Turning 50 is one of those milestones in life that the average person approaches with trepidation, but you ask any elite professional golfer who’s already rounded third base, and that 50 mark can’t come quick enough.
If they’ve had a good enough career to step right onto the PGA Champions Tour, then they become the young gun once again, with the stamina, the speed and the sharpness to make hay while the sun shines.
And the rewards are bountiful.
Take Steven Alker, for example. The Kiwi earned his first PGA Tour card ahead of the 2003 season and immediately fell back onto the Korn Ferry Tour – the Nationwide Tour as it was then known – and it was more than a decade before he played his way back onto the big league again. In total, he’s played 87 PGA Tour events in his career, and taken a total of $841,849 in prize money.
He’s played almost four times that many events on the Korn Ferry Tour, earning $1,477,017 from 304 starts, and had missed more cuts than he’d made in the two seasons prior to turning 50 in July 2021.
Over the next four months, Alker played in 10 events on the Champions Tour, had a win, a runner-up and seven further top-10 finishes and amassed $1,146,207 in prizemoney – more than he had in his entire career on the main tour.
Fast-forward three years, and he’s taken almost $10 million in on-course earnings, and over $2 million more in end of season bonus payments. Not bad going for a player who’s only played in seven major championships and only made the weekend twice.
But it’s not just the early-50-something players who are capable of winning, though the likes of Alker, Pádraig Harrington, Y.E. Yang and Richard Bland – all 54 or younger – have combined for more than half-a-dozen wins this year. Stephen Ames won three times in 2024, the second of which came on his 60th birthday. 61-year-old Rocco Mediate won last month, and Paul Broadhurst won twice at the tender age of 59.
But none of these can compare to Bernhard Langer, who just secured his 47th Champions Tour win at the age of 67. For 18 straight seasons, the German has picked off at least one win, with 2017 being the standout year when he won seven times including three of the five senior major championships.
He’s also shot his age or better 22 times on the Champions Tour, doing so on three occasions in the last week, the best of which saw him beat it by three on his way to a 64 in round two. He’s also earned more than $37 million on the Champions Tour alone.
To put his longevity in context, Harrington would need to average three wins a year for the next 13 seasons to surpass his victory tally, and there’s every chance that Langer will add to his as he’s undoubtedly got that half-century of wins in his sights.
I haven’t always been the biggest fan of the Champions Tour – that Alker was able to go from being an average-at-best Korn Ferry Tour player and immediately become one of the top dogs on the seniors’ circuit suggests that the prizemoney on offer is generous to say the least – but, without it, we wouldn’t truly be able to appreciate the brilliance of Langer’s career.
Sure, two Masters wins and 17 other major top-10s, along with 42 European Tour wins and 10 Ryder Cup appearances mean he’d rightly be regarded as one of the game’s legendary figures, but he’s held in ever higher esteem because of the Champions Tour and for that reason alone, it’s a tour worth having.
And bear in mind that in just over 12 months’ time, a certain Tiger Woods will celebrate his 50th birthday and completing the USGA set of US Junior Amateur, US Amateur, US Open and US Senior Open titles will be one of the big goals left for the game’s biggest superstar.
And watching Tiger Woods play golf will never get old. I don’t care if he’s riding in a cart and playing against men old enough to draw a pension.
Just don’t expect him to turn 50 and start dominating like he once did on the PGA Tour. It’s too competitive for that, and the likes of Harrington, Ernie Els, and Langer will be there to make sure.
And that’s about the highest compliment you can pay to the Champions Tour.
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