Crushing it, from tee to green
Memphian Doug Barron finds PGA success on Champions Tour
When the PGA Tour introduced a tour in the early 1980s for those 50 and over, Doug Barron was approaching his teenage years. He was a fledgling youth golfer, whose dreams included winning events on the PGA Tour and, perhaps, taking home the trophy at one of the sport’s four majors. h The seniors tour, which became the Champions Tour and is now known as PGA Tour Champions, was in the distance, farther down life’s fairway than a John Daly tee shot.
For Barron, 52, the champions tour is an option he cherishes today. It is defining his career, bringing him titles that he did not receive earlier. When the Champions tour resumes next month at the Rapiscan Systems Classic in Biloxi, Mississippi, Barron will be a candidate to challenge for the title. He’s among the top-ranked golfers, placing 15th on the tour’s money list through the first three months of this season.
“Not many people get a second chance when they are 50 years old,” Barron said. “I wake up every day feeling so lucky and blessed. You don’t get chances like this in any other sport. It’s really cool. It’s been a great experience so far.”
Loren Roberts, 66, is a 13-time winner on the PGA Tour Champions, who won eight PGA Tour events during his career. He plays only a handful of events now and considers himself semi-retired. But he remained interested in Barron’s resurgence.
“I’ve watched Doug hit balls when we’re both in town and at (TPC) Southwind,” Roberts said. “He is really a great ball striker right now. He has really worked on his game. I don’t know if it was his teaching a lot of young kids, but something made him think about his golf swing. I’ve never seen him swing as good at it as he does now.”
Roberts said Barron can become more of a factor if he improves his putting.
“I am really proud of him,” Roberts said. “He was in a gray area (during the 2010s) as far as his game was concerned. For him to be able to put it all back together is impressive. He’s hitting it farther now than when he was on the regular tour.”
Roberts said Barron is more focused since returning to tour competition.
“There is a mental side to the sport, “Roberts said. “I just told him to work his butt off and for the next five or six years you won’t have anything to worry about. Tee to green, he is probably one of the best out there now.”
After failing to win an event during a lengthy run on the PGA Tour, Barron owns two champions tour victories. He nearly collected a third, falling in a playoff to German Bernhard Langer, the former World No. 1 and two-time Masters champion.
In Barron’s first career Champions tour win in 2019 at the DICK’S Sporting Goods Open in Endicott, New York, he fired three rounds in the 60s (65-68-66) to claim a two-stroke win over Couples. Others in the field he outlasted included Langer, Retief Goosen, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Colin Montgomerie. Couples, Langer, Goosen and Montgomerie are in the World Golf Hall of Fame and, along with Angel Jimenez, have combined for more than 200 career victories.
In 2021 at the Shaw Charity Classic in Calgary, Barron shot three 64s to win by two strokes over Steve Flesch, a fourtime winner on the PGA Tour and the owner of one Champions tour victory. Barron birdied each of the final three holes to post a 5-under 30 on the back nine.
“I’ve always been a competitor, but having this chance to compete again — and to compete against guys I maybe didn’t do as well against when I was younger — it’s kind of fun,” Barron said. “Now it’s kind of reversed.”
Barron’s success has been one of golf’s best, recent feel-good stories. Before winning his first tournament three years ago, he had made 376 starts across three sanctioned tours — 238 PGA Tour, 137 Korn Ferry (developmental tour) and 1 PGA Tour Champions — without a win.
The momentum created by that first victory remains three years later. Through four events in 2022, he’s posted four top 20 finishes, including a tie for fifth at the Hoag Classic in Newport Beach, California, earlier this month. And he’s played solid golf despite battling a nagging neck condition.
“My goal now is to just keep winning,” Barron said. “I don’t think about the future. I think day to day. I’m just happy to be out there.”
Barron thought he was done with professional golf when he stepped away from the PGA Tour for nearly seven years beginning in 2013.
He didn’t envision playing the champions tour.
“I was giving lessons,” he said. “Then I started hitting golf balls between lessons and I started playing well (with friends). I was hitting it so good I had to go play a few tournaments.”
“I don’t think about the future. I think day to day.
I’m just happy to be out there.”
He was approaching his 48th birthday and it struck him. The champions tour might be a realistic option.
“It took me about six months to get comfortable playing tournaments again,” Barron said. “Then one day it clicked. I won three mini-tour events before I turned 50. It was so cool. You couldn’t have scripted it any better.”
