tour tales & true viewpoint
Grant Dodd
The continual rise of average
Ian Poulter (left, with
Justin Rose) did a tough
apprenticeship before enjoying
the spoils of success.
W
hilst trying to bring some
order to a computer filing
system rapidly regressing
into anarchy, I chanced
upon the first article that I wrote for
Australian Golf Digest, way back
in 2002.
Titled, “The road less travelled,” it was
a travel diary-cum pro golf exposé of a
three month tour of duty on the European
Challenge Tour. A momentary glance
quickly became a self-indulgent diversion
from more pressing matters. For better
or worse, the time capsule nature of old
publications offers a strangely compelling
window of retrospectivity through which
to view the recent past.
More so, it seems, when that past is
yours. As the emotional highs and lows
embedded into each page morphed into
voyeuristic fodder, the starkness of one
detail in particular grasped the attention.
In a summation of the state of play
midway through the tour, I noted that
over a four-week period, my cumulative
score against par was 31-under. Solid
STUART FRANKLIN/GETTY IMAGES
playing, particularly by the standards of
the day, but sobering in the face of the
monetary compensation it afforded.
The total return for the four-week’s
work was €5,800. A more than fair
monthly salary for most, providing of
course that you didn’t have to pay
international and domestic airfares,
accommodation, ground travel, entry
fees and food for the period in uber
expensive continental Europe. Given
that all expenses were coming out of my
pocket, the ledger in this instance simply
recorded one result – a loss.
There’s an old saying that there is no
such thing as easy money in tournament
golf, a maxim bought into sharp refrain
by stories such as this. If anything,
this circumstance has magnified in
recent years. With the modern golf ball
making golf easier to play at the elite
level and more young players dedicating
themselves to pursuing a career in the
game from an early age, the sheer weight
of numbers seeking fame and fortune
in professional golf has seen the median
standard of play rise substantially over
the past decade.
As a result, 36-hole cut scores are now
regularly in the red, with the separation
between the leader and the cut line also
noticeably compressed. If you want a
representation of how this condition
manifests itself on the pro golfer P&L
sheet, then the 2010 Victorian PGA
Championship might well be exhibit A.
The cut in the $110,000 event held
in February was 4-under par, around
Sandhurst, a solid, contemporary golf
course measuring a tick under 6,300
metres. The halfway leader was 12-under
par, meaning that everyone who made
the cut was within eight strokes of the
lead with two rounds to play. For what
is effectively a secondary tour event and
field, such statistics are a stark reminder
of the standard of play now required to
simply gain entry to the ground floor of
tournament golf.
Come Sunday evening, if you had
managed to put together some solid
play to post 14-under par and finish
in a tie for 15th you would have been
rewarded with $1,400 in prizemoney,
inclusive of GST. It is hard to imagine
anyone not sleeping in their own bed for
the week being able to do much better
than breaking even financially with even
modest spending habits.
Few make the transition from amateur
ranks to the PGA Tour in a single leap,
and development tours all over the world
form an essential part of the schooling
process for those with the resolve to fight
their way from the ground up. Names
like Ian Poulter and Mark Calcavecchia
are just two who did the hard yards early
in their careers, pulling themselves up to
the elite level through sheer willpower,
self-belief and dogged determination.
But those qualities are in plentiful
supply amongst pro golfers. And
quantifiable or not, in isolation, resolve
has never been known to pay an airfare
or hotel bill. The passage of time has a
tendency to cast a rosy pall over the past,
but even the glow of reminiscence can’t
mask the brutal economics of life for pro
golf’s underclass.
Grant Dodd played in the 1997 and
1998 British Opens and is now a
commentator for golf broadcasts on One
and Ten. To ask Grant a question, visit
http://grantdodd.blogspot.com