ANCASTER, Ont. - Jim Rutledge has a great chance to be a kind of Crash Davis of pro golf, the career minor leaguer who worked his way to the big time.

He’s back in Boise this week on the Nationwide Tour after missing the cut at the Canadian Open, but the native of Victoria, British Columbia, is looking toward what is almost certain to be a debut on the PGA TOUR as a 47-year-old rookie in 2007. He will have been a professional longer than many of his fellow first-year men will have been alive.

“It would be nice -- and I hope it will be nice -- to do this every week, to get used to everything that goes along with the whole show,’’ Rutledge said last week at Hamilton Golf and Country Club, where Jim Furyk won the event Sunday by one stroke over Bart Bryant.

“I’m really, really looking forward to it. But on the other hand, I’m looking forward to trying to finish the year off in style. I want to ultimately finish in the top-five at the end of the year, because that will get me an earlier start. But to do something like that at this age, it would be a lot of fun, I think. A lot of fun.’’

Rutledge, who has been, by independent count, to PGA TOUR Q-school 13 times without success, is playing his way on to the world’s biggest tour from the Nationwide Tour. He is the seventh-highest money earner this year on a circuit that graduates its top 20 money winners to the big time.

He won his first Nationwide Tour event this year, the IMG New Zealand PGA Championship, to get off to a hot start. After Boise this week, he will take a break, then expects to compete in four of the final five events preceeding the Nationwide Tour Championship at The Houstonian.

“I’m trying to keep my foot on the gas. We’ve got about seven weeks to go and there’s a lot of guys in the same position. Everybody is fighting to stay inside that top-20.

“I’m just having fun with it. It would be a great scenario to finish inside the top-20.’’ He said he didn’t consider bypassing the Canadian Open, which he plays most years, in favour of trying to pad his account on the Nationwide Tour in Utah.

“No regrets at all. You try real, real hard and sometimes things don’t work out,’’ he said. “I didn’t play poorly, but I didn’t give myself enough birdie opportunities. Three birdies just doesn’t cut it for two days.

“If I can come (to the Canadian Open) I’ll always come. I’ll never hesitate. It’s still a great experience for me. I’ve played in it quite a few times, but it’s always a rush to play in your national open.’’

Rutledge’s story obviously is one of perseverance. Twenty years ago, he looked like a can’t-miss player who somehow missed. He had some bad luck along the way, but that’s not unusual. He figures now that perhaps he simply got too comfortable making a good living on smaller tours.

“Maybe my priorities were in a little different line than they should have been. I was having lots of fun and playing a good tour in Asia. I was playing in Canada and I was enjoying it. I was having success,’’ he said. “So going to the PGA TOUR Q-school more or less became a habit at the end of the year. I don’t think it ranked high enough on my list, because I knew if it didn’t work out, I was very, very content going back to where I was.’’

Jim Rutlege lifts the trophy after his victory at the 2006 ING New Zealand PGA Championship (Topic/WireImage)

One year he got close to final stage of Q-school, then was injured a couple of weeks before, damaging a hand in a fall that kept him out of action for almost a year.

“We were in Trinidad playing in a golf tournament and we were just at the beach after a round of golf. We went to go down to the beach and I slipped and fell down a cliff and landed on my hand. Just a fluke,’’ he said of the resulting fracture. “Big screw-up, yeah. I was playing good at the time.’’

His wife Jill, a recent cancer survivor, told him to hang in.

“She’s been a pretty good fighter herself,’’ Rutledge said. “”She’s been through breast cancer and the loss of her father, who she was very, very close to. He was going through the same things she was at the same time, chemotherapy and radiation. She’s the one that has been very, very supportive, along with the rest of the family: Just stay out there, keep hammering away and good things will happen.’’

Rutledge said things came into better focus for him when he read the book Fearless Golf by Dr. Gio Valente, which put him on a different mental path to the course.

“The bottom line is, if I’m worrying about Mike Weir and Mike Weir is worrying about me, who’s worried about playing the golf course? Nobody is. If you just play the golf course one shot at a time and don’t worry about the leaderboards, don’t worry about anything else, just play the golf course to the best of your ability one shot at a time, day to day, and see what happens at the end of the week. It just clicked for me.’’

Rutledge doesn’t worry about making up for lost time or any of that. He’s facing only one direction now.

“I can’t look back and I have no regrets,’’ he said. “I think I have to look forward.

“I finally got myself out there, one way or another.’’