I was watching the tournament at lunch today. Every now and then they would show the entire ranking, not just the top players. And some guy is dead last at the 143rd position. I mean no disrespect to those guys since they are probably better than most local duffers by a long shot. I’m sure it’s a life long dream to be a player in a PGA tournament. But do any of the lesser players slowly work their way up through the ranks? 143rd today, but next time he is at 120th. Then 99th - yay, top 100! How high can they go?
And conversely, do the best players start out in the top 20 or so and climb to glory? How were Tiger Woods, or Gary Player, Arnold Palmer etc in their first few tournaments?
For Woods, for example, he played in the Masters as an amateur at age 19 (at the time, he was going to Stanford, and on the school’s golf team), and made the cut (the first amateur to do so in decades). That same year, he made the cut at the Western Open and the U.S. Open
He turned pro in August of the next year (1996), at age 20, and won two PGA tournaments that year, with three other top-five finishes. He then won the 1997 Masters, at age 21 (the youngest player to ever do so). By June of that year, he was ranked #1 in the world.
The pithy answer is that there are 156 players in the field, so someone has to be back in the pack. Just like someone has to win the tournament.
The long answer is a little more complicated. This year’s PGA Championship has 21 Club Pros from around the country. Not Touring pros. These guys might not even be the best player at their club which they are representing. These guys are selling golf balls, sweaters, and giving lessons to the hacks at their club. (The reason why there are 21 club pros is a topic all by itself.)
Most of these guys are the bottom feeders this week with a couple of exceptions (so far). Other players in the bottom are Past PGA champions like John Daly, Padraig Harrighon, Shaun Micheel and Rich Beem. Well past their past playing day but still play because they have lifetime exemptions. and still other players at the bottom are players that are just not playing well. Players like Mattheiu Pavon and Camilo Villegas are just off their game this week. They have won PGA Tournaments in the last 8 months.
FWIW, this article talks about “late bloomers” in golf – guys who knocked around for a while before they started to put together wins, or took up the sport relatively late in life, and thus were delayed in their success. Famous players like Ben Hogan, Larry Nelson, and Steve Stricker got most of their wins in their 30s or later.
But, the article notes that late bloomers seem to be an endangered species.
Hogan and Nelson are bad examples because they lost several years of their primes to World War 2, as are a number of foreign-born players who may have gotten a late start in the States. In any event if you factor out those kinds of exceptions, it’s kind of hard to see that many late bloomers in the history of the sport. Golf has an aging curve just like any other sport does-it is certainly shallower than for most any other contest of course, but the chances of winning a major starts to fall off significantly after age 35, so someone who finally starts contending and winning at age 30 will only have 5 more years or so to make his (or her, if on the LPGA) mark.
What is the financial situation for the players at the bottom? Are they financing their tournament play with the income from their regular 9-5 job? Or are they making enough at the bottom of the rankings to fund the expenses need to play in the tournaments?
#125 on the 2024 money list is nearly $500,000, so the bottom feeders are doing alright. and the season is about half over. They have to pay their own expenses (which are not cheap) but they have opportunities to earn extra money by getting sponsorship money (clothes, equipment) and playing in corporate outings and exhbitions.
Players in the Top 125 have playing privileges for the next year.
To make a fairly obvious point, the players finishing in the 100s in a major like the PGA Championship are a different class of golfer than the players finishing in the 100s in a random PGA or LIV tournament during the rest of the schedule. And naturally, golf is a sport where even the very best players can have a bad weekend and miss the cut. You can be the #1 golfer in the world and find yourself 125 on the leaderboard on Friday any given week.
I can’t find any detailed stats for Ben Hogan, but it looks like he joined the PGA tour about three years after turning pro, finished in the top 10 once in his first five years, and then burst out with multiple wins in his tenth year as a pro.
Not to mention all the money games they play against club members and the like on the off days. Hustling at golf is a time-honored tradition. This money never shows up on tax statements or alimony papers, either.