Better talent expected with bigger purses
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
Adam Speirs may have helped put himself in a bit of a Catch-22.
The Canadian Tour is increasing its purse total in 2010, which means more money will be up for grabs for the 31-year-old Winnipegger and his fellow pro golfers.
The catch, however, is the bigger paydays will likely attract better talent from south of the border.
Speirs, who helped instigate this move as a player rep on the Canadian Tour’s board of directors, is looking only at the positives that more money will bring.
“We’re hoping it has a huge impact,” Speirs said yesterday from Texas, where he is competing in a mini-tour event this week. “We’re hoping from a player’s perspective that, one, we’re going to make more money. Two, we’ll hopefully get some better players from the mini-tours down here.
“The knock on the Canadian Tour has always been that we don’t play for enough money, and they can’t use that anymore. We are playing for enough money.”
The purse increase means Winnipeg’s annual Canadian Tour event, The Players Cup, is going from a $200,000 event to a whopping $300,000.
That is music to the ears of former Canadian Tour member Rob McMillan, who is the event’s new executive chairman.
“That grants a lot of attention,” said McMillan, whose wife Nicole is the tournament’s executive director. “It was not too many years ago we were playing for $125,000 here. When you start thinking that your winner’s going to be taking home close to $50,000, that brings a whole different dynamic to the event.
“Hopefully we can get it higher than that. Hopefully two or three years from now we’re the biggest purse outside of the Canadian Open.”
The Players Cup is regarded as one of the finest on the Canadian Tour, and its perks make it an attractive stop. The winner gets an automatic berth into the PGA Tour’s Canadian Open, which takes place a week after the Winnipeg stop.
In addition, the top five players on the Canadian Tour money list after The Players Cup gain entry into the Canadian Open.
That, combined with the fact that Manitobans are strong supporters of the event, is why the tour will make Winnipeg its second-richest event of the season, behind only the $325,000 Canadian Tour Championship.
“We’ve had really strong support with our sponsors the last two years,” McMillan said, “and we’re looking at making this hopefully the premier golf event in western Canada.”
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