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Loren Roberts wins opener on Champions TourWednesday, January 25, 2006 There's a new boss on the moss of the Champions Tour. Loren Roberts, for years one of the finest putters on the PGA Tour, won the season-opening tournament for age-50-and-over pros on Sunday by draining - naturally enough for him - a 30-foot birdie putt on his final stroke of the MasterCard Championship. The putt secured a one-stroke victory over Don Pooley and a course-record 61 for Roberts at the Hualalai Course in Kaupulehu, Hawaii, where the former PGA Senior Tour launched its 26th season with a top-of-the-leaderboard accent on relative youth. Roberts turned 50 in June and third-place Jay Haas - who finished three shots off the lead - turned 52 last month. Peter Jacobson (51), David Eger and D.A. Weibring (both 52) also wound up in the top 10. Roberts, the former Cal Poly San Luis Obispo putting whiz who led the PGA Tour in that category in 1994 and was a top-10 putter five other seasons there - including a seventh-place finish in 2004 at the age of 49 - was the brightest of the young seniors at Hualalai. He set not only the 18-hole course record but also finished 25-under-par 191 for the 54-hole event to break the tour record in relation to par and tie the tour stroke mark for a three-round tournament. That kind of senior success might not turn out to be so uncommon for the fit Roberts, who turned 50 last June and enters this, his 31st professional season, a trim 6-foot-2 and 190 pounds. He made six Champions Tour starts in an abbreviated 2005 season and was top-10 in five of them, missing a season top-10 sweep on the basis of a tie for 11th in his third start. Roberts might still have been giddy at that point in his Champions Tour career, coming off a fifth and a tie for second in his first two senior events - both majors - at the Senior British Open and U.S. Senior Open. He put a wrap on senior start No. 7 by becoming that tour's newest and one of its quickest career millionaires, with $1,249,882 in Champions earnings. But all that earning power and the firepower to outshoot the lowest-scoring field in senior tour history might not translate into Roberts becoming the man to beat for Player of the Year honors this season. He might not wind up playing that much on the Champions Tour. Roberts placed 93rd in earnings on the 2005 PGA Tour to secure another season of eligibility on that tour, and he showed the week before his 2006 Champions Tour debut that he still can shoot with the younger guns. Roberts tied for 18th in the Sony Open at Honolulu, the full-field season opener for the PGA Tour. His record-breaking success at Hualalai came against a limited but quality field made up of 2005 winners and some champions from past senior tours. Quality? Of the 105 rounds played at Hualalai, 75 of them produced scores in the 60s. The field scoring average of 67.981, while lowest in senior tour history, won't count as a record because the event was not a full-field tournament. Roberts, who included 26 birdies in a 63-67-61 finish, will stay in the islands for another senior tournament this week. He is in the field for the Turtle Bay Championship at Kahuku, Hawaii, where all-time Champions Tour wins leader Hale Irwin is defending champion. Irwin, 60, has won this tournament five times in a row and six times overall. How will the tour's reigning old gun respond to young guns like Roberts and Haas? Irwin seems to hear that question every year, with different names for the newest challengers. His response last year was four more senior tour wins and a strong run at another Player of the Year award. Article by Dave Shelburne at dailynews.com. |
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