“Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots - but you have to play the ball where it lies.” -Bobby Jones
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| www.pgatour.com |
This quote is one of my all time favorites, mostly because of how true it really is. Especially when talking about the grey area between the Web.com Tour and the PGA Tour, where futures can be born or wiped away in the matter of a few strokes. In the end, golf is about never giving up. Just like life, when you’re down and feel like you have nowhere left to go, there always might be something mir
aculous waiting for you just ahead, so you have to just keep trucking along. Nicholas Lindheim and Kyle Thompson have both experienced opposite sides of this truth, and both greatly prove my argument that skill is a much bigger factor on development tours than is is on the PGA Tour. Articles from the PGA Tour itself, who is always a reliable source when it comes to its own players, and Greenville, who has established itself as a very credible source for all news, will aid me in my argument.
aculous waiting for you just ahead, so you have to just keep trucking along. Nicholas Lindheim and Kyle Thompson have both experienced opposite sides of this truth, and both greatly prove my argument that skill is a much bigger factor on development tours than is is on the PGA Tour. Articles from the PGA Tour itself, who is always a reliable source when it comes to its own players, and Greenville, who has established itself as a very credible source for all news, will aid me in my argument.
I watch golf on T.V more than the average person. Most likely because I genuinely enjoy watching it. I can see how some might think it’s extremely boring, but for me, I could sit on the couch and watch golf for hours. That being said, I can personally vouch for the fact that it looks like every one of the golfers on T.V, both on the PGA and Web.com tours, are filthy rich, and I find myself aspiring to be them everytime I sit down and watch golf. While this may be true for a lot of players on the PGA Tour, it most certainly isn’t the case for hundreds of players, more commonly on the development tours, the most popular being the Web.com tour. There are players that are playing tournaments weekly just to get by and move on to the next one, just grinding it out, waiting for that one week that they might win that will propel them onto the big stage, the PGA Tour, where they don’t have to worry about their professional status, as they are guaranteed at least a full year on tour.
Two great examples of this sort of situation are Kyle Thompson and Nicholas Lindheim. Kyle, an 11-year veteran on the Web.com tour, has had a career of ups and downs, never securing a long term spot on the PGA Tour. He’s been struggling as of late, and hurricane Matthew caused the cancellation of the web.com Tour Championship, which would have been Thompson’s last chance to earn a spot on the PGA Tour in 2017. As a result, he’s had to contemplate giving up professional golf. “I’d be the first guy ever to leave behind full status on the web.com Tour,” said the 37-year-old Easley native. “I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m kind of over the web.com Tour. It’s just harder and harder to make it,” Thompson said. “The money is down. The web.com Tour has struggled. The opposition gets better and better. It’s not the same animal as when I started.” The cost of traveling to every event each week has become harder for Thompson over the years, because the events are farther away from each other. And as the distance has increased, so have the travel costs, and so has the competition. All of these factors have caused a player with almost $2 Million in career earnings to have to decide whether or not to hang it up.
On the other side of the spectrum, there’s Nicholas Lindheim. Nicholas didn’t go to college, instead getting a job at a golf course where he fueled his passion for the game everyday after work, first attempting to qualify for the PGA Tour in 2011. After mixed success, and some wins in Latin America which got him status on the web.com, Lindheim was tired of trying. It had been 5 years of work that seemed like it was going nowhere. "I thought maybe at one point this year I wasn't good enough," Lindheim said. "It was my daughter's third birthday. I was in Springfield, Illinois, and had just missed the cut by a shot. I missed an 8-footer on the last hole. I called my wife and said, `This isn't fun.' I was missing out on life at home." But his wife convinced him to finish out the year and re-evaluate then. That next week, he won in Utah and secured his spot on the PGA Tour. "That's how crazy this game is," Lindheim said. It’s a story that explains just why web.com tour players go through what they do, which leads me into my next topic of what do development tour players receive in trade for getting paid a fraction of what PGA Tour players make.
Two great examples of this sort of situation are Kyle Thompson and Nicholas Lindheim. Kyle, an 11-year veteran on the Web.com tour, has had a career of ups and downs, never securing a long term spot on the PGA Tour. He’s been struggling as of late, and hurricane Matthew caused the cancellation of the web.com Tour Championship, which would have been Thompson’s last chance to earn a spot on the PGA Tour in 2017. As a result, he’s had to contemplate giving up professional golf. “I’d be the first guy ever to leave behind full status on the web.com Tour,” said the 37-year-old Easley native. “I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m kind of over the web.com Tour. It’s just harder and harder to make it,” Thompson said. “The money is down. The web.com Tour has struggled. The opposition gets better and better. It’s not the same animal as when I started.” The cost of traveling to every event each week has become harder for Thompson over the years, because the events are farther away from each other. And as the distance has increased, so have the travel costs, and so has the competition. All of these factors have caused a player with almost $2 Million in career earnings to have to decide whether or not to hang it up.
On the other side of the spectrum, there’s Nicholas Lindheim. Nicholas didn’t go to college, instead getting a job at a golf course where he fueled his passion for the game everyday after work, first attempting to qualify for the PGA Tour in 2011. After mixed success, and some wins in Latin America which got him status on the web.com, Lindheim was tired of trying. It had been 5 years of work that seemed like it was going nowhere. "I thought maybe at one point this year I wasn't good enough," Lindheim said. "It was my daughter's third birthday. I was in Springfield, Illinois, and had just missed the cut by a shot. I missed an 8-footer on the last hole. I called my wife and said, `This isn't fun.' I was missing out on life at home." But his wife convinced him to finish out the year and re-evaluate then. That next week, he won in Utah and secured his spot on the PGA Tour. "That's how crazy this game is," Lindheim said. It’s a story that explains just why web.com tour players go through what they do, which leads me into my next topic of what do development tour players receive in trade for getting paid a fraction of what PGA Tour players make.
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