Lorne Rubenstein

Survival of the Fittest
November 30, 2005

When it comes to survival of the fittest, perhaps no professional sport can compare to golf.

A golfer either evolves to make it on the PGA or LPGA Tours, usually by getting through qualifying school, or it's down the road and off the course. Golf does allow people who live in fantasy worlds to keep trying year after year, mind you, so it's also easy to blow a life in the game.

Photo: © Scott Halleran/Getty Images Seven-time PGA Tour winner Bill Glasson is at the PGA Tour Q-school this week trying to resurrect his career.

I was thinking about these profound matters when I grabbed my Globe and Mail early this morning off the drenched front steps at home.

Dreary doesn't begin to describe the solid wall of gray that has descended over Toronto. T.S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month, but I'll opt for November. And Eliot wasn't even a golfer, or golf writer. If he were, he'd have known April is the kindest month, especially in Canada when the golf season starts.

But back to the weighty subject of the evolution of a golfer.

The PGA and LPGA Tour qualifying schools that are on this week, and every tournament and every season, for that matter, demonstrate that golf provides no guarantees.

This sets golf apart from a sport such as baseball, for instance. I just about gagged on my coffee when I read in the paper today that the Toronto Blue Jays have signed B.J. Ryan from the Baltimore Orioles to a five-year contract worth $47 million. That's the biggest contract ever for a relief pitcher.

This works out to more than nine million bucks a year, and it's guaranteed. That's a million short of what Tiger Woods, the best golfer in the world, made for leading the PGA Tour's money list this year.

Woods at least had to earn that on the course, and will have to earn his big bucks the next few years also. Granted, he makes something like another $80 million off the course, but the point is that golf doesn't come with salaries.

Photo: © Scott Halleran/Getty Images Bill Haas, son of Jay Haas, tried hard not to be at Q-school, but there he is, trying to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.

Or forget about Woods. He's on another planet when it comes to what he's making.

The whole point about pro golf is that players have to perform to get paid. This renders them a fragile bunch. Even the wealthy ones know they can lose their games at any time, and then the paydays will stop. Money in the bank doesn't prevent twitches in the putting stroke.

Golf should never, ever, provide guaranteed income.

PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem's job is, in part, to line the pockets of the players. That's why he's come up with the FedEx Cup that will start in 2007 and will put more money in the bank for more players. But this won't change the fact that there are no guaranteed salaries in tour golf.

Over the years I've heard various proposals that would guarantee paydays.

Sometimes you hear that anybody who gets into a tournament should be paid, whether or not he makes the cut. But that would start to chip away at what still makes golf interesting.

The game is all about earning it, not having it given to you. The game is all about the possibility that a player can lose it at any moment and drop into oblivion.

There's something else, too. Tour golfers have their freedom. They don't have to play this week in Toronto and next week in Phoenix and the next week in Los Angeles. They don't have to attend team meetings, except for the occasional mandatory players' meeting. Coaches can't bench them, and managers can't trade them.

Only their games bench them. Again, it's survival of the fittest.

The players know this and most of them scream when the idea of their being forced to play each event every four or five years comes up. Tom Watson didn't like the idea proposed years ago to split the tour into two leagues, with some crossover and mandatory play.

Photo: © Jeff Gross/Getty Images Steve Schneiter is back to Q-school for the 19th time in his career.

Players hated being told to fill out their ShotLink cards.

They're not exactly rebels—far from it. But tour players love to trot out the fact that they're independent contractors who can go where they want to go when they want to go there. Nobody tells them to do anything.

Well, the PGA Tour might tell them, or suggest something, but it's up to them to handle their careers as they see fit. It's difficult to see even the lesser players giving up their freedom for a guaranteed paycheck.

Anyway, I hope that never happens. That wouldn't be professional golf as we know it. Even now, tournaments without cuts don't, well, really cut it.

I don't know about you, but one of the reasons I find the Tour Championship less than compelling is because it includes only 30 players and there's no cut.

Then there's the Champions Tour, the no-cut mulligan for the 50 and over set. It's always been caught between being a vehicle for entertainment and a place where tournaments are legitimate contests.

Photo: © Michael Cohen/Getty Images Dan Forsman won the Pennsylvania Classic just back in 2002 but is back to Q-school after finishing 190th on the PGA Tour money list.

The powers-that-be should expand the fields and institute cuts. The tournaments will then appear less like fraternity gatherings and more like survival of the fittest competitions—real golf, that is.

There's one sense in which the Champions Tour does provide real golf: it offers so few spots in its qualifying school. Only seven golfers get through and win their full playing privileges for the following year.

Now that's survival of the fittest.

That's cut-em-out-if-they-can't-cut-it golf. That's proper tour golf. Brutal, and not made for the brittle.

Real tour golf should be intelligently designed, then. Only then are golfers forced to be strong and to see if they have what it takes to survive.

The game has always been about getting it done without the security blanket of a guaranteed cheque. Little by little, that's changing, sure. Anybody who wins a tour card will make at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars from equipment contracts and other endorsements. But that disappears if the player doesn't keep the card.

Tour golf is best when players sweat over shots. Skins games don't go skin-deep when it comes to that. The sweat factor provides drama to Q-school and majors and also the last few holes of most tournaments.

Here's the late and great Canadian golfer George Knudson from an unpublished manuscript. He was describing when he went out on tour 50 years ago for the first time, in the winter of 1956. Knudson was still a teenager.

"I saw how hard players worked," Knudson, who hitchhiked from his home in Winnipeg to hit the tour, said. "I found out what it was like to live in flea-pit motels, eat in dingy restaurants. I wanted it."

Raw, isn't it? That's the way golf should be, raw and pure and down to the bone. Vital, digging at one's vitals. Q-school slices to this edge.

Knudson, by the way, went on to win eight PGA Tour events. No Canadian has won more. He wanted it. He got it. He survived. Q-school's here. Let's see who survives.

The Mighty Have Fallen
Past PGA Tour winners at the final stage of Q-School

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