The 2020 Cologuard Classic in four easy pieces:
1. Brett Quigley was sitting alone at the bar Friday night, eating at Bob’s Steak and Chop House at the Omni Tucson National. An hour or so earlier, Quigley shot a 64 to lead the Cologuard Classic.
Finally, someone recognized the 50-year-old “young ’un” from Rhode Island and asked if he wanted the big screen TV changed to the Cologuard Classic, which was then being replayed on Golf Channel.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “I know what happened.”
It would’ve been fitting if the bartender changed not the TV, but the music, playing Vince Gill’s “One More Last Chance.”
Quigley is like the bulk of 50-year-olds not named Ernie Els breaking into the PGA Tour Champions — one more last chance to get it right. After Quigley shot a 68 Saturday to remain atop the leaderboard, 14 under par, he described how unlikely it is for him to be leading not only Tucson’s tournament, but winning the Morocco Champions event a month ago.
“There’s a category, career-money earnings from the PGA Tour, and 11 guys play out of it every week,” he said. “I believe I was the last guy in that category.”
He won in Morocco, becoming golf’s version of the Marrakesh Express. Now he gets a two-year exemption to play in any event he chooses. The pressure is off.
Quigley earned about $11.5 million in his PGA Tour days. Let’s just say he wasn’t a star. He played in the old Tucson Open in 1997, 1998 and 1999 and missed the cut all three times. But his career didn’t go off the tracks until he was 40-something. He fell off a ladder and fractured three vertebrae. He had a stress fracture of his lower left leg that went undiagnosed for so long that he thought his golf career was over.
He went to the Mayo Clinic five times. The doctors were puzzled. It took seven years to get his body right again. The timing was perfect; he turned 50 in August, rediscovered his golf game and now he gets recognized at a bar in Tucson.
I’m not making this up.
2. The PGA Tour Champions — formerly the Senior Tour — is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It has been eons more successful than former PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman could have imagined in 1980.
The broad television and media exposure given to pro golf in the last four decades made Champions Tour players like Fred Couples, Steve Stricker, Miguel Angel Jimenez and Bernhard Langer as well-known and popular as almost any PGA Tour regular, with the exception of elite bluebloods like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.
You can make a good case that the ongoing Cologuard Classic has a better leaderboard than the PGA Tour’s Honda Classic in Florida.
Answer this: Who would you rather watch in Sunday’s final round if selecting from the top 10 at each event?
In Tucson, the best of the top 10 includes Stricker, Couples, Jimenez, Langer and John Daly.
In Florida, the best of the top 10 includes Luke Donald, Lee Westwood, Tommy Fleetwood, Charl Schwartzel and, for Tucson purposes, former UA golfer Rory Sabbatini.
I’ll take the older guys.
When Couples reached the 16th tee at Tucson National on Saturday, about 1,000 people in party suites near the tee and at the green started to behave as if it were the 16th hole at the raucous Waste Management Phoenix Open, where golf etiquette takes a break.
A woman behind the tee shouted “I love you Freddie!”It was soon followed by “let’s go Boom Boom!” and “hole-in-one, Freddie!”
When Couples half-chunked his tee-shot, finishing 30 yards short of the green, it created an audible gasp.
Finally, when Couples finished his 7-under 65, moving into second place at 12 under, he was escorted to an interview with Golf Channel as 40 or 50 fans waited in a staging area to get his autograph.
Let’s see Honda Classic contenders Brendan Steele, Mackenzie Hughes or Robby Shelton stir a reaction like that.
Is the Cologuard Classic the only Champions Tour event Langer has never won? It seems like it.
Ernie Els gets a ball out of the bunker during the Cologuard Classic hosted at the Omni Tucson National Resort, on Feb. 28, 2020.
3. Langer, 62, is the most successful “older” golfer in the world. He has won 40 Champions Tour events, earned $29.4 million and has the “it” factor.
On Saturday at the long, 587-yard No. 8 hole at Tucson National, Langer hit a rare wayward drive, crashing far to the right of a spectator path near the No. 3 hole. Muni golfers refer to it as being “in jail.” It bounced off a man’s leg.
It didn’t faze Langer. He ultimately hit a 3-wood over (and through) some trees and purposely into the No 3 fairway. He and his caddy walked alone, through spectators, to find his ball. Many in the gallery did a double take.
“Isn’t that Bernhard Langer?”
His ball had come to rest near the No. 3 tee. As he walked to his ball, he passed Els, who had just hit his tee shot at No. 3. Els looked at him as if to say “what are you doing?”
After pacing off the distance to the No. 8 green, Langer hit a spinner, a wedge shot that barely cleared a bunker and stopped 12 feet from the pin. Somehow he managed to par the hole.
No wonder he is within striking range for his 41st career victory.
4. The Tucson Open, by any name, began in 1945 at the downtown El Rio Golf Course. Over more than 70 years, the most worrisome time for pro golf in Tucson was 1999-2006, when the PGA Tour scheduled Tucson’s event opposite the WGC-Match Play Championship near San Diego.
Attendance plummeted. TV coverage was minimal. It was termed as being “encumbered,” but that was just a word for being lost.
Champions of the Tucson Open in those years included Frank Lickliter, Gabriel Hjertstedt and Garrett Willis. Zzzzz.
After the Match Play championship run, 2007-2014, was moved from Dove Mountain to other parts of the map, the Champions Tour seemed a numbing consolation prize. But it hasn’t turned out that way.
The crowds at Tucson National on Friday and Saturday were significant in size and enthusiasm. Buses ferrying spectators to and from the Foothills Mall and Pima College’s north campus were full much of the day.
The Champions Tour might not work everywhere, but it works in Tucson.
But then when it’s 75 degrees and sunny, why wouldn’t it?
