Tag: sponsor exemption

Webb Simpson’s RBC exemption highlights how the PGA Tour’s sponsor invite conundrum is alive and well

“I totally can see it and I don’t disagree,” he said. “I’m in a tough place because I’m on the board.”

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – Steve Wilmot is working the RBC Heritage for the 38th straight year. Long enough, in fact, that his first tournament was in 1987, when Davis Love III won for the first time.

“Davis has gone on to win this event five times and make it all the way to the Hall of Fame and I’m still sitting here in this double-wide,” said Wilmot, president and tournament director of the RBC Heritage, with a wide smile.

But in all of his years in his post, he’s never received so many requests from players and agents seeking a sponsor invite. As if further proof was necessary, he pulled from his desk a spreadsheet consisting of a handful of pages stapled together where he tracked the performance of all the players who had texted, emailed, and phoned hoping to get into the Heritage now that it is a $20 million signature event with a limited field, no cut (guaranteed payday) and jacked up FedEx Cup points.

Last year, as a designated event, the RBC Heritage field peaked at 150, an increase from 132 and an all-time high. This year, it’s limited to 70 (down to 69 with Viktor Hovland withdrawing over the weekend) and Wilmot’s sponsor invites were chopped in half from eight down to four. He whittled the potential candidates down to 40, to 30 and then 20, personally calling the players to break the bad news.

But he held off on making any announcements about the four Willy Wonka golden ticket winners to play Harbour Town Golf Links this week. The Official World Golf Ranking didn’t update until midnight after the Masters, which impacted some of his decisions, so he waited until Monday morning to announce the four sponsor invites, the latest he’s ever done that.

The four lucky players are Gary Woodland, the 2019 U.S. Open winner who is a sentimental pick after returning from brain surgery last fall; Kevin Kisner, a popular player who once lost the tournament in a playoff and is a South Carolina resident; Shane Lowry, the 2019 British Open champion who has three top-10s in his last five years at this event and seems poised to win the title some day; and Webb Simpson, the 2012 U.S. Open champion, 2018 Players Championship winner, the 2021 RBC Heritage champion, as well as an ambassador with RBC for four years.

Kisner received an exemption into a signature event for the first time while Lowry, who is an ambassador for MasterCard, the presenting sponsor of the Arnold Palmer Invitational, got his second as did Woodland (Genesis Invitational). For Simpson, it is his third and while it isn’t official, you can connect the dots that Simpson, who lives along Quail Hollow Club and is the unofficial host of the Wells Fargo Championship (not to mention that he has the company’s logo on the belly of his golf bag) will receive a fourth exemption next month. That’s the max allowed for a player during a given season.

Simpson’s exemptions have received increased scrutiny (as did an exemption to Peter Malnati at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am before he won and became exempt into the rest of the signature events this season – and to a lesser extent Adam Scott) because all three are player directors on the Tour Policy Board. In February, several players — although none willing to put their name to their words — expressed their disappointment, using words like “fishy” and “shady,” to describe their displeasure with the invites  and suggested the choices either were payback for their unpaid board work or even worse, a payoff for their future vote.

The optics of handing invites to three policy board members at Pebble may have raised some eyebrows in the locker room but the implication that the suits in Ponte Vedra are pulling the strings on those invites is just the latest baseless claim spouted by LIV enthusiasts.

Qualifying for signature events is meant to be a meritocracy, something LIV could still learn from, but the Tour left a few ways to let players who haven’t played up to their usual high standard have a back door so they still can participate. But with the purse at signature events being more than double that of the regular events and guaranteeing both points and a payday, it’s a huge opportunity that can give a player a leg up to qualify for future signature events, to keep one’s card and, potentially, qualify for the signature events next season. Simpson, for one, can see from a player’s perspective how entry into the signature events should be more of a meritocracy.

“I totally can see it and I don’t disagree,” said Simpson, who is making his 15th start at the RBC Heritage this week. “I’m in a tough place because I’m on the Board and the signature events concept was crafted at the Board level. If Adam (Scott) gets four and I get four, sure, I know people are going to be saying things.

