The Champions Tour is largely a closed shop to those who don't arrive at their milestone 50th birthday with playing privileges already secured, which renders as exceptional the efforts of Gene Jones and Mike Geddes.

Each of their otherwise obscure names keep turning up on Champions Tour leader boards, including that of the Jeld-Wen Tradition at the Crosswater Club in Sunriver, Ore. Entering Sunday's final round, Goodes is tied for fourth while Jones is tied for 10th.

Jones tied for first and Geddes tied for 22nd in the Champions Tour Qualifying Tournament last year, providing them only the opportunity to Monday qualify for events. It promised nothing, if not frustration, yet each of them kept playing their way into tournaments and turning up on enough leader boards that full-time employment in 2009 has become a reasonable expectation.

Goodes said that they're feeding off one another, a friendly competition, but that they also share a role model, Bruce Vaughn, who followed a similar route the year before and won the Senior British Open last month.

"You get in these things and the only thing that matters is what you shoot," Goodes said. "It doesn't matter who you're playing against. You never know if and when that will happen. Vaughn's victory gives you more hope."

Goodes, who owns a plastics recycling business, was a formidable amateur in North Carolina, who turned pro only after surviving his Qualifying Tournament experience. He has earned $316,179 in 12 starts, three of them top 10s, and ranks 42nd on the money list.

Jones, a former teaching pro, has earned $506,445 in 13 starts, six of them top-10s, and ranks 25th on the money list.

By finishing in the top 30 on the money list, they could earn a full exemption for 2009. They would likely need to earn in excess of $650,000 to do so, a number now well within reach.

--John Strege

SUNRIVER, Ore. -- The Champions Tour hasn't seen the last of Fred Funk, but neither will it see as much of him. Funk, 52, has temporarily abandoned his plan of playing both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour.

Funk, whose 66 in the second round thrust him into contention in the Jeld-Wen Tradition, said that his intention is to play the PGA Tour virtually full time in 2009. The Champions Tour will be his fallback position, he said, in the event he is "not playing well or competing well.

"I've got that opportunity and I don't want to give it up," said Funk, who has a PGA Tour exemption through 2010 by virtue of his winning the 2005 Players Championship. "I want to give it one more good run. I still really enjoy playing with the young kids. I still don't consider myself the senior guy out there."

Nor does he concede that age in any manner has begun to erode his skills. In fact, he said he's a better player at 52 than he was at 42, and that, "I've worked at my game harder than I've ever worked at it."

Funk learned that splitting his time on two tours this year has diluted his ability to meet his own expectations on either, simplifying his decision. He missed six cuts in 13 starts on the PGA Tour and has won only once in nine Champions Tour starts, that coming in January.

"I'm going to play the regular tour exclusively next year," he said.

-- John Strege

SUNRIVER, Ore. -- The Jeld-Wen Tradition began Thursday in the wake of a gamut of emotions, from sorrow to joy, for which the Elysian Fields otherwise known as Sunriver is an appropriate setting for either.

On the 18th green of the Crosswater Club in the shadow of central Oregon's snow-capped Mount Bachelor on Wednesday night, a memorial service was held for former U.S. Open champion Orville Moody, an 11-time winner on the Champions Tour, who died last Friday at 74.

As many as 20 Champions Tour players, more than a fourth of the field in the Tradition, were on hand for the service, conducted by Portland Trailblazers chaplain Al Egg. Among those who spoke were Moody's daughter Michelle, who often caddied for her dad on the Champions Tour, and Evan Byers, the tournament director of the Tradition, who also caddied for Moody.

On a more upbeat note, Champions Tour player Des Smyth took a phone call from his son Greg, 24, on Thursday morning, a few hours before teeing off in the Tradition. Greg was calling to inform his parents that he had won the eighth largest jackpot in the history of Ireland's Lotto, 9,426,636 Euros, nearly $14 million.

Greg, a college student studying horticulture, paid $6 for a quick pick ticket Wednesday and when he was having breakfast Thursday morning he checked his numbers and discovered that he had won.

-- John Strege

The intrinsic value of an Open is that it is indeed open  to anyone, however obscure, with enough game to qualify. There aren't many more obscure than Jeff Klein, a career grinder known to friends as Helmet in homage to a hard head that wouldn't allow him to quit and pursue honest work.

