf has a seemingly endless cash stream from the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund.

“I think the biggest thing going forward for the PGA Tour, there has to be some way of capping, you know, can’t just steal all our players,” he said. “Players will always make a choice individually what’s right for them, but I think the Tour has to, there’s very few businesses in this world where there isn’t some sort of a noncompete sort of clause.

But until things are sorted out, Harrington pondered, why not have some kind of system of player movement.

“I’m not against, you know, some sort of a transfer back and forth,” he said. “I’m not against having a small amount of invites, and that cuts both ways. … maybe an outside team playing every week in LIV, why not. But again, not too sure how they’re going to come together as one tour, so why not have an agreeable two tours where there’s a bit of rivalry.”

Photos: 2024 Cologuard Classic by Exact Sciences on PGA Tour Champions

La Paloma has three courses and parts of all three were combined to make a composite layout.

TUCSON, Ariz. — The PGA Tour Champions returned to Southern Arizona for the Cologuard Classic but at a new venue.

La Paloma Country Club, a Jack Nicklaus design that opened in 1984, hosted the senior circuit for the first time in 2024 after nine years at Tucson National. Cologuard came on as title sponsor in 2018.

La Paloma has three 9-hole golf courses and parts of all three were combined to make a composite layout for the tournament, which played at 6,856 yards and had a par of 71.

It’s the first year of a three-year deal for the venue, which is also famous for being used for some of the scenes in the hit golf movie Tin Cup.

The total purse is $2,200,000 with the winner earning $330,000.

Ricardo Gonzalez wins Trophy Hassan II in Morocco, Angel Cabrera T-27 in PGA Tour Champions return

He’s the fourth player from Argentina to win on the PGA Tour Champions. 

Across four PGA Tour-sanctioned tours, Ricardo Gonzalez had made 38 starts during his career, surviving the cut 28 times. He had recorded six top-10 finishes and made nearly $350,000.

On Saturday, he finally broke through.

The 54-year-old Argentinian shot 3-under 70 at Royal Golf Dar Es Salam in Morocco to win Trophy Hassan II on the PGA Tour Champions, his 13th start on the circuit. He did so with his son on the bag.

Gonzalez finished at 10 under, one stroke in front of Thomas Bjorn, who carded a 4-under 69 on Saturday. Y.E. Yang, a co-leader heading into the final round, finished T-3 at 7 under along with Mark Hensby.

Gonzalez is the fourth player from Argentina to win on the PGA Tour Champions.

“Very happy and very emotional,” Gonzalez said. “I worked so much to be here, and this is my trophy. I like that.”

After a bogey on the par-5 12th, Gonzalez had four straight birdies on Nos. 13-16 to take the lead and secure the victory. He earned $320,000 for his victory and moves to No. 3 in the Charles Schwab Cup standings.

Stephen Ames, the event’s defending champion and last week’s winner at the Chubb Classic, finished T-16.

In his return to the PGA Tour Champions, fellow Argentinian Angel Cabrera finished T-27, with his best round of the week coming Saturday with a 3-under 70.

Angel Cabrera of Argentina in action during the final round of the Trophy Hassan II at Royal Golf Dar Es Salam on February 24, 2024 in Rabat. (Photo by Phil Inglis/Getty Images)

Cabrera, the 2009 Masters champion, has been working on obtaining a visa to return to the United States and continue playing golf. He did not need a visa to travel from Argentina to Morocco for this week’s event.

“While competing in the Masters again is a dream, securing a visa is Angel’s priority at the moment so he can resume his professional career,” Cabrera’s manager Manuel Tagle wrote in an email to Golfweek last month. “We are working on getting an appointment with the U.S. Embassy in Argentina. Probably early March as his visa has expired January 2024.”