“I told another player this year who had an issue with board members getting spots. I said, ‘I know it looks political. I would argue it’s not political at all.’ The relationships I built, I built over a long period of time. I told this player that if we got something wrong,  if we missed something, we want to learn from it. I gladly accept people’s criticism and feedback. I hope I’m not in this position again. It’s a tough place to be knowing that some players have an issue with it.”

Reigning British Open champion Brian Harman sees both sides of a complicated issue.

“It’s a tricky one. I mean, in the pure meritocracy of it, no. But we’re asking sponsors to pony up extra money for these events, and so I don’t see how you can ask them to also not have sponsor exemptions,” Harman said. “So, I hear arguments for both sides and I understand both sides.”

Wilmot lamented having to call past RBC champs Matt Kuchar, Brandt Snedeker, C.T. Pan, Stewart Cink and Luke Donald and letting them know there was no room at the Inn for them this year. Mark Hubbard, No. 49 in the FedEx Cup standings, and Nicolai Hojgaard, a European Ryder Cupper who held the Masters lead on Saturday and ranks right behind him at No. 50 in the standings, also were left on the outside looking in.

Sponsor invites likely won’t be going away any time soon. Perhaps they should be reduced, or the Tour could add some language that the maximum number of invites a player receives can’t be reached until the final signature event. Simpson noted that the Tour should build flexibility into the system for Tiger Woods, who has liftted the Tour in immeasurable ways, to allow him into any field he wants to play given what he’s done historically and still continues to do every time he tees it up. No one will argue with the boost Woods would instantly bring to a signature event, but he’s probably the single figure who can elevate a field. And there’s no denying that there are intangibles some players bring that don’t show up in the stat sheets.

Wilmot picked Kisner, a former Tour policy board member, for all the little things he does throughout the year, including appearances at media day and at a tournament for sponsors as well as social media requests while Simpson went above and beyond the call of duty when he was reigning champion during the COVID year. Sometimes being a model citizen has its benefits.

“We remember these sorts of things,” Wilmot said.

Simpson is thankful for the opportunity to compete against the best in the world this week. He played himself into a late third-round tee time at the Valero Texas Open two weeks again and was more nervous than he’d been in a long time.

“I showed myself without realizing it how much I love the game still and competing,” he said. “It gave me a kick-start to want to be there more.”

And while Simpson understands how some players feel about him getting a third sponsor invite this week, he is unapologetic. Asked if he would consider passing up a fourth sponsor invite at the Wells Fargo Championship, his hometown event in May, to appease the faction of the Tour that thinks he’s received special treatment, Simpson didn’t waver. “No way,” he said. “I’m taking it. The rules are written as they are and I’m going to take every opportunity I can to play against the best players.”

(Editor’s note: A previous version of this story had a paragraph attributed to a social media post that has since been taken down.)

Meet the content creators battling at The Q at Myrtle Beach for PGA Tour sponsor exemption

Who’s going to come out on top?

Some of the top content creators in golf battling it out for a spot at an official PGA Tour event? Yeah, it’s happening next month.

The Monday qualifer for the 2024 Myrtle Beach Classic is called The Q at Myrtle Beach and it will feature 16 players competing for a sponsor exemption into the tournament at Dunes Golf and Beach Club in South Carolina.

The Myrtle Beach Classic, a new event on the Tour schedule in 2024, will be played May 9-12 and will feature a purse of $3.9 million, with 300 FedExCup points awarded to the champion. It’s an opposite-field event held the same week as the Wells Fargo Championship.

The Q at Myrtle Beach field includes 16 players, many with ties to South Carolina, including eight of the most prominent golf content creators.

All professional and amateur competitors meet the PGA Tour tournament regulations for sponsor exemptions and will be eligible if they qualify.

The 18-hole shootout will be March 4 at TPC Myrtle Beach. It will be closed to the public, but a 90-minute video will be released on Play Golf Myrtle Beach’s YouTube page on April 23, and the content creators will post videos on their respective channels documenting their experiences.

Here’s a look at the 16 golfers playing in The Q at Myrtle Beach:

‘Collusion,’ ‘fishy’ and ‘shady’ among PGA Tour players’ descriptions of AT&T Pebble Beach’s sponsor exemptions

Three of the four exemptions were given to player directors on the Policy Board, who will soon vote on the Tour’s future.

The PGA Tour’s rank and file are rankled again.