Klein's stubborn resolve to make a living from this game paid off Saturday, when he threatened for a time to post the lowest score in the history of the USGA's Opens (the U.S. Open, the U.S. Senior Open and the U.S. Women's Open). He fell short, but still managed to put his name into the USGA record book by equaling the lowest nine-hole score in the history of the U.S. Senior Open.

Klein, 50, went out in six-under 30 on the East Course at the Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, the 15th player in the history of the event to play nine in 30 strokes. He birdied two of the first five holes on the back nine to get to eight-under par, and needed to play the last four holes in one-under par to shoot 61, which would have bettered by one Loren Roberts' Open record. Instead, he bogeyed two of the final four holes, but still shot a 64, the low round of the tournament (Scott Simpson also shot 64 on Saturday), which vaulted him into the top 10.

"I always wanted to play, but wasn't that good really," said Klein, who played college golf at Nebraska and lives in Scotts Bluff, Neb., in the northwest part of the state. "I was a decent player, but just kept working at it."

In 2003, he actually made it to the PGA Tour. "It took me 15 years to get my PGA Tour card, and then I got my lunch handed to me out there," he said. "I was already 45 when I did it, so thought, 'maybe we'll just wait for the next level.' And here I am. I guess I can still play a little. Sometimes you wonder.

--John Strege

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The East Course at the Broadmoor Resort may be a bear, but it wasn't the bear that had everyone talking on Friday. The one that had everyone talking was instead the black bear that crossed the 13th fairway in the midst of the second round of the U.S. Senior Open.

"I heard the officials actually saying that the bear was up in a tree," second-round leader Fred Funk said, "but if the bear got back down, that they were going to tranquilize it and halt play. It would be pretty scary if it got a little panicky and some spectator or some of the golfers were too close."

A USGA official said he had not heard of the tranquilizing plan, but the bear left the premises of its own volition. To prevent further potentially dangerous wild-animal-kingdom intrusions, the USGA decided it would deploy local wildlife officials to monitor the perimeter of the course on a 24-hour basis.

The Broadmoor sits at the base of the Rocky Mountains on the southwestern side of Colorado Springs. It should have come as no surprise that wildlife of some sort would turn up during the course of play. In its tournament fact sheet, the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America identified wildlife that frequents the premises. Black bears were first on a list that also included bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes and snakes.

-- John Strege

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- The number of players who passed on the opportunity to play the Senior PGA Championship at Oak Hill CC begs the question: Why?

"Guys have to walk for four days?" Scott Simpson said, positing the most interesting theory.

Thirty-seven players from the alternate list eventually made the field at Oak Hill. The Champions Tour allows players the use of carts, but the Senior PGA Championship is conducted by the PGA of America, which does not permit carts.

"I'd love to see us get rid of carts," said Simpson, for whom the walk Saturday was rather pleasant. Simpson birdied five holes on the back nine en route to a one-under-par 69 that was one of the few sub-par rounds shot over three days. "We're trying to do it. I don't know if that had something to do with it, with the weather forecast and slogging around in it."

The scouting report on Oak Hill might have been a deterrent, too. "It's pretty much the same setup we had for the '89 U.S. Open," Simpson said. "It's tougher than we're used to. You just can't hit greens out of the rough. If it was me I'd cut the rough down a little bit.

"But I can't imagine not wanting to be here. It's a great course and this is [the Champions Tour's] original major."

-- John Strege

ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Handicapping golf tournaments that don't include Tiger Woods or Lorena Ochoa tend to be a fruitless endeavor given the vagaries of the game, but there is an evident favorite at the Senior PGA Championship this week. A favorite son, to be precise.

Jeff Sluman is a native of Rochester, N.Y., and is a member at Oak Hill CC there, site of the Senior PGA. Though he lives in Chicago, he still has family in Rochester, including brother Brad, who runs a restaurant, the Pittsford Pub, a short ride from Oak Hill. Sluman also has a long-time relationship with Craig Harmon, Oak Hill's head pro for 37 years.

"I've probably got about 500 rounds under my belt here," Sluman said, "but [except for] the '89 U.S. Open and the 2003 PGA and now this, you don't see the golf course in this type of condition with the speed of the greens and rough and that. But essentially I know where to go and what to stay away from. I certainly feel like I can play the golf course well."

