With a few feel-good stories of Jose Coceres, Matt Kuchar and John Daly aside, this has been a quiet fall on the Tour. Whatever talk there was regarding the PGA Tour Player of the Year award was all but silenced when Tiger Woods' closest challenger, David Toms, withdrew from the Buick Challenge last week. Now, even a win at the Tour Championship won't be enough (but really, would it ever have been?) for Toms to overtake Woods, who has also wrapped up money title, scoring title and the PGA of America's Player of the Year.
Certainly, this year's Tour Championship lacks the same excitement from the previous one. Last year as in this year, Woods had all but captured every important award going in, but at least there was the anticipation of his chasing the 10th win of the year and $10 million mark (all figures U.S.) in earnings.
Speaking of earnings, the Tour Championship offers the winner $900,000. Since there is no cut in this event, the 30th-place finish gets a golfer nice little $80,000 as well. So the mood is definitely relaxed and loose at Champions Golf Club at Houston, Texas. In fact, if anything, Tour Championship is akin to a job-well-done sort of a reward to those who earned enough to be in top 30 on the money list.
Ranking top 30 on the Tour, however, no longer demands the same kind of respect that it once did. The purses are so huge nowadays that a slew of top-10 finishes will give many over one million in earnings, and eight players in the Tour Championship field, including fourth-ranked Vijay Singh, haven't won on the Tour this year yet. And thanks to the simultaneously-held Southern Farm Bureau Classic, it is possible for those who didn't qualify for the Tour Championship to actually finish the season inside the top 30.
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