The latest reason? The implementation of the Aon Swing 5 and sponsor exemptions into this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which features an 80-man field, purse of $20 million, no cut and beefed up FedEx Cup points, with 700 awarded to the winner.

“The Tour rated the Swing 5 category above being a Tour winner, which makes absolutely no sense. In every other instance, winning is at the top of the food chain, the No. 1 category, and it should be. Winning on the PGA Tour is hard,” said a veteran PGA Tour player, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s just another thing the Tour has done that is complete bullshit.”

Matthieu Pavon, winner last week of the Farmers Insurance Open, and Grayson Murray, winner of the Sony Open in Hawaii, were the top two finishers, followed by Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Kevin Yu and Stephan Jaeger. All five will compete at Pebble Beach Golf Links as the top five FedEx Cup point earners across the last three full-field events – the Sony Open in Hawaii, the American Express and Farmers Insurance Open – not otherwise exempt.

The 80-player field at Pebble Beach includes the top 50 on the 2023 FedEx Cup, Nos. 51-60 on the 2023 FedEx Cup Fall standings, the top finisher on the 2023 Race to Dubai not otherwise exempt (Nicolai Hojgaard), the Aon Swing 5, tournament winners not otherwise exempt (Nick Dunlap), players inside the top 30 on the Official World Golf Ranking not otherwise exempt (Justin Thomas) and four sponsor exemptions. This adds up to 72 players, leaving eight remaining spots via the “fill the field” category.

Multiple players reached out to Golfweek to argue players were originally told during a meeting at the Players Championship last March that winners would be automatically exempt into Signature events. That is still true, but the Swing 5 category, which was designed to give hot and trending players a shot to play their way into the big-money events, falls higher on the priority list than winning.

“Now it’s like, oh, no, winners are part of the Swing 5. That is allowing fewer players to qualify for these events,” a veteran player said. “It’s really disappointing that you’re under the impression that if you play well, you’re going to have the opportunity to get into one of these events and then you don’t. If there are an extra two or three players in this field, who cares at this point? There’s $20 million in the purse.”

Indeed, for the AT&T the Tour resorted to the “fill the field” category, admitting Nos. 62-69 on the 2023 FedEx Cup Fall standings to bring the field to 80 for the pro-am.

A PGA Tour spokesman said staff have been on the road and available to educate players on the makeup of the fields for the signature events and infographics were distributed to players in December. The reason why the winner category is a lower priority than the Swing 5 is to avoid fields exceeding 78 players later in the year, such as at the Travelers in June, when more winners will have become exempt. Based on projections, the Tour says that outside the top 50, an additional 70 unique players will play in at least one signature event this season.

2023 Wyndham Championship
Webb Simpson watches his shot from the 11th tee during the third round of the 2023 Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Photo: David Yeazell-USA TODAY Sports)

The AT&T’s sponsor invites also are a hot topic of conversation among players. Sponsor invites were granted to four players. Three of the four exemptions to AT&T were handed out to members of the Tour’s independent Board of Directors – Peter Malnati, Adam Scott, Webb Simpson – as well as local product Maverick McNealy, who last week fulfilled his medical exemption.

“It seems like collusion, a political game that should never happen on Tour,” said one veteran player. “It’s very shady, if you ask me.”

Given that Malnati, Scott and Simpson are on the verge of being three of the six players to vote on the Tour’s deals with private equity groups and potentially Saudi Arabia’s PIF, it could be perceived as a kickback for their unpaid efforts on behalf of the Tour or even as a way of buying their votes.

Another veteran Tour winner said, “It doesn’t pass the smell test. The cool thing about sports is it used to be the outlet where everything was determined on the field or court. Golf has always been the ultimate meritocracy.”

Malnati, a one-time winner, currently ranks No. 245 in the world. He finished T-4 at the AT&T last year and has supported the event consistently and knows how to show his amateur partner a good time. Simpson, a former major winner, has slipped to No. 225 in the world and has resorted to playing a limited schedule in recent years to spend more time with his large family. He has played at Pebble in only two of the last 10 years.

Gary Woodland, who won the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and is making a comeback from brain surgery last year, and Daniel Berger, a tournament winner at Pebble in 2021 who is making his own comeback after being sidelined for more than a year, would seem to have more box-office appeal and attract more attention but are among the players who won’t be teeing it up this week.

