And before you get paid at all, you have to get a chance to play. Don't qualify on Monday? You're out whatever it cost you to get there. And even if you play, there's no guarantee you'll come out ahead. Finish at the bottom of the pack, and your paycheck can be in the three figures. That may just be enough to pay your caddie, who, in Holtgrieve's case, gets $700 for a tournament plus 7% of whatever Holtgrieve wins. (If he continues on his current pace, which is his best ever, Holtgrieve will net somewhere around $250,000 in 2001 after travel and caddie expenses and before paying taxes. But remember, that "net" doesn't include a health plan or profit sharing or a 401(k) or a company car. Holtgrieve is almost always on the road, yet he'd have made a lot more money staying behind his old desk in St. Louis.)
OK, you say. The overhead is high, but what about the benefits? The free clubs, balls, clothes? All those sponsorship deals and five-figure fees for putting on an exhibition or playing a round with a couple of key corporate clients have to more than make up the difference. The golf is probably a loss leader. The perks have to offset everything else, right?
What perks? the rabbits reply. Holtgrieve, for example, who currently ranks 148th on the all-time Senior Tour money list, has exactly one endorsement deal: $5,000 from Callaway to play its new ball. He gets his golf shirts free -- but no pay for wearing them -- and that's it. No sponsorship. No golf-club deal. Nothing. Look for him out on the tour. He's easy to spot. He's the fella without a golf cap. No one is paying him to wear one.
And this is a guy who shot one under for a tournament played mostly in the rain, this summer's Instinet Classic. You probably paid absolutely no attention to the Instinet, since it was held during the same weekend as the U.S. Open. Despite his impressive score, Holtgrieve finished 14 strokes behind the leader and barely broke even for the week.
Indeed, the closer you look at Holtgrieve's career, the more you realize that you may have underestimated just how hard turning your fantasy into reality may be.
A top amateur in his twenties and into his thirties, Holtgrieve played on three Walker Cup teams, the amateur equivalent of the Ryder Cup squads. He had a winning record in Walker Cup play, which means he went head-to-head against the best amateurs in the world and beat them. But when he was left off the Walker Cup team for what would have been his fourth appearance, he said the heck with it and started devoting himself full-time to his family's manufacturer's rep business in Missouri. Over the next 15 years, Holtgrieve took on more and more senior positions in the company, eventually moving into the top job. During his time there, he tripled the size of the business, growing it to just about $20 million in annual sales.
Golf was just a happy weekend activity. Holtgrieve understands the fantasy most weekend duffers have, but turning pro was not something he had ever really thought about. In fact, he wouldn't have done it if circumstances had been different.
"I'm not proud of this, but I basically went on the tour to get out of town," he says. "My marriage was falling apart. The boys [then 18 and 11] were going to be living with their mother, and the business wasn't going well. This was the chance to get away from the company for a while and get everything straight."
Holtgrieve had planned to give himself a year to get into shape, but the man he hired to replace him as CEO changed his mind right before he was to start. So Holtgrieve had to stay on at the company. He ended up having only three months to prepare for his first event as a pro -- he was offered a sponsor exemption at a local tournament -- but a 13th-place finish convinced him he'd made the right decision.
Today, more than three years later, even his fellow players think he's overdue for a win. So do PGA officials. In fact, the only person who has his doubts is the only person who matters: Holtgrieve.
Holtgrieve concedes that he thinks too much. "There's an awful lot of money out there, and I need it," he says. "I don't have any endorsement deals to fall back on."
And this guy is good. How good? In this year's premier senior tournament -- the U.S. Senior Open -- Holtgrieve outplayed such "names" as Gary McCord, Hubert Green, J.C. Snead, Bob Murphy, Graham Marsh, Miller Barber, and Gary Player. Arnold Palmer and Chi Chi Rodriguez didn't even make the cut.
And if you stack him up against everyone else on the Senior Tour for driving distance, greens hit in regulation, and sand saves, the numbers compiled by the PGA show there is no reason to think he won't win a tournament soon. (See "Have You Got Game?" on page 46.) And this guy's only a rabbit.
As a rabbit he has gone to Q-school each of his three years on the tour, but he hasn't finished better than the top 16, which means he's not guaranteed a slot in any event. He gets in as an alternate in some tournaments -- especially the ones the big-name players -- Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, and others -- turn down.
To increase his chances, he scrambles. He attends the Monday qualifiers. That's how he got into the U.S. Senior Open. He also works hard on gaining sponsor exemptions.
By this point in his career, Holtgrieve has met everyone who runs an event on the Senior Tour. If Holtgrieve hasn't qualified for a tournament, he'll write a letter to the tournament director -- he carries a printer and laptop with him on the road -- asking for an exemption and volunteering to do what needs to be done in return. Need someone to put on a junior clinic? Holtgrieve's your man. Ticket sales a bit slow and someone needs to do a couple dozen local interviews? He's more than willing. One of the companies taking advertising space at the event wants someone to play a round or two with their key clients? Sign Holtgrieve up.
