Youth being served on PGA, LIV tours – Lake County Record-Bee

Now more than ever in the world of professional golf, it is safe to say that youth shall be served. It wasn’t all that long ago that golfers of note such as Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart played college golf, then headed off to some faraway circuit in Asia for a few years of seasoning, then got through Q School, and ultimately made it onto to PGA Tour.

In the case of Strange, who played college golf at Wake Forest University and subsequently won the NCAA Championship and the Western Amateur, it took him almost four years from the time he turned professional until he won his first PGA Tour event, the 1979 Pensacola Open. In the case of Payne Stewart, it was more of the same. He attended Southern Methodist University, turned pro in 1979, headed off to Asia where he won the India Open and the Indonesian Open, finally qualified onto the PGA Tour, and won the 1982 Miller High Life Quad Cities Open. Strange would win his first of two back-to-back U.S. Opens in 1988 while Stewart would win his first of three majors at the 1989 PGA Championship. Way back then, nothing seemed to come easy in the world of professional golf. There was no Korn Ferry Tour and you had to go overseas to get your beak wet. It was tough, it was a grind, and it was costly.

If we look back at this past weekend, the journey that Curtis Strange and Payne Stewart took in the 1970s is a far different one from the path taken by Tom Kim of South Korea and Eugenio Chacarra of Spain. Both Kim and Chacarra won…