Tournaments are allowed to offer sponsor exemptions at their discretion – and they have run the gamut from the NFL’s Tony Romo to the LPGA’s Lexi Thompson in recent years – but those selections will be greeted with greater scrutiny given the heightened stakes. AT&T Pebble Beach tournament director Steve John didn’t respond to an email requesting an explanation for his tournament’s choices, but at least one player wasn’t interested in hearing his reasoning.

“Peter Malnati has zero business getting an invite into a signature event and Webb shouldn’t really either,” a veteran pro said. “It just seems very fishy.”

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Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson highlight 12 sponsor exemptions who won a PGA Tour event since 1990

There are five major champions on this list.

Every PGA Tour event has a handful or so of spots in the field to dole out to golfers who didn’t otherwise qualify.

Those spots may go to a past champion. They often are awarded to a rising star in the game. The strategy there is that perhaps the up-and-comer will remember the courtesy later in his pro career and will become a regular at that particular Tour stop.

Sometimes a sponsor exemption gets doled out to someone noteworthy as a means to drive interest in a tournament, such as former NFL quarterback Tony Romo, who got into the Charles Schwab Challenge, or LPGA star Lexi Thompson, who wowed the Las Vegas crowd last October before just missing the weekend cut at the Shriners Children’s Open.

According to the PGA Tour, since 1990 there have been just 12 golfers to win a tournament after getting a sponsor exemption. There’s been over 1,000 PGA Tour events in that time, proving the long odds a sponsor invite faces.

Here’s the list of those who won on the PGA Tour after receiving a sponsor exemption since 1990.

Lexi Thompson says making cut at PGA Tour’s Shriners would be at the ‘top of my accomplishments’

While the preparation might be the same, this is no ordinary tournament. And she knows it.

LAS VEGAS — As she might in advance of any other tournament, Lexi Thompson walked TPC Summerlin on Tuesday with her parents, Scott and Judy, following along closely. The 11-time LPGA winner tried a myriad of shots, including two approaches on the par-5 16th hole – one in which she played it safe in three shots, another in which she tried a driver off the deck that cleared a lake but rolled through the green into a bunker.

But while the preparation might be the same, this is no ordinary tournament.

And she knows it.

Thompson, who played a practice round Tuesday with Michael Kim and Ben Griffin, will become the seventh woman to compete in a PGA Tour event when she tees off Thursday at the 2023 Shriners Children’s Open. She was as caught off-guard by the sponsor exemption as anyone, telling media members that she found out just nine days ago during the final round of the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship.

But while she’s won a major and has been in the public eye for more than a decade and a half, Thompson said she’d consider a chance to play the weekend at the Shriners as her crowning achievement.

“Definitely at the top. Definitely at the top of my accomplishments. It’s been an honor just to get this invite, but one step, one shot at a time,” Thompson said Tuesday. “That would be an amazing feeling.”

Although it may have seemed an inopportune time to get this call a few months ago, Thompson has seen an uptick in her performances in recent weeks, something she attributes to a small swing change in advance of the Solheim Cup.

More: Lexi Thompson photos | These are the 7 women to play on the PGA Tour

Thompson missed five cuts in a row over the summer and looked like she might be a liability for Team USA when she made the 12-player squad based on her Rolex Ranking. But she undoubtedly found something in September, and it was enough for captain Stacy Lewis to ask Thompson to hit the first tee shot in Spain and anchor her singles lineup Sunday.

After a fifth-place showing at the Volunteers of America last week outside of Dallas, Thompson said she feels comfortable with her game as the big day approaches, although she wouldn’t let on to what she was doing wrong.

“I can’t say,” she said with a wide smile. “No, it was something very simple, but I feel like as golfers and athletes we kind of have our tendencies of always going back to certain things. Even when we are struggling, we always have tendencies of what our swing goes to. Just really focusing in on this one thing, and it’s gotten me a lot better on track with my swing plane. Just really dialed into that the week before Solheim and I probably hit hundreds of golf balls every day until I got it down.

“Because I wanted to go to Solheim and play my best golf, because representing your country, that’s what I live for.”

