"Champions Tour" Is Just A Much Worse Name

This is kind of random, but I'm sitting here watching the U.S. Senior Open Championship and I heard someone mention that so-and-so had joined the Champions Tour earlier this year, and I had the following thought. The impetus behind the switch from "Senior Tour" to "Champions Tour" is the idea that it's more complementary to the players. "Senior Tour" sounds like a tour with a bunch of old dudes on it, guys who are washed up, past their primes, etc. "Champions Tour" sounds, or is at least trying to sound, like a tour full of all the great champions of yesteryear.

But there's a problem with this, and there is scarcely better demonstration of it than Michael Allen, the man currently leading the Senior Open by several shots. His career PGA Tour win total is... zero. He had one European Tour win, one minor-tour win (I believe the minor tour was called the NIKE Tour at the time), and that was it. He played in 369 total PGA Tour events, managed 17 top 10s including three runner-up finishes, and never managed to win a tournament. He was not what you'd call a "champion." Then, on January 31st, 2009, he turned fifty, so though not a champion, he was a senior. And he received a special invitation to play in the Senior PGA Championship (all the majors have kept the traditional "Senior" designation), because though he never won anything he did have a solid career earnings on the PGA Tour. He won that tournament, his first Champions Tour event. Since then he's won three other senior tournaments, has nine further top-10 finishes in the senior majors, and is leading the Senior Open right now.

And it is my impression that quite a few players on the so-called Champions Tour fit this profile. They never won any of the "real" majors. Maybe they snuck a tournament victory here or there, but not many. Some of them may not have been touring professionals in their youth at all. And some of them go on to have spectacular careers after turning fifty. The list of players with the most Senior Tour wins confirms this: Hale Irwin and Lee Trevino, No.s 1 and 2, are definitely "champions," but Gil Morgan, Miller Barber, Bob Charles, Don January, Chi-Chi Rodriguez, Jim Colbert, and Bruce Crampton, who occupy the 3 through 9 spots, had a total of one career men's major to their credit (Bob Charles' win at the 1963 British Open, the only left-handed major winner until Mike Weir in 2003) and 64 PGA Tour wins. They won a total of twelve Senior majors and 156 Senior tournaments. They got better, competitively speaking, after turning fifty. Each of these guys were solid players, but you wouldn't have thought of them as great champions. Others like Bruce Fleisher, Mike Hill, Loren Roberts, Jim Thorpe, etc. fit the same pattern: decent Tour players for a while who turned 50 and then started winning.

And, in my opinion, this creates a dual problem with the "Champions Tour" name. For starters, it's dishonest. These are not all the great players of yesteryear. It's some of the great players of yesteryear, the ones like Fred Couples or Tom Watson who wanted to keep playing full-time competitive golf and whose games stayed in pretty good shape, and some guys who maybe you would've heard of twenty years ago if you followed the Tour closely, but not if you were just a casual fan. But also, and perhaps more importantly, it's insulting to the players, specifically to those players who aren't Couples or Watson or Nicklaus or Irwin. It's insulting to the guys like Michael Allen, or Gil Morgan, or Loren Roberts. It suggests that the point of the Champions Tour is to watch the guys who were the greatest champions when they were all in their prime, not simply to watch the best golfers who are old enough that it doesn't make sense to ask them to play against guys half their age. And that suggests that guys like Michael Allen don't belong, that they aren't the point. They're interlopers, or a distraction, because they weren't great champions on their initial golfing life.

Of course, it's not a very strong implication, and it's sufficiently indirect that I'm probably the only one who's noticed. But still, I think it's abundantly clear that they should've just stuck with calling it the Senior Tour. Because that's what it is, and a Senior Tour is cool enough on its own terms.