He came through qualifying to earn a spot in his first PGA Tour Champions event, the Senior British Open in England in 2019, shortly after turning 50. He immediately looked as if he belonged. He fired a final-round 67 to move swiftly up the leaderboard and challenge the leaders. He finished in a tie for fifth.
“I was one out of the lead with four (holes) to go,” he said. “But then I bogeyed two holes.”
A few weeks later, he played his second champions tour event, again after going through qualifying, and surprised the field with his win at the DICK’S Sporting Goods Open.
“I had to go through pre-qualifying and qualifying,” he said. “And then I won from start to finish.
“I get emotional thinking about it. I was just so happy, for my wife (Leslie) more than anything for all she has endured for my career. It was an unbelievable blessing to go out and win that tournament like that. It was a dream come true.”
While he never won a PGA Tour event, Barron had his moments, including a third-place finish at the 2005 Byron Nelson Championship in Texas. He also posted 12 career top 10 finishes. His rookie season in 1997 was impressive, too. He made 21 of 31 cuts to tie a record at the time for a tour rookie.
In 2005, he had three top 25 finishes and earned more than $730,000.
But, for the most part, the PGA Tour was a grind. He battled shoulder injuries and confidence issues.
“I didn’t always have it very easy, I was hard on myself,” Barron said. “And I wasn’t always the happiest person out there, to be honest with you. I didn’t have the mental game that I have today. I always tell people that I was a really good golfer on the PGA Tour, I just never believed it.
”You can get beat up (mentally) pretty easily when you’re good. You go out
there (to a tour event) and there’s another (155) guys who are just as good as you are, or better. It’s a hard place to stay.”
There were other obstacles he encountered, too. In 2009, the PGA Tour suspended him for a year for violation of its anti doping policies. His lawyer, Arthur Horne III, said Barron was taking testosterone and propranolol under the treatment of medical doctors to treat medical conditions, not to gain a competitive advantage.
Several years later, Barron stepped away from the sport. He returned home and did not play tour golf from 2013 to 2019. Instead, he reconnected with his family, spending time with his wife and sons, Buzz, 21, and Wiley, 15.
“One of my biggest regrets is that I missed, pretty much, my oldest son’s whole childhood,” Barron said. “That was hard. He’s in the military now. He’s serving overseas. He’ll be back in June.
“I have a better relationship with my youngest son and now I have a way better relationship with my oldest son. It was tough being away all the time. When I look back I think: Why would you be away from your kids all that time?”
When Barron is in town, he plays practice rounds at Windyke Country Club, Ridgeway Country Club, Spring Creek Ranch and TPC Southwind. Former University of Memphis golfer Jonathan Fly often works with Barron on his putting. The difference at this stage of his career is that Barron doesn’t practice incessantly, as he did when he was younger.
He’s found a golf/life balance and it seems to be working. He’s enjoying the competition and he’s relishing the success.
“He stayed around the game of golf (after he stepped away in his 40s), and that was good for a guy like Doug,” said Darrell Smith, former tournament director of the PGA Tour stop in Memphis. “It kept the fire burning for him.”
And, Smith said, it kept the fire burning for Memphis golf fans, who have taken pride in the accomplishments of Barron, Shaun Micheel, Loren Roberts, David Gossett, Vance Veazey and Casey Wittenberg in recent years and Cary Middlecoff from an earlier era.
“I’ll never forget that when Doug went to play in the Senior British Open (his champions tour debut in 2019), it was during the (Memphis PGA event at TPC Southwind),” said Smith, a financial advisor at UBS. “There was a group called the Captain’s Club on site (at TPC Southwind) and they told me they needed the TV turned to ABC. Doug was making a run. That’s when I knew Doug was going to make some noise at the latter end of his career.”
To retain his exempt status on tour, Barron has to finish among the top 36 on the annual Charles Schwab Cup points list. He had a year-end rank of 10th last season after finishing 34th two years ago.
There’s some pressure to maintain his status, but it’s pressure he welcomes. He’s having the time of his professional golfing life in his early 50s, striking a balance between golf and family as well as any 8-iron approach to the green.
“The champions tour has been a life changer,” Barron said. “No doubt.”
Freelance writer Phil Stukenborg is a former staff writer and deputy sports editor for The Commercial Appeal. You can reach him at philstukenborg@gmail.com.