When she’s playing the average LPGA event, Thompson only gets a few chances per round to pull out her driver, but she’ll need it more often this week on a par-71 course that plays to 7,255 yards.

Typically, Thompson plays with five wedges in her bag and leaves her 5-iron home, she said Tuesday. This week the 5-iron is in play, and her driver will get a workout.

“Yeah, it’s nice to come here and hit a lot of drivers, of course. You know, the last few weeks I didn’t hit too many drivers, but you still have to hit the golf shots on the LPGA Tour. It’s just I don’t get to take advantage of sometimes my length on a few of those holes,” Thompson said. “Here, it’s driver on every hole, and I definitely like that. Fire away and swing, get the most distance I can on a few of those holes.”

Griffin, who lost in a playoff at last week’s Sanderson Farms Championship, said he was impressed with Thompson’s game and won’t be surprised at all if she’s still around after the cut.

“I thought she was striping it. She was hitting it closer than us on a few holes, which is to be expected. She has a ton of talent, and she can handle it out there,” he said. “It’s a little different out here being a little firmer, a little different conditions, but I think she’s adjusting well, and she played awesome today, and I think she can really compete this week and have a good chance at at least making the weekend. It’ll be fun to watch.”

While the odds are firmly against her making the cut, Thompson insisted she’s not feeling any additional pressure this week. She’s played golf with men as long as she can remember, often with her two brothers, Nicholas and Curtis.

“I think it’s just since I’ve been under the microscope I guess since I was 12 years old, just being used to it. Just believing in yourself and not listening to outside expectations or any people that judge you,” she said. “You know what you’re capable of, and all you have to do is believe in the work that you put in and go out there and trust the process. That’s all I’ve done throughout my whole career. Turning pro at a young age was a big step, doing this.

“Really you just have to go out and do what you love.”

Beth Ann Nichols contributed to this report.

Suzy Whaley Q&A: Lexi Thompson playing on the PGA Tour generated more buzz than months of Solheim Cup buildup

Suzy Whaley applauds Lexi Thompson for stepping outside her comfort zone to take on the men.

It’s been 20 years since Suzy Whaley teed it up on the PGA Tour in the 2003 Greater Hartford Open. Now a groundbreaking past president of the PGA of America, Whaley became the first woman to compete in a PGA Tour event since the great Babe Zaharias in 1945.

Whaley, of course, earned her spot by winning the 2002 Connecticut PGA Championship.

Last week it was announced that Lexi Thompson had accepted a sponsor invitation to the Shiners Children’s Open in Las Vegas, which will make her the seventh woman to compete in a PGA Tour event.

The field and the scene next week in Vegas will be much different for Thompson than it was for Whaley, who laughed out loud when David Duval introduced himself on the putting green. (“I know who you are!”) Whaley actually credits much of her success that week to a chip shot Peter Jacobsen taught her during a practice round.

Most of the heavy hitters on the PGA Tour have shut it down this fall, and Thompson has only a week of lead-up to prepare and navigate the naysayers.

Whaley dealt with the buildup – good and bad – for months. She ultimately shot 75-78 to miss the cut by 13 strokes. Only one player – Zaharias – has ever made the cut in a PGA Tour event.

Golfweek recently caught up with Whaley to reminisce on her time playing against the men and talk about the challenges Lexi might face.

Whaley firmly believes that women taking opportunities outside their comfort zones is what must be done to create progress.

“Yesterday the world was talking about women’s golf more in one day than I heard for nine months to the Solheim Cup,” said Whaley.

“I can’t wait for the day when women get that kind of attention and don’t have to play against the men to get it.”

PGA Tour player Peter Malnati quickly retracts statement after calling Lexi Thompson’s exemption a ‘gimmick’

The 36-year-old Indiana native admitted he thought the exemption might have been a stretch.

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In his first year as a member of the PGA Tour policy board Peter Malnati has proved a champion of the everyman, coming clean on the average player’s reaction to the PGA Tour’s framework agreement with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.

Malnati stayed strong on comments that players lost trust in the Tour after the announcement of the arrangement and added that it would take some time to be restored.

On Tuesday, in advance of this week’s Sanderson Farms Championship, Malnati was asked about the news that LPGA star Lexi Thompson was given an exemption into the Shriners Children’s Open in Las Vegas. The event will be played Oct. 12-15 at TPC Summerlin, which last year played 7,255 yards with a par of 71. The field of 132 will compete for a purse of $8.4 million.

