Stephen AmesEric Risberg
Some Canadians have wondered why Stephen Ames isn't in this week's Players Championship. Ames won the 2006 Players by six shots, so it's understandable that there's confusion about why a fairly recent champion isn't in the tournament.
To start, his status as far as getting into the tournament based on being a past champion expired last year. The past champions exemption is good for only five years, so it ran out last year. Meanwhile, Chris Armstrong, the V-P of management and director of Wasserman Media Group in Toronto, points out that Ames, a client, finished outside the top 125 money-winners on the PGA Tour last year; he was 139th with $547,589 (USD). The top 125 get into the Players.
Ames had one more chance, perhaps. That would have been by his standing in this year's FedEx Cup points list. But Jeff Maggert was the last alternate to get in off this list. Maggert was 82nd heading into the Players. Ames stands 142nd.
Ames, 48, lives in Calgary. He's won four PGA Tour events, his last being the 2009 Childrens Miracle Network Classic in Orlando. Ames has exempt status on the PGA Tour for this year, even though he's not in the Players Championship. I explained why this is the case in this piece last September.
Meanwhile, Ames is 145th on this year's money lists. His best finish is a T-16 at the Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico last February. He's missed the cut in his last two tournaments, and is ranked 371st in the world.
Ames continues to work hard on his game, although he's obviously not near where he was when he dominated the game's best field of the year in that 2006 Players Championship. Here's what he said after he won, about putting himself in what he called "another gear".
"I've probably felt [that]a couple times in my career of playing golf, but not for four days like I did this week. Coming down to the end there, it was a matter of seeing the shot and hitting the shot and not worrying about it because there wasn't nobody was that close to me to worry about it. You know, it was just a matter of playing the right shot, making sure that I wasn't going to leave myself short-sided, I wasn't going to make myself have a hard chip or a putt. As you know, coming down to the end there, it was always to the safe side of the flag coming in. That's just the way I hit the golf ball. I hit the ball really well this week, and it helped."
Ames mastered the difficult course and his tendency to overthink shots that fantastic week. Now, six years after he shot 71-66-70-67 to win by those six shots over Retief Goosen, he's on the sidelines. Tough game, golf.
RELATED LINK: More blogs from Lorne Rubenstein
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Lorne Rubenstein has written a golf column for The Globe and Mail since 1980. He has played golf since the early 1960s and was the Royal Canadian Golf Association's first curator of its museum and library at the Glen Abbey Golf Club in Oakville, Ontario and the first editor of Score, Canada's Golf Magazine, where he continues to write a column and features. He has won four first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, one National Magazine Award in Canada, and he won the award for the best feature in 2009 from the Golf Journalists Association of Canada. Lorne has written 12 books, including Mike Weir: The Road to the Masters (2003); A Disorderly Compendium of Golf, with Jeff Neuman (2006); This Round's on Me (2009); and the latest Moe & Me: Encounters with Moe Norman, Golf's Mysterious Genius (2012). He is a member of the Ontario Golf Hall of Fame and the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Lorne can be reached at rube@sympatico.ca . You can now follow him on Twitter @lornerubenstein