So it was that Sluman finished round one of the Senior PGA near the top of the leader board, shooting an even-par 70 on a difficult course made harder by the cold, windy conditions.

"I think anybody teeing off at 8 o'clock like we did would have taken 70 and got a cup of coffee and stayed in the clubhouse," he said. "But that's the best I could do."

He's happy as well that he did not play himself out of contention, as he has done here in the past. You see, there is a downside to a home game, too.

"Golf's a very challenging game at best," he said, "but when you really want something and try too hard ... well, judging by my past experiences in Rochester, I haven't played very well. I finally relaxed out there and started to play some good golf.

"I'm going to go out and try and compete the next three days and if I have a chance to win on Sunday, regardless of what happens, I'll take it as a great week," said Sluman. "Just playing well in front of my family and friends means a lot to me."

-- John Strege

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Playing 36 holes with a tour pro is an education you don't quite get watching on television or walking in the gallery. You can hear the sound of the shots and feel the tempo, especially when someone has as fluid a swing as Jerry Pate, our pro Thursday in the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf pro-am.

Pate hadn't played a full round in a few weeks because of minor shoulder and knee injuries--he was wearing a neoprene brace on his left knee--but hit some beautiful shots. None was better than his final full shot of the day. On our group's final hole, the par-3 third, Pate's 3-wood from 227 yards into the wind faded about five yards just as he diagrammed it and finished four feet short of the hole.

He made the the birdie with a putter that is older than a lot of players on the PGA Tour, a Wilson Arnold Palmer blade he got in 1971 when he was a freshman at Alabama.

"I haven't used this putter in years," he said. "I won the [1974] U.S. Amateur with it. I won the [1982] TPC with it. I haven't used it on the Champions Tour, but at times I get a little too mechanical with a center-shafted, Ping-type putter. I like a heel-shafted putter at times where I can swing the toe a little
bit."

We had another 60 Thursday, for a two-day best-ball net total of 120, which beat 11 teams but was a whopping 14 strokes behind the pro-am winners (Shapiro, Shapiro, Green and Guernsey) who followed up their 51 with a 55.

Pate will be paired with his old Southeastern Conference rival Andy Bean in the tournament proper starting Friday. The Club at Savannah Harbor will be cleared of the amateur flotsam. I go back to work with a few swing thoughts from Pate and a reinforcement that the game they play and the one most of the rest of us play are different beasts.

--Bill Fields

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Nerves, rust and a good old-fashioned talent deficit were a potent cocktail at 7:30 Wednesday morning. The first day of the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf pro-am began with a shotgun start, but I had a water pistol that wouldn't shoot straight.

I had gotten up early and eaten oatmeal for breakfast, worked my way through the bag on the range and left the practice green bursting with confidence having made two six-footers in a row.

Two holes in, I was wondering if I eventually was going to have to poach a couple of golf balls from our pro, Lonnie Nielsen.

Fortunately I found a temporary tourniquet for the mess I was making. At least on occasion, my swing tempo slowed to something approaching the legal limit. I two-putted from 100 feet on the 12th hole. I chipped nicely. I stayed out of everybody's through-line.

Besides, it was a team game and I had some good partners. I thought Leo Story, a 2-handicap local banker, had taken a wrong turn on the way to a long-drive contest, so formidable were many of his tee shots. After one of my better drives, Leo's ball was still a Ray Guy punt beyond mine. At 71, Jim Smith, a fixture in Savannah golf circles, was amazing. Just two weeks ago he had gotten dizzy on the course and gone to his doctor, who discovered a blocked heart artery. He had a stent put in. All Jim did Wednesday was shoot a neat 76, making 4-for-3 on the par-5 fourth hole to well-deserved applause from a few friends who followed us around. Kim Iocovozzi, a Savannah art dealer and tournament volunteer vice-chairman, struggled a bit on the greens but hung in there and had his moments.

Thanks to those guys and a couple of early birdies by Nielsen, we were eight under through our first nine holes before cooling down. Our 12-under best-ball net 60 beat a few of the 48 teams, but we can barely see the leaders (R.W. Eaks' team of Fred Shapiro, Bruce Shapiro, James Green and Kevin Guernsey), who carded a 51.

