In terms of numbers, Georgia does not have a huge presence on the Champions Tour, with just five residents of the Peach State holding status for the 2016 season.
But of the five, three qualified for the 2015 Schwab Cup Championship, the season ending event that features the top 30 money winners from the season. The other two Georgians are former major championship winners, with one of them joining two of the three Schwab Cup qualifiers in the tour’s season opening event this week in Hawaii.
The 2016 season begins with the Mitsubishi Electric Championship at Hualalai, the tour’s Tournament of Champions. Qualifiers for the event include winners of tour events in 2014 and ’15 and past major champions on both the PGA and Champions Tours.
Georgia’s three players in the field are 2015 multiple winner Billy Andrade, 2014 winner Scott Dunlap, and three-time major champion Larry Nelson.
Andrade, a long time Atlanta resident, won three times last season, highlighted by a season-ending playoff victory over Bernhard Langer in the Schwab Cup. It was Andrade’s second head-to-head win over the Champions Tour’s best player in less than three months, following an earlier one-shot victory over Langer in Seattle.
Following a winless Champions Tour rookie season in 2014, Andrade teamed with Joe Durant to win the Legends of Golf team event the week after the Champions Tour made its stop at TPC Sugarloaf in Duluth. After back-to-back finishes of seventh and fifth in the Senior Players and U.S. Senior Open, closing with a 63 in the latter, Andrade scored his first individual victory in Seattle, narrowly holding off Langer and Fred Couples, who had beaten Andrade in a playoff one year earlier after Andrade shot a final round 62.
In the season-ending Schwab Cup, Andrade trailed by four shots after 54 holes in Scottsdale, Ariz., but fired a 6-under 64 concluded by a birdie on the 18th, and again birdied the 18th – the first playoff hole – to take down Langer for a second time. He finished the year with $1.534 million in earnings to finish fourth on the final money list.
Dunlap won as a Champions Tour rookie in 2014 in Seattle in a playoff, and ended up 10th on the money list with $1.1 million. Despite not winning last year, he increased his earnings by a little over $10,000 and again placed 10th in earnings thanks to 10 top-10 finishes, including a pair of runner-up showings, a third and a fourth.
Like Andrade, Dunlap moved to the Atlanta area after playing collegiately in a neighboring state, with Dunlap settling in Duluth after playing his college golf at Florida and Andrade starring at Wake Forest. Unlike Andrade, who won four times in a successful PGA Tour career, Dunlap was a non-winner in seven seasons, only one of which came after 2002.
Dunlap won twice on what is now the Web.com Tour in 2004 and ’08, and scored a number of international victories early in his career in Canada, South America and South Africa.
Nelson, a long-time Marietta resident, won three majors championships among his 10 PGA Tour titles, among them the 1981 PGA Championship at Atlanta Athletic Club and the 1983 U.S. Open. He also won twice in the Atlanta Classic at Atlanta Country Club, the second coming in 1988.
After joining the Champions Tour full time in 1998, Nelson won 20 tournaments in his first seven seasons, 11 of those victories coming in 2000 and ’01. He led the tour in earnings in 2000, had four straight years in the top four on the money list and was eighth or better six times in seven years before his career began to wane after his 57th birthday.
Nelson has become an infrequent participant on the Champions Tour the last two years, making just 18 starts. His highlight of 2015 came in Minnesota, when he shot 66 in the second round to beat his age. Nelson, who turned 68 a little over a month later, remains very competitive in the Father/Son Challenge, losing in a playoff in an event he has won a total of three times with each of his two sons.
Georgia’s other two Champions Tour members are Savannah’s Gene Sauers and Larry Mize of Columbus.
This is Sauers’ fourth season on the Champions Tour, and he has qualified for the Schwab Cup all three years, placing 23rd, 14th and 29th on the money list. He started strong last year with a second place finish in Boca Raton, Fla., in his first start of 2015, and tied for third in the first Champions Tour major in Birmingham. He struggled for most of the remainder of the season, with a tie for ninth his best showing after mid-May.
Mize was 29th in earnings as recently as 2012, but has gradually slid down the money list since, and was a career low 64th last year. A tie for eighth in the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open was his first top 10 since Mize’s first start in 2013, but he had only one other top-20 finish.
At the outset of the 2016 season, Mize is 69th on the all-time money list, which will enable him to get into most of the Champions Tour events.
Three Georgians have qualifier status on the tour, including Web.com Tour veteran Scott Parel of Augusta, who turned 50 last year. Parel was 76th on the 2015 Web.com money list to narrowly miss retaining his exempt status, and made one successful qualifying attempt on the Champions Tour, tying for 44th in North Carolina. Parel has played on the tour since 2003, scoring his only victory in Wichita in 2013 at the age of 48.
Sylvester’s Sonny Skinner has made 29 starts on the Champions Tour since turning 50 in 2010, and competed in six events last year, including the tour’s three primary majors. He made the cut for a fifth straight year in the Senior PGA Championship, and narrowly missed the cuts in both the U.S. and British Senior Opens after playing his way into the fields in qualifiers. Skinner, a two-time Georgia PGA Player of the Year in 2006 and ’14, played four seasons on the PGA Tour in the 1990s and spent most of his 20 years as a tour player on the Web.com Tour, winning twice in the early ‘90s.
James Mason of Dillard was a recent inductee into the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame, with his stay on the Champions Tour nearing its end. Mason played his way onto the tour in 2002, winning a tournament after making the field in a Monday qualifier. He played the tour full time for nine years, and has been an occasional participant since 2011. His lone start in 2015 came in the Senior PGA Championship, and he will back in the field for that event in 2016 along with Skinner. Mason, who turned 65 early this year, shot a 65 in the finals of Champions Tour qualifying late in 2015.
The big story on the Champions Tour last year was the emergence of Jeff Maggert, who challenged Langer and Colin Montgomerie for Player of the Year honors with four wins, two of them majors including the U.S. Senior Open after joining the tour in 2014.
The most prominent addition for 2015 is two-time major champion John Daly, who turns 50 in late April, too late to compete at Sugarloaf. Two-time Masters champion Jose Maria Olazabal joins countryman Miguel Angel Jimenez on the tour this year along with former British Open champion Todd Hamilton.
The big change in the Champions Tour 2016 schedule is the addition of two Playoffs events the two weeks prior to the Schwab Cup Championship, with the top 72 players on the money list qualifying for the opening event. The tour will play at Sherwood CC in Los Angeles Oct. 28-30 and in Richmond, Va., Nov. 4-6, with the Schwab Cup set for Nov. 10-13 in Scottsdale.
A new tournament in Wisconsin in late June was also added to the schedule, and the tour is slated to return to China after last year’s event was cancelled. Tournaments in Chicago and San Antonio have dropped off the schedule, with the tour having 26 events on the schedule as opposed to 24 last year, when the tournament in China and one in Calgary were late dropouts.
The Champions Tour’s Atlanta stop has a new title sponsor, with the Mitsubishi Electric Classic to be played April 15-17 at TPC Sugarloaf.
Major championship sites for 2016 include the Jack Nicklaus-designed Harbor Shores in Michigan (Senior PGA, May 26-29), its second time as host in three years; the historic Philadelphia Cricket Club (Senior Players, June 9-12), the site of last year’s PGA Professional National Championship; Carnoustie (Senior British, July 21-24); and Scioto in Columbus, O. (U.S. Senior Open, August 11-14), which will go head-to-head with men’s golf in the Olympics.