TRENDS, fashions, zeitgeists? You name it, this correspondent has never really followed them. In fact, I reckon I’m so far out of the current trends, fashions and zeitgeists, I’m in danger of being lapped by trends, fashions and zeitgeists that were current a few trends, fashions and zeitgeists ago.
While the massed ranks continually hover about at the cutting edge and boast eye-wateringly sharp hair styles that look like they have been downloaded straight on to their heads from the internet, all the time jabbing at gadgets so technologically advanced they haven’t actually been invented yet, I prefer to entrench myself in a bygone era and wheeze and gasp away like Fred Dibnah scaling a factory chimney in Bolton.
In a typically roundabout way that has become a humdrum hallmark of the Tuesday column, that Dibnah-inspired reference to getting a foot on the ladder is particularly apt at this time of the month as golf’s dedicated followers of potential fame and fortune attempt to clamber towards the giddy heights of the European Tour on the perilous rungs of the qualifying school.
Already, a handful of Scots, including the amateur duo of Liam Johnston and Craig Howie, have successfully negotiated stage one of this prolonged process having emerged unscathed from the 72-hole shoot-out at the Roxburghe last Friday.
All they need to do now is get through a four-round second stage and a 108-hole final and Bob’s your Aunt’s live-in lover. There are plenty more Scots in action this week, too, at Stoke-by-Nayland and over at the Austrian venue of Schloss Ebriechsdorf, which sounds like a Eurovision Song contestant from 1974.
A few years ago in the US, the top brass at the PGA Tour decided, essentially, to bin their own three-stage q-school, a series which had offered a direct route to the main circuit since 1965. The developmental Web.com Tour became the primary path, while a lesser qualifying school continues to be held, but only offering cards for the second-tier circuit.
On this side of the pond, there have been loud calls for the European Tour to do the same and give the proven breeding ground of the Challenge Tour a similar status and relegate the role of the qualifying school.
Of course, the naysayers of the qualifying school argue that it doesn’t prepare new recruits for the rigours of tour life. A player can have one good week –or indeed three if they come through all three stages – and vault directly into the fearsome cut-and-thrust.
But then, that’s one of the most enchanting aspects of the whole process. There’s a kind of rags-to-riches element where a nobody can get the chance to become a somebody or a zero can become a hero.
Admittedly, a great number of those who fork out the £1500 or so entry fee have as much chance of getting a tour card as this scribbler has of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but take away hope and opportunity and you take away much of what keeps driving players on.
Every player has ambitions, no matter how fanciful. The q-school is always a gamble but, then, it may just be worth it in this furiously fickle game where you’re constantly gambling on a week-to-week basis.
Critics of the qualifying examination will always say that the successful players at q-school get only modest offerings. They are down the pecking order rankings wise and are playing for a fraction of the money available on the European Tour as a whole.
That may be true to an extent but, in the ruthless, every-man-for-themselves world of professional sport where there is no right to success and certainly no room for a sense of entitlement, those who are good enough will seize the chance.
Last year’s qualifying school winner, Nathan Kimsey, has played 23 events so far this season, which would appear to be a decent enough crack of the whip, but the 24-year-old Englishman is struggling to keep his card. Nobody said it was easy. It’s a hard old business and every opportunity has to be grasped with both hands.
Getting on to the tour is tough enough. Staying at the top level is even harder. But, then, has that not always been the challenge of sport in the upper echelons?
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