Tough crowd.

-- Bill Fields

SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Flying down to the Liberty Mutual Legends of Golf, the smart play for a golfer of questionable ability with a long winter behind him and two days of pro-am golf ahead of him would have been to read Hogan or Snead, Harmon or Haney--to hope immersion in the fine points of the game would smooth all the rough edges.

I opted for the entertaining choice, the late George Plimpton's 1968 classic The Bogey Man, the account of his travails in three PGA Tour pro-ams back when woods were wood and the Crosby was the Crosby. Plimpton was an 18-handicap with a golf club but scratch with a typewriter. Better to laugh a little bit, I thought, than risk catching one swing thought too many.

When I got on the ground in coastal Georgia, I could have searched for a large bucket of practice balls, but sought to gather a couple of stories instead. One of the first people I ran into at The Club at Savannah Harbor was John Buchna, who has caddied for Joey Sindelar for 25 years. That's a lot of pro-ams, a lot of nervous amateurs, a lot of shots you don't usually see on Sunday afternoons.

"I've seen them hit scoreboards," Buchna said. "I've seen them hit cars out in the middle of a lake. I've seen them hit shots that end up behind them. If you top a ball just right,  the spin moves it in the wrong direction."

I would love to hit a few fairways, make a few pars, avoid having a to swipe at a ball lodged head-high in a tree, as Plimpton did.

If you cover golf, you don't pay much attention to pro-ams until you find yourself playing in one. In reporting on the Champions Tour since 2001, I've had the chance to play several informal rounds with senior pros. David Eger, Mark McNulty and Graham Marsh kindly put up with me during a round at Del Monte GC prior to The First Tee Open a couple of years ago.

Another year at that event, I got to play Pebble Beach with Peter Jacobsen and his junior partner in a practice round. Dana Quigley, Jim Thorpe and Jack Fleck were amiable partners in outings. My only sour experience was one round with an old pro who spoke as few words over 18 holes as I hit good shots, which was to say not many at all.

That won't be an issue over the next two days. Lonnie Nielsen is our pro today, followed by Jerry Pate on Thursday afternoon. I just hope Nielsen doesn't remember my leaving him out of a preseason top-30 ranking a few years ago (as one of his fans let me know). And I hope Pate doesn't recall the drive I pushed halfway to the Statue of Liberty as he played along for a hole or two during a round at Liberty National two years ago.

But as John Jacobs told me Tuesday, the pros don't care what the amateurs shoot. There isn't a bad shot they haven't seen. There was the fellow who was so nervous on the first tee in Tampa a couple of years ago that he couldn't get his ball to rest on a tee. "I teed up his ball for three of the first six holes," Jacobs said, "but he played pretty well after that."

Hope was high at the pro-am draw party Tuesday evening. "Have some fun, make some birdies," master of ceremonies Andy North told the audience.

The first command was within reach. And so were the shrimp.

--Bill Fields

Jerry Pate went almost 24 years between his last victory on the PGA Tour and his first on the Champions Tour, so what if almost 24 months elapsed between his first senior win and Sunday's triumph at the Turtle Bay Championship?

The oft-injured Pate, driven off the PGA Tour because of shoulder woes when he was only 28, kept his game tidy in extreme winds on Oahu that made the final round on Turtle Bay's Palmer course quite a challenge--from tee to green and once you got there.

"I was playing with Scott Simpson," Pate said Monday morning, "and he had about a 30-foot putt on the 16th hole and putted it right off the green into a hazard. The ball just kept going."

The final round began as a dogfight among the final pairing of Gil Morgan, Jim Thorpe and Bernhard Langer, but the trio had its problems. Pate, four strokes behind when the day began, birdied Nos. 8-10, then settled in with seven straight pars that pretty much settled the outcome, giving the 54-year-old his first win since the 2006 Outback Steakhouse Pro-Am at 5-under 211.

The week was an emotional one for Pate, who dedicated his victory to the memory of Justin Wilk, the 25-year-old son of his good friend Kevin Wilk, who died unexpectedly Jan. 8. "It was devastating for Kevin," Pate said. "He had gotten an e-mail from his son the day before he died, talking about much he was looking forward to this year, and then, boom, the next day they find him dead. I told Kevin I was going to Hawaii for two tournaments, and I was going to win one of them for Justin."

