O'Meara makes his Champions Tour debut ready to win soon  PGATOUR.com Editorial Coordinator There were only three players who won two majors during the same calendar year in the 1990s -- Nick Price, Mark O'Meara and Nick Faldo. Can you guess what they have in common? All three turn 50 this year and will be eligible for the Champions Tour. That's how stacked the Class of 2007 is.  No less than Hale Irwin is predicting big things from Mark O'Meara. (WireImage)
This week, O'Meara, a 16-time PGA TOUR winner, will play in his first Champions Tour event at the Outback Steakhouse Pro-Am. Price made his debut last week at the Allianz Championship while Faldo turns 50 in July. "My expectation on the Champions Tour is to try to get back to playing some good competitive golf and trying to win," O'Meara said "Golf, you don't win a lot; it's always nice to be able to stand there on Sunday afternoon and hoist a trophy. I kind of miss that and hopefully I can get my game into a position where I can get that feeling again." The last time O'Meara was a rookie, back in 1980, his life looked a little different. He had a young wife, no money and drove a Volkswagen Rabbit. And, in those early years, golf wasn't so much about winning as it was trying to survive on the PGA TOUR. Even after he won his first tournament -- the 1984 Greater Milwaukee Open, where he had the "unreal" experience of being paired with and beating Tom Watson -- O'Meara wasn't sure of his future. "I thought, 'Well, no matter what happens, at least I won one tournament on the PGA TOUR. That's a great accomplishment'," he said. "You know, I've had my up and downs in my career. For a long time I was pretty consistent, but I've had my moments where I struggle like all of us do in life at whatever it is." Not that a glance at his resume shows those struggles. He played on five Ryder Cup teams from 1985-1999, as well as on the 1996 and 1998 Presidents Cup squads. His first PGA TOUR win came in 1984 and his last in 1998. O'Meara, who views golf as a "global game, also feels his 13 international victories were an important part of his career. He first won overseas in 1985 and earned a victory as recently as the 2004 Dubai Desert Classic. The last tournaments O'Meara won on the PGA TOUR were the 1998 Masters and the 1998 British Open. Not too shabby for a guy who was 41 at the time. In fact, O'Meara became the oldest player to win two majors in the same year and was voted Player of the Year by the PGA of America and the Golf Writers Association of America. "Look, I never classify myself as a great player. You know, I think I'm a good player. I think I've had a great career, for me. But relative to the greats of the game, I mean, no, would not put myself in that category," O'Meara said. But, "to have made money doing this all along the way and to have started really with nothing and to be quite a bit better off now than I was when I came on the TOUR 26 years ago, I'm a lucky guy." If it took a bit of luck to win nearly 30 events worldwide, O'Meara must have had a leprechaun's worth when it came to pro-ams. He won the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am five times and the 1991 Walt Disney World/Oldsmobile Classic once, which O'Meara attributes to his outgoing personality and affection for socializing. "I spend more time thinking about them [the amateurs] and hopefully they are going to play well and less time worrying about me, and that just gives me a form of relaxation," explained O'Meara, whose may have made an inspired choice for his Champions Tour debut. "Maybe I'm not the type of person that can just walk down the fairway and totally stay focused all day long." That's one aspect in which O'Meara differs from his good friend Tiger Woods. Of course, that subject had to come up -- his inevitable, inescapable link to the No. 1 player in the game. Not that O'Meara minds those questions. "You know, he really in a roundabout way kept me going," O'Meara said. "Because before he burst on and became my neighbor and my younger brother, you might say, I might not have won the two majors. I mean, he pushed me for sure. It's been fun. I have no regrets." O'Meara has played three tournaments in 2007, two on the PGA TOUR and one abroad. Though he missed the cut at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic and the Dubai Desert Classic, he did tie for 39th at the Buick Invitational. Now he starts all over, but with a familiar group of guys. Hale Irwin, who has been out on the Champions Tour for 12 years, has seen many players come and go. The 44-time Tour winner expects big things from this O'Meara and the rest of this year's rookie class. "Mark is going to do well," Irwin said. "All of these guys have the kind of game -- they were not sort of a flash in the pan for a short period of time and disappeared. They were around for a long time at one stage or another or maybe more times than not, were at the top of the world or at least near the top of the World Rankings. So they know how to win." O'Meara's fellow players are glad to welcome "the rookie," as he's been called several times this week, to a new Tour. Peter Jacobsen has been looking forward to the late 2000s, with this influx of top talent, since he joined the Champions Tour in 2004. "O'Meara has been a close friend of mine since college golf, and he's closely followed behind by John Cook and then Jeff Sluman," Jacobsen said. "So you've got some great names, some great characters, some quality gentlemen that are going to come out on this Tour. And they are really going to enhance our pro-am experience, they are going to enhance our dinner experience, they are going to enhance the experience for everybody, not only the players in the pro-am, but the spectators and the sponsors, because of the quality people that they are." And, if anything, O'Meara thinks a change in pace on the Champions Tour is going to do him good. "I played golf now for 26 years as a PGA TOUR player, and now to have the opportunity to move over to the Champions Tour and compete with a lot of great players that I grew up admiring and certainly played with when I first came on the TOUR -- guys I didn't get to see because they moved on to the Champions Tour and I was still playing the PGA TOUR -- (is) going to be exciting," O'Meara said. "It's going to be fun. It's going to be new. "I haven't been too excited about too many things about my game, obviously, in the last three years or so. Any time you do something new, it kind of gets the juices flowing a little bit." Copyright 2007 PGATOUR.com. All rights reserved. |
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