The 36-year-old Indiana native admitted he thought the exemption might have been a stretch.

“I just got a text this morning, so I don’t know much about it,” Malnati said. “Obviously I know that Lexi at times has been one of the top players on the LPGA Tour, and she’s obviously very athletic. Distance won’t be a problem. She’ll hit it far enough.

“My gut reaction when I saw that was like the tournament reaching to try to get — just trying to drum up interest. I think I understand that, if that is the case.”

2023 Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial
Peter Malnati plays his shot from the third tee during the third round of the Charles Schwab Challenge golf tournament. (Photo: Jim Cowsert-USA TODAY Sports)

Malnati started to step in hot water but caught himself quickly with his next statement.

“I don’t think we’re going to need to resort to gimmicks to drum up interest. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know that having Lexi play is a gimmick, but I don’t think the tournaments are going to have to go to those kind of lengths to drum up interest and get storylines that they can sell because I think these events are actually going to have a lot of meaning,” he said. “Like I said, change is hard for everyone at every level, so I assume if you’re a host organization of a tournament, if you’re the Century Club here in Jackson, if you’re Wayne Sanderson Farms, you just don’t know right now for sure what you have anymore because the fall is completely reimagined.

“I’m pretty sure that the fall is going to be a blockbuster hit. I think it’s going to be very successful. But these tournaments, they don’t know yet.”

A full-time LPGA member in 2014, Thompson has racked up 15 professional wins including a major — the 2014 Kraft Nabisco Championship.

“Having Lexi play certainly will get a lot of headlines, and if that’s the goal for Shriners and the host organization in Vegas there, that’s great. Obviously, she’s a professional athlete. She’s accomplished a lot,” Malnati said. “It’s not like — I mean, who knows what’ll happen. She may go play really well and it’ll be huge. She may play absolutely terrible and finish 132nd.

“Either way, she’s a professional golfer. She has a spot in the field. The tournament is — if it gets them the attention that they want and it works out positively for them, it’s great, all for it.”

Malnati is one of seven past champions in the field at The Country Club of Jackson and is making his ninth straight start in the event. He won the tournament in 2015 and added a second-place showing in 2020, making him the only player to have a victory and a runner-up showing since it moved to its current location in 2015.

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The golfer who shot 89-81 (28 over) at the 2022 Butterfield Bermuda Championship? That would be 65-year-old island native Kim Swan

Kim Swan, who is from Bermuda, was the longtime teaching pro at Port Royal Golf Course.

John Daly shot 71-76 and finished 5 over at the 2022 Butterfield Bermuda Championship. There were still golfers on the course playing their second rounds but Daly’s score would’ve been good for last place.

If not for fellow sponsor invite, 65-year-old Kim Swan.

Swan, who is from Bermuda, played college golf for Troy, where the Trojans finished fourth in the 1979 NCAA Division II National Championship. He later played professionally for two years on the then-European Tour. He was the teaching pro at Port Royal Golf Course, host of the tournament, until last year. He frequently gave lessons for free.

“This special opportunity comes as I celebrate my 65th birthday at Port Royal Golf Course, which I proudly serve as chairman of the Board of Trustees, as it enters its 53rd year of operation as a public golf course,” Swan told the Royal Gazette.

In 2019, Swan hit the honorary tee shot to celebrate the inaugural Bermuda Championship, the first official PGA Tour event on island.

Swan was one of 12 sponsor invites this week. His first-round scorecard had five bogeys, four double bogeys and a 9 on the par-4 12th hole, which led to an 89. He got a couple of birdies Friday and scored eight shots better with an 81.

Ben Crane, who was an alternate but was later offered a sponsor invitation, is at the other end of the leaderboard, taking the clubhouse lead Friday after posting a 9-under 62.

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Why did World Golf Hall of Famer Tom Kite need to write for his first sponsor exemption?

After more than 1,100 career starts in his illustrious career, Hall of Famer Tom Kite pens his first letter asking for a sponsor’s exemption. Allow us to explain.

