Road to PGA Tour starts here
When Jason Bohn hit six consecutive birdies last week on the front nine during a scorching final round 63 to finish tied for second place with wunderkind Masters champion Jordan Spieth and veteran Brandt Snedeker — behind winner Chris Kirk at the Colonial PGA Tour event in Fort Worth, Texas — Bohn was a walking billboard for not only the Canadian Tour, but also the Victoria Open.
Bohn won the Victoria event, now known as the Bayview Place Island Savings Open presented by the Times Colonist, back in 2000 at Royal Colwood and then shot an other-worldly 58 to win another Canadian Tour event in 2001. It’s been quite a journey since then, and it was even before that when Bohn famously won $1 million as a 19-year-old when he scored a hole-in-one during a contest. He went on to win two PGA events and more than $13.6 million in career earnings.
So, yes, the dream does start here.
It did for Bohn, who finished with a 14-under total with a sixunder final round 64, during his championship run around Royal Colwood 15 years ago.
“I felt it in my stomach,” Bohn told Times Colonist sports reporter Tom Hawthorn after that Victoria victory in 2000.
“I heard the noise and the cheers. That was awesome.”
Another Canadian Tour — Mackenzie Tour-PGA Tour Canada as it’s now called — product, home-country grown Nick Taylor of Abbotsford, won his first PGA Tour event and $720,000 by outlasting Bohn and Boo Weekley by two strokes at the Sanderson Farms event last November.
Spencer Levin, the 2007 Victoria Open champion at Gorge Vale, now also tees up regularly among the 25 Canadian tour alumni on the 2015 PGA Tour. There are another 40 Canadian tour alumni on the 2015 Web.com Tour.
Levin, Bohn and Taylor, the lat- ter a University of Washington Huskies graduate who played on the Canadian tour from 2011 to 2013, are just the tip of the iceberg.
Victoria Open alumni include the likes of Bohn, Taylor, Levin, Steve Stricker, Mike Weir, Stuart Appleby, Chris DiMarco, Scott McCarron, Kirk Triplett, Craig Parry, Tim Herron, Hank Kuehne, Ken Duke and Tim Clark.
Canadian tour alumni have amassed a combined 112 PGA Tour titles and more than $400 million in earnings.
Three Canadian tour alumni have won majors — Weir, Todd Hamilton and Michael Campbell.
That’s why the PGA Tour formalized the relationship in 2013, making it the PGA Tour Canada and the official springboard to the Web.com Tour, which in turn is the springboard to the big-league PGA Tour.
The Canadian tour lists an average of 11 players annually since 2000 who have gone from the Canadian tour to the Web.com Tour and an average of 2.5 Cana- dian tour alumni get on the PGA Tour each year.
Not everyone makes it, of course. But that in itself makes the stories that come out of the minor pros in any sport so compelling in their own way. Golf fans know what became of past Victoria Open winners such as Bohn, Levin, Stricker, Parry, Todd Erwin and Dave Barr. But whatever became of Jay Hobby, Scott Hend or Matt Jackson?
So, who knows what will become of 2014 Victoria Open champion Josh Persons’ pro golf career? At 31, maybe the 12-under 268 championship victory last year at Uplands is as good as it gets for the former NCAA University of Minnesota Golden Gopher. Or maybe there is time yet to become golden on the PGA Tour.
Sport is largely about the unknown, about what will happen next. So welcome to the chase, when the 2015 Bayview Place Island Savings Open presented by the Times Colonist, plays out this week.