By Peter Owen
ASK any 16-year-old with a scratch handicap what they’d like to do with their life and they’ll tell you they want to be touring professionals – preferably on the US PGA Tour, contesting the world’s top tournaments.
There are thousands of them throughout Australia, highly talented young men and women, practicing hard, consulting their coaches daily, working out, eating the right food, doing everything they can to improve their game.
And with so many outstanding junior programs in place at golf clubs in every state we’re producing more and more of these prodigies.
Sadly, though, only a small fraction of a miniscule percentage of them are going to live out their dreams – the others finding work in pro shops, playing the pro-am circuits, becoming instructors or, more often than not, abandoning any thoughts of a career in golf.
It’s always been that way, of course. Only the most committed, focused and talented will make it onto the world stage. Many try; few succeed. Former Aussie star Stuart Appleby once told me that the difference between a scratch golfer and a touring pro was greater than the difference between a scratch golfer and an 18-handicapper.
The path to success, however, has been made clearer and more certain by the initiative of Golf Australia, the PGA of Australasia, the WPGA, and their admirable sponsors, in introducing a genuine summer golf tour in this country.
Old-timers will recall that Australia once supported a strong national tour – a schedule of state championships that attracted our best golfers and a few internationals, and a handful of marquee events contested not only by the best of the Aussies and Kiwis, but by planeloads of genuine world superstars.
The Australian Masters was an event of international stature, and the Australian Open was so highly regarded that Jack Nicklaus, who won the event six times, once referred to it as the ‘world’s fifth major’.
Those days are long gone, our once strong tour decimated by dwindling sponsorship dollars and the competition from cashed-up overseas tours – particularly the US Tour, which changed the dates of its schedule in such a way it prevented international players from making a summer excursion to Australia.
But things are on the way back. The PGA Tour of Australasia, sponsored primarily by ISPS Handa and Webex, has become a vibrant, popular and well-supported tour, with strong fields, keen competition and regular television coverage.
Beginning with the Western Australian PGA Championship in October, this year’s tour included 16 events and offered prizemoney of more than $8.6 million. And the Cathedral Invitational at the new Cathedral Lodge and Country Club provided a 17th event, worth $300,000.
Our female pros were able to contest the Webex TPS series, played for $420,000 in the Victorian Open, $150,000 in the Women’s NSW Open and $45,000 in the Melbourne International.
By international standards that’s still modest with our richest event, the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland, offering just $2 million – well short of the string of $20 million tournaments that LIV Golf has forced the US Tour to offer.
But ours is in many ways a development tour – a place for the best of those aspiring youngsters to test their game and see if they have what it takes to make the next step towards an international career – in Europe, the US or Asia.
It also provides welcome opportunities for our ‘journeymen’ pros to make a living out of a game that can be financially brutal. With regular tournaments – most offering prizemoney of at least $250,000 – over a five-month period, our pros won’t grow rich, but they’ll at least have a chance to make a living.
We’ve also become world leaders in developing mixed-gender events, where female professional golfers get to compete alongside men in the same event and for the same prize pool – with the girls showing that they’re quite capable of matching it with the boys.
It’s an initiative that reflects the worldwide trend towards gender equality and will inevitably be copied by other world tours.
Our two biggest events – the Australian PGA and the Australian Open – were co-sanctioned with the DP World Tour, which has the dual benefit of attracting better players and giving the winner immediate access to what used to be the European Tour.
For Jed Morgan, who won the Australian PGA early last year, it got him onto the lucrative LIV Tour.
The golfers who fill the first three positions on the Australasian Tour’s Order of Merit gain membership of next year’s DP World Tour and the OOM winner gets a start in this year’s Open at Royal Liverpool.
These are enormously important benefits to professionals seeking a pathway to the big time.
We need to add lustre – and prizemoney – to our major events, the Australian Open and the Australian PGA and, hopefully, one day soon, resurrect an event like the Australian Masters. We should also do what we can to foster closer ties with the US PGA and see if we can get at least one of our events sanctioned by the Korn Ferry Tour.
But we’ve come a long way in a short time, and those organisations responsible should be proud of what they’ve done.
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