Amateur Nick Taylor, of Canada, chips out of a bunker on the 18th hole during the third round of the U.S. Open Golf Championship at Bethpage State Park's Black Course in Farmingdale, N.Y., Sunday, June 21, 2009. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)Morry Gash/The Associated Press
Whatever the training and coaching and programs an aspiring PGA Tour pro takes, it has to include serious competitive golf. The Vancouver Golf Tour (VGT), which ended last Thursday with its Tour Championship, has been operating since 2006 and is providing significant competition. That's also true of the Great Lakes Tour in Ontario.
Obviously, the more local and provincial tours there are, the higher the probability of Canadians reaching the PGA Tour. Abbotsford, B.C.'s Nick Taylor, the world's number-one ranked amateur for 21 weeks in 2009, chose the VGT's final event to make his professional debut.
Taylor shot 70 in the one-day tournament to tie for sixth with three players, and picked up $525 for his effort. He's headed for the first of the PGA Tour's three-stage qualifying school, but he's hardly the only VGT professional hoping to get through. Six other players who have been getting important seasoning on the VGT will be doing the same.
The group includes Bryn Parry, a teaching pro at Seymour Creek Golf Centre in North Vancouver and the winner of the Tour Championship.
Parry won the VGT's Order of Merit and with it, $5,000 towards his PGA Tour qualifying school. Parry has won this bonus the last three years.
Adam Hadwin, the hit at the RBC Canadian Open in July because of his spirited play, will also try to make his way through qualifying school. Hadwin, 23, tied for 37th in the Canadian Open. He was low Canadian. Hadwin, like Taylor, plays out of Abbotsford, B.C. He's played a variety of tournaments this season, including on the VGT, the Canadian Tour and his one impressive appearance on the PGA Tour.
Hadwin is third on the Canadian Tour's money list, having won $64,861.
There's one tournament left on the Canadian Tour. That's the inaugural Desert Dunes Classic in Desert Hot Springs, Calif. The purse of $150,000 (USD) is excellent for a first-year event. The VGT can't offer such a purse in its events, but it does offer those important competitive opportunities.
"Some great players are coming out of these corners," Fraser Mulholland, the head professional at Seymour Creek and the man behind the VGT, wrote in an e-mail. "It has been fun seeing the advancements that some of our players have made the past four years. It's just a matter of time before Canada explodes onto the world pro golf scene."
That remains to be seen. The VGT's motto remains "Prepare Tomorrow's Champions." The VGT means business, and that business is helping players find out if they have enough game to progress. They've learned plenty on the VGT. They're about to continue their developmental education, and learn a lot more, at the PGA Tour's grueling qualifying school.
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and, most recently, he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 11 books, including The Natural Golf Swing, with George Knudson (1988); Links: An Insider's Tour Through the World of Golf (1990); The Swing, with Nick Price (1997); The Fundamentals of Hogan, with David Leadbetter (2000); A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (2001); Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); and his latest, This Round's on Me (2009). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca .