The time is coming for rookies to make their move

text size

Jun. 30, 2008
By John Maginnes, PGATOUR.com Contributor

Some PGA TOUR cards are just being broken in halfway through the season. It is an interesting contradiction to earn your PGA TOUR card at the PGA TOUR Qualifying Tournament or through the Nationwide Tour and not get to plan a schedule or even know from week-to-week where you will be. It is all part of the process for playing your way to fully exempt status on the PGA TOUR, though,

Shamus/Getty Images

Australia's Matt Jones leads the rookie class of 2008 so far this season.

Q-school and Nationwide Tour grads are grouped together and given a priority number at the beginning of the year. The category is then placed behind the 125 fully exempt players as far as the priority to enter tournaments is concerned. When you consider that most events prior to Daylight Savings Time feature fields of 144, and, during the longer days of summer, the number rises to 156, the math simply doesn't work out. There just aren't that many spots available each week.

Periodically, throughout the year, there are re-shuffles of the Nationwide Tour and q-school grads to give the ones who have played the best a higher priority number. So just how important is getting off to a good start and maintaining a good number? Nicholas Thompson is at the top of the list and has played 21 tournaments on the PGA TOUR this season. Ron Whitaker, on the other hand, hasn't played well and has made only 11 starts through last week's Buick Open. As with everything else when you make your living on the PGA TOUR, if you don't like the situation you're in, play better. That is easier said than done, though, especially if you aren't getting into golf tournaments.

But there is still time for those players well down the reshuffle list, money list and FedExCup standings list to prosper. Their playing opportunities are about to increase. Take Nationwide Tour grad Paul Claxton, for example. He has only played two weeks in a row once this year. But following this week's AT&T National, a field from which he will be absent, Paul should get in four tournaments in a row. Of course, players like Paul and Ron have the option to fill in their early schedule with starts on the Nationwide Tour. That can bring up a different set of problems, though. What if you play great on the Nationwide Tour and poorly on the PGA TOUR? Where do you play then?

The reality is that when you are playing out of the Nationwide Tour/q-school category on the PGA TOUR, you aren't going to get that many opportunities to play early in the year. Following the U.S. Open, though, the fields open up -- especially now with the Fall Series that so many players used to finish off the season successfully last year. In 2006, prior to the inaugural FedExCup campaign, Troy Matteson was not on anyone's radar screen. But he turned his year -- and his career -- around with a closing stretch that included a win at the Fry's.com Open. With five tournaments left, though, Troy was without a top-10 finish and was well outside the top 125 on the money list. When he finished with five top-10s and that victory, Matteson vaulted to 36th on the season-ending money list.

Last week at the Buick Open, some new names crept up the leaderboard. Rookie Matt Jones had missed seven of his last eight cuts but turned things around with the second top 10 of his TOUR career. Brett Rumford started the 2008 season with his only top-10 finish at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, then missed eight cuts in his next 12 starts. He, too, put together a nice tournament at Warwick Hills and came away with his second-best finish of the year.

All the Nationwide Tour and q-school grads can expect to get into the John Deere Classic, which is played the week before the British Open. And opposite the British Open is the U.S. Bank Championship in Milwaukee, which is another favorite among players. The RBC Canadian Open and Reno-Tahoe Open round out a comfortable stretch for these players who desperately need some quality finishes to edge closer to exempt status on the PGA TOUR. Only a couple of the names at the top of the reshuffle list have made enough money at this stage of the season to finish comfortably inside the top 125 on the money list at year's end. The rest of the players, some of whose PGA TOUR careers will only span this season, will have the opportunity to make up for lost time in the coming months. And you will become familiar with some of these young men who will carry the torch for the PGA TOUR into the future.