Golf season teeing off on optimistic note
With financial lifeline from PGA, circuit could become feeder to Nationwide series
This year, it truly is the Canadian Tour. That hasn’t always been the case in recent years, when this country’s professional golf tour made stops in southern locales such as Mexico and Colombia.
But apart from a season- ending tourney near Palm Springs, Calif, in early November, this year’s Canadian Tour is a home and native land affair, beginning on Thursday in Victoria with the season- opening $ 150,000 Times Colonist Island Savings Open at Uplands Golf Club.
The number of tournaments is down and some of the purses have been cut, but for the first time in a long while, there seems some reason for optimism about the future of the struggling Canadian Tour.
Late last year, the PGA Tour stepped in to provide a financial lifeline of sorts for the Canadian Tour.
The PGA Tour has agreed to essentially bankroll the Canadian Tour this year and will spend the year deciding if it wants to forge a longer relationship with it.
There is reason for hope because the PGA Tour may need the Canadian Tour.
Beginning in 2013, the PGA Tour is dramatically changing its qualifying process. It is doing away with qualifying
school and wants its Nationwide Tour to serve as the feeder tour to golf’s promised land.
To make that work, the PGA Tour needs other feeder tours to get players onto the Nationwide Tour. It has already established what is called PGA Tour Latinoamerica, which has an 11- event schedule set for his fall in South America and Mexico.
The Canadian Tour is hoping it can also become a feeder tour to the Nationwide Tour, something commissioner Rick Janes has been lobbying for in recent years.
An affiliation with the PGA Tour would great news for Canadian Tour players, but it would also be good for business.
The Canadian Tour has never had any trouble attracting players.
The list of players who have gone on from the Canadian Tour to have success on the PGA Tour is a long and impressive one.
But that track record of producing top pros has not translated into business success.
Janes and the commissioners before him have not been able to sell the tour to corporate Canada. The Canadian Tour has survived in recent years in large part because of a now expired deal with the Golf Channel that was negotiated by former commissioner Jacques Burelle.
Janes and others believe a long- term relationship with
the PGA Tour could help loosen those Canadian corporate pursestrings.
For now, though, the Canadian Tour is forced to be a lean operation. With tournaments in Kamloops and Seaforth, Ont. gone, this year’s schedule features just nine full- field events.
The Canadian Tour hasn’t had a Lower Mainland stop since 2009 when the last City of Surrey Invitational was played at Hazelmere.
Purses this year range from $ 100,000 to $ 175,000. The Victoria event has been one of the Canadian Tour’s most successful and stable stops over the years. But its purse is down this year to $ 150,000 from $ 200,000 in 2011.
This week’s tourney will feature a number of B. C. pros, including Abbotsford’s Nick Taylor, Roger Sloan of Merritt and Victoria’s Cory Renfrew.
Taylor, who had success this past winter playing on mini tours in the southern United States, made six of seven cuts last year on the Canadian Tour and had two top 10s.
Sloan won the Kamloops event last year at Rivershore and finished fifth on the 2011 money list.
Renfrew, the former UBC star, earned his Canadian Tour card at last month’s qualifying school and will play his first event as a tour regular in his hometown.