While the PGA Tour is in the midst of the FedEx Cup fall series, a time when many of the game’s biggest stars rest up at home, the PGA Tour Champions is the opposite: the senior tour is grinding out the final two regular-season events before the year’s finale, the Charles Schwab Cup Championship, in which only the top 36 players qualify to compete.
Those 36 players are also the only players who secure their cards for the following year. That number stands in stark contrast to the number of players who keep their cards on other worldwide tours. On the PGA Tour, it’s 125 players. On the DP World Tour, it’s 110, and on the Korn Ferry Tour, it’s 75.
One player who’s keenly aware of what’s at stake for the 50-and-over circuit this week and next is Padraig Harrington, who described the PGA Tour Champions as “the hardest tour to keep your card in the world” while speaking on the range at the Dominion Energy Charity Classic in Virginia on Wednesday.
“We’re in the playoffs and I’m only on the tour a few years, and I’m only starting to realize, this has got to be the hardest, tightest tour to keep your card on in the world,” Harrington said. “Thirty-six guys keep their card. And even if you win, you only get one-year exemption.
“At the start, I didn’t know. But now I’m seeing people I’m playing with, and they’ve had a good year, and then the following year they just play average, average, and they’re gone,” he continued. “And some of them will never get a second chance.”
For players who don’t make the top-36 cutoff, Monday qualifiers and sponsor’s exemptions are options. But even the annual PGA Tour Champions Q-School is no guarantee, as it only admits the top five finishers.
“This is really cut-throat,” Harrington said. “Thirty-six to keep your card is very, very tight. It doesn’t take much for you to drop out of that 36. So that’s why you see the guys out here practicing. And if you’re not one of the guys practicing, somebody else will do it for you. And that means you’ll slip out of your position.
“Guys practice just like they practiced on tour. They actually maybe even work a little bit harder out here.”
Why do players on the senior tour grind so hard? Harrington offered yet another thoughtful reply.
“I think they feel like there’s a limited life out here,” he said. “I think you get to the PGA Tour. You think everything is rosy and you’re always going to be on the PGA Tour. But when you get to the Champions Tour, you realize that you’re getting old, you’ve only a few years and it will, you know, you might get three, four years before you’re gone, because you’re not going to be as competitive at 56, 57 years of age as you were at 50. So they understand that they get this one opportunity and they’ve got to make the most of it as quick as they can as soon as they can.”
As Harrington noted, time marches on. And each year, the player pool widens to welcome the next crop of eligible 50-year-olds.
“There’s always new guys, always fresh guys coming out,” Harrington said. “I think I counted seven rookies in the top 36. So that’s seven guys who are gone.
“So yeah, it really, really is cut-throat out here. Very, very difficult.”
The Dominion Energy Charity Classic kicks off on Friday, followed by the final regular-season event on the PGA Tour Champions, the Simmons Bank Championship, in Little Rock, Ark., next week. The Charles Schwab Cup Championship will be played November 7-10 at Phoenix Country Club in Arizona.