An Alabama physical therapist, Kevin Wilk guided Pate through many hours of rehabilitation following the golfer's shoulder surgeries in 2003 and 2006. "This game is so crazy," Pate said. "I won in Tampa two years ago then got hurt a month later and had to have another surgery. And then after being out of the game for six months, I kind of lost my putting. All last year I had a mechanical flaw--I was kind of dragging the putter grip back first and creating a bad angle with my left wrist. I tell you, I was missing putts from a foot. It's not like I was nervous and had the yips, I just mechanically couldn't release the putter."

Pate, 41st on the 2007 money list, finally figured out what was wrong with his putting stroke last fall, and he came into the new year confident that a career with so many detours might go smoothly for a while. Sunday's win makes him fully exempt and has broadened his optimism.

"I can challenge them," he said of tour standouts such as Jay Haas and Loren Roberts. "Those guys are great players. But history says that before I was injured, when my putting was solid, I could compete with anybody. This is exciting for me."

--Bill Fields

SONOMA, Calif.--It's impossible to watch Tom Watson in action at Sonoma G.C., in the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, and not think of his late friend and caddie, Bruce Edwards (right). Stricken with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Edwards was able to work for the last time at the 2003 Schwab Cup Championship. The progressive neurodegenerative disease took his life April 8, 2004. He was 49.

Watson has worked hard since Edwards' death, doing what he can to support research for a cure for ALS, a fatal disease that usually claims its victims three to five years after diagnosis. He remains heavily involved with Driving for Life, a fund-raising organization, but admits that medical progress has been slow in coming.

"Nothing of significance has come from any  drug trial with ALS," Watson said this week, "significance meaning a 7 percent reduction in the progression of the disease. Nothing. Zero. Nada."

Watson mentioned one study in which researchers hope they have discovered a protein that could lead to a vaccine to thwart an inherited form of ALS that accounts for about 10 percent of ALS cases. "All we've got is hope," Watson said. "We've never had anything more than hope with this thing. There's nothing out there. There's not a single thing that will stop the progression of the disease. You get it, and you're going to die. We're all going to die, but you get this stuff and you're going to die quick, within three to five years. With Bruce, it was a year and a half."

--Bill Fields
(Photo: Jonathan Edwards/Getty Images) 

SONOMA, Calif.--Pars don't figure to cut it this week at the Charles Schwab Cup Championship at Sonoma Golf Club.

"The course is playing very soft," said Tom Watson, who won here in 2005 on the strength of a final-round 64. "The greens are soft, the fairways are soft. The rough is tough, but the greens aren't hard. It's going to be a very low-scoring tournament."

The seniors' season-ender has been a low-scoring tournament since it settled here in 2003 after stints in Oklahoma City and Myrtle Beach. Jim Thorpe won with a 20-under 268 in 2003 and was 17 under when he won last year. Mark McNulty was 11 under when he won in 2004, and Watson won at 16 under.

"The golf course today was very, very scoreable," Loren Roberts said after his pro-am round. "I think you've got to be 4- or 5-under every day [to win] unless conditions change drastically."

The pristine conditions of the putting surfaces will help Roberts--and the rest of the 29-player field--go low. "They might be the best greens we play on tour," Roberts said. "They're fast. They're smooth. I like that."

Roberts enters the week with a 165-point margin over Jay Haas in the Schwab Cup season-long points competition, which he narrowly lost to Haas in 2006. Tom Watson (684 points behind) and Brad Bryant (697 behind) are the only other players with a mathematical chance to claim the $1 million annuity.

"I want to focus on winning the golf tournament," Roberts said. "I don't want to get caught up with trying to play Jay. I need to concentrate on winning the tournament."

While Mark O'Meara (13th on the money list) qualified but is playing in an event overseas instead, several other senior mainstays are absent after having failed to finish in the top 30. Allen Doyle and Tom Jenkins aren't here after playing eight straight Schwab championships each, Morris Hatalsky is absent after five straight appearances and Craig Stadler is missing his first after four consecutive starts here.

--Bill Fields