Thanks to Tom Watson and Greg Norman the Royal & Ancient has modified it’s rule regarding past winners eligibility expiring after the age of 59. Now any former champion that finishes with a top 10 at The Open in the past five years gains a five year exemption. Peter Dawson, R&A chief executive said:

“We have introduced this exemption as a direct response to seeing two of our great Open champions, both in their 50s, challenging to win our championship these last two years. We rightly reduced the age of exemption for past champions from 65 to 60 two years ago and our intention was never to remove players still at the top of their game from competing in the Open.”

Personally, I think this is great for the game of golf. It’s great that these guys are still able to compete. What’s better than seeing the all time master of The Open Championship get one more run at St. Andrews? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that the length of the modern game is making it so that only young guys can win. There are tournaments (like The Masters) where that may be true. However, I see a lot of signs that the same equipment being blamed for making it a bombers game is keeping the older guys in it. Think I’m making that up? Check out this chart from PGATour.com: Winners by Age Bracket.

In the last 10 years 20% of the tournaments were won by players 40 years old or older. In the 10 years prior to that – the number was only 15%.

So despite a late 20’s / early 30’s Tiger Woods dominating the scene and longer more punishing golf courses, the older players on tour are doing more than holding their own: older players are using their experience to win.

Categories: Golf News

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 3:23 PM and is filed under Golf News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.