Nothing Minor League About It
Set to host its first event with a $1 million purse, the Nationwide Tour continues its evolution from fledging start-up to reliable proving ground
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If all goes according to schedule, on July 13 a man will sign a raft of autographs after winning a tournament. Kids will thrust golf balls or T-shirt sleeves toward him, adults will offer programs and pairing sheets, tournament officials will set aside assorted mementos for charities and the host course.
When it seems his felt-tip marker is nearly dry, he will make the signature that means the most to him—on an ice cooler, the enormous white plastic kind found in a pickup truck's flatbed at a construction site. Although the beverage he fishes from the ice water will slake his thirst, signing the cooler's exterior will quench his soul.
This is how you know you've arrived on the Nationwide Tour: Win and sign Jaws, the perpetually stocked cooler on the tractor-trailer that hauls the circuit's leader boards and radios from stop to stop. This year's cooler, Jaws 8, bears signatures of some guys you barely know exist, names in scoreboard agate at the back of this magazine. But there is an unrealized value to those signatures, as attested to by some of the men who signed, say, Jaws 3 in 2003: Joe Ogilvie, Ryan Palmer, Brett Wetterich, Vaughn Taylor, Bo Van Pelt, Zach Johnson.
That July 13 signature also will commemorate two milestones for the circuit itself. The 554th tournament in its existence, making its debut the summer before the tour's 20th season, is its version of the Players, christened the Nationwide Tour Players Cup. And finally—after four title sponsors, several thousand players through its fields and about 500,000 travel miles—the tour will pay a seven-figure purse.
"Getting to $1 million is a psychological threshold that makes an important impact," says Bill Calfee, the tour's president. "Everything just kind of fell into place. The tournament came to us and wanted to do something bigger, they had a financial plan to get them to where they needed to be, they had a good golf course, dates to support and good crowds."
That enthusiastic statement begs an observation: A majority of golfers and fans have little idea the Nationwide Tour has so many stars in alignment, especially next week at Pete Dye GC in Bridgeport, W.Va. Its challenge remains elevating itself from backwater to major tributary. And the way that occurs, some tour officials say openly, is for the Nationwide to become the sole avenue for gaining a PGA Tour card, superseding the romanticized hell of the annual Qualifying Tournament.
That heady designation would underscore vast changes in the lower strata of pro competition since a January 1989 announcement that the Ben Hogan Co. had signed a five-year, $19-million agreement with the PGA Tour for a separate circuit. For decades the PGA Tour conducted satellite events to augment the incomes of lesser players back before the top 125 money-exemption category arrived in 1983, when "rabbits" endured Monday qualifying to get into weekly fields. The tour even cobbled together an abbreviated Tournament Players Series in the 1980s but it withered, assuring the considerable gulf between the PGA Tour's standards and dozens of lesser circuits.
"I'm one of the people who, if I didn't get a [PGA] Tour card, I had to go overseas or play 36-hole [mini-tour] tournaments on carts where you played for your entry fee," says Scott Dunlap, who turned pro in 1985 and competed in the inaugural 1990 season. "This is so much better than what my options were."
The Ben Hogan Tour was a quantifiable arena for kids trying to reach the bigs, vets prepping for the Senior (now Champions) Tour and club pros. The 30 tournaments went 54 holes, all but one offering a $100,000 purse. It provided spit-and-polish for the top five players on its money list, who were handed PGA Tour cards for the next year. That lucrative carrot made it worthwhile to abandon a single-city mini-tour, scrape together enough cash or max out credit cards and follow a connect-the-dots schedule roaming the U.S. in a counter-clockwise loop. Those 1990 events stretched 13,098 miles from site to site, a throwback to the PGA Tour's formative years when players spent long stretches in autos.