What is a World Golf Hall of Famer with 19 PGA Tour victories, more than $27 million in earnings and more than 1,100 career combined starts as a professional doing asking for a sponsor invite into the PGA Tour Champions Cologuard Classic in Tucson, Arizona, this week?

Good question. Tom Kite, the golfer in question, provided me the answer.

“I failed the tour’s playing standard regulation last year because of how poorly I played,” he said.

There’s a playing standard on the senior circuit? Who knew? Here’s the actual language of this arcane rule that was implemented roughly 20 years ago, according to the PGA Tour Champions.

“Upon the conclusion of the season, any player who has played a minimum of six official rounds and played in a minimum of three tournaments shall have maintained a scoring average for all rounds played by such player during the previous year in tournaments awarding official money no higher than four and one-half (4.5) strokes in excess of the average score for all players in such tournaments.”

There’s two opposing schools of thought on this: you either think this rule is a joke and Kite is an all-time great, a name golf fans still care to pay money to see and he deserves our admiration that he’s still grinding and should be allowed to go out on his terms. Or you think this is a reasonable rule meant to protect the quality of the field and would tell Kite, ‘C’mon, old man, your time has passed,’ and, in what is very much a closed shop, you’re taking a spot from a more worthy player.

Kite, 70, has played in 426 senior tournaments since turning 50 in December 1999 and racked up 10 wins, 125 top-10 finishes and more than $14 million. But last season he played just 11 tournaments and earned $26,476. And, for our purposes here, the bigger problem was his scoring average in ‘19: 76.148, which was a differential of 4.847 compared to the fields he played against, so that’s how he missed the 4.5 stroke average.

Tom Kite won 19 times on the PGA Tour and 16 times on PGA Tour Champions.

Kite’s final tournament in 2019 was the Pure Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach, where he won his lone major in 1992. He shot his age, 69, in his first round but followed it up with a 79 at Poppy Hills Golf Course.

“I forgot about the rule,” Kite said. “I could’ve signed my scorecard incorrectly or not signed it at all and been DQed and still have my status.”

Here’s more on the rule affecting Kite’s status this season.

“Any such player failing to meet the guidelines set forth in this Section C.1(a) of this Article III shall retain regular membership but for subsequent seasons shall no longer be exempt. The scoring average portion of the Performance Guidelines shall not be applicable for those members who have a minimum of 50 combined (PGA TOUR and PGA TOUR Champions) victories in tournaments awarding official money, or players in the All-Time Victory Category A.1 (i)(i). There shall be no other exemption from this scoring average provision of the Performance Guidelines.”

The bar is set so high for a “get out of jail card” – a combined 50 wins between the tour’s junior and senior circuits – too high, you could argue, that even stalwart Bernhard Langer wouldn’t meet it. (Hale Irwin is one of the few, the proud, who does.)

But Kite didn’t complain about being in this no-man’s land to start the season. In fact, he said, “I endorse the policy 100%.”

As a result, Kite sent his first letter requesting a sponsor exemption to tournament officials at the Tucson tournament, which begins Friday.

Fifty years ago this June, Kite made his PGA Tour debut at the U.S. Open at Hazeltine. He passed Tour Q-School in his first attempt and made it through Monday Qualifying initially. Never did he have to ask for a handout. Well, there was one time he accepted a sponsor exemption into the old Crosby Clambake, but that was arranged by his amateur partner.

Part of the reason Kite may have accepted having his exempt status suspended – technically, he qualifies through the all-time points, all-time money and Hall of Fame categories – is that he can receive unlimited sponsor exemptions. He already has another one lined up for the Hoag Classic next week in Newport Beach, California, and then he will re-assess his plans. And there’s also this:

“A player who loses his exempt status for failing to meet the scoring average provision of the Performance Guidelines may regain exempt status immediately by finishing among the top one-half (1/2) of the starting field in any PGA Tour Champions cosponsored or approved tournament awarding official prize money, excluding official money team events.”

In other words, if he can finish inside the top half of an official, non-team event – top-39 or better this week – his status will be reinstated. It’s not a high bar and one Kite is confident he can achieve.

“I know I’m at the end of my rope,” he said. “I don’t have any super-high aspirations other than to see the guys and compete and get my status back. I didn’t play worth a darn last year, but you know what? I’m still a pretty good player.”

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