Players take many paths to prosperous careers on the PGA Tour Champions.
Some come out of nowhere. Do you know who Steven Alker is? Alker is a New Zealand native who now lives in the Phoenix area. He never recorded a top-10 finish in 86 PGA Tour starts. Since joining the PGA Tour Champions last year, he has a win, two second-place finishes, a third and 11 top-10s in 12 events.
Some are still competitive on the PGA Tour when they turn 50. Steve Stricker is one such recent example. Stricker made more than $1 million on the PGA Tour in 2017 — the same year he became eligible for and joined the Champions Tour.
Some spend years in a state of limbo before gearing up for an opportunity at a second chapter. Their careers having gone sideways for one reason or another — their peak performance having faded into the distance — they can’t wait to turn 50. There are too many stories like that to list them all.
Jim Furyk and David Duval, two of the highest-profile entrants in this weekend’s Cologuard Classic at Omni Tucson National Resort, fit those last two categories to, well, a tee.
Furyk, the former University of Arizona standout, earned more than $2.5 million on the PGA Tour in 2019. In 2020, he took the PGA Tour Champions by storm, winning his first two events. He earned Rookie of the Year honors for the 2020-21 season.
Duval ascended to No. 1 in the world in March 1999 — when Tiger Woods was in his prime — and won 13 times on the PGA Tour, including The Open Championship in 2001. Duval never would win another PGA Tour event as injuries and other issues undermined his career. Since 2014, he barely has played any competitive golf.
Now Duval is back, at a course where he won the Tucson Chrysler Classic in 1998. As has been the case since they were teenagers, Furyk is among his friendly foils.
With the eighth Cologuard Classic set to begin Friday morning, we caught up with Duval and Furyk. Here’s how they got here.
Furyk’s furious start
Although he was still able to make cuts on the PGA Tour more often than not, Furyk had to accept reality as his 50th birthday approached: He simply couldn’t hit the ball far enough to compete with the young bombers who populate the Tour.
“It was time for me to turn a new page and start the next chapter,” said Furyk, who turned 50 on May 12, 2020. “There’s some courses (where) I can be competitive on Tour, but there’s not nearly as many as there used to (be).”
Furyk ranked 30th in driving distance on the PGA Tour Champions last season, averaging 275.7 yards off the tee. That figure would have ranked 194th on the PGA Tour.
Furyk made it look easy when he joined the PGA Tour Champions. He won The Ally Challenge in his debut in the summer of 2020 and the PURE Insurance Championship in his next start.
Furyk swears it was anything but. Those events happened to take place at courses where he had played well in the past. There was nothing easy about it.
Still, Furyk kept racking up top-10 and top-25 finishes. In July 2021, he won the U.S. Senior Open Championship.
Furyk finished last year’s Cologuard Classic tied for 17th, one of his worst performances on the PGA Tour Champions. He conceded that he might have put too much pressure on himself in his return to Tucson.
“My game wasn’t in great shape when I arrived here last year, and I probably tried a little too hard,” Furyk said. “You can’t play well every week. It’s disappointing.”
In reviewing his performance here, Furyk felt he could have been more aggressive off the tee. But heading into this year’s event, he hasn’t been driving the ball well. Furyk hit only 64.3% of fairways in last week’s Chubb Classic, well below his usual standard. He finished tied for 38th – the only time he’s been outside the top 25 in 28 starts on the PGA Tour Champions.
Furyk has been working hard on his driver. He also knows the course well. And he’s supremely motivated after last year’s middling performance in front of fans who were pulling for him.
“This is an event,” Furyk said, “that would be on a short list of ones I’d really like to win.”
David Duval will be competing for the famed Conquistadores helmet this week at Omni Tucson National Resort.
Matter of patience
Duval’s first two starts on the PGA Tour Champions didn’t go as well as Furyk’s. Duval finished tied for 34th and tied for 68th.
But the transition he’s attempting to make is much more difficult. Duval spent most of the past decade as a broadcaster for Golf Channel and ESPN.
“Not playing a lot of competitive golf for the last 10 years ... a lot of it’s going to be patience,” Furyk said. “It’s hard for a competitor to be patient. When I take four months off ... it takes a little while to get back. Ten years is a lot.”
Duval understands the challenge he faces. He’s embracing the opportunity to reunite with old friends, travel with his wife, Susan, and play a robust, regular schedule of 20-plus events. And, he added, “not taking it for granted like I may have towards the end of my full-time playing that I get to do this.”’
Duval has a way with words, and he easily could have spent the rest of his working life as a TV commentator. When asked to analyze his own career, Duval paused. It’s complicated.
“If you would have told me the day I turned pro that I would win 20 times around the world, get to world No. 1, win a Players (Championship), win a major, Ryder Cups, Presidents Cups, I would have probably taken it and said, ‘That’s awesome,’ ” Duval said.
“But when you’re in the midst of it, in the throes of it ... I look back thinking, ‘You know what? Had I not been hurt, had I not continually had these nagging little problems, I could potentially have been a 25-, 30-win player (with) two or three majors.’
“So I try to balance that out. If you really think about it, when you started, it’s a hell of a career. But at the same time, I think it could have been better.”
Duval was 29 years old when he won The Open Championship in July 2001. He would win only one other event worldwide, on the Japan Golf Tour, later that year.
Various comeback attempts fizzled. Duval earned more than $400,000 for three straight years from 2009-11, but he never recaptured his peak form.
Like so many before him, the PGA Tour Champions offers Duval a second chance.
Duval’s first two starts didn’t go “as well as I would have thought or wanted them to,” he said. “But at the same time, I’m trying to be patient with myself because I haven’t really done this in quite some time.
“It’s just getting the rust off more than anything.”
Former Arizona Wildcat Jim Furyk is back in Tucson this week for the 2022 Cologuard Classic at Omni Tucson National.
