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 The final round of the PGA Tour’s Qualifying School is six rounds of tension where one out-of-bounds drive, one flubbed chip or one three-putt can mean the difference between a courtesy car at the AT&T at Pebble Beach or a courtesy call at some motel in Fort Smith, Ark., for a Nationwide Tour event. The torture begins long before the final stage of Q-School, recently held at the Orange County National Golf Center and Lodge in Orlando, Fla. There are two other stages that a majority of the golfers must traverse before reaching the finals. The first stage is for golfers with no status. They pay $4,000 and hope they can put together four good rounds to advance to the second stage, where golfers who have had their cards and lost them will be waiting. Many consider the second stage more grueling than the final stage, where players who make it that far are at least assured of playing somewhere the following year. The top 30 golfers and ties at the final stage of Q-School earn a PGA Tour card. The next 46 finishers earn exempt status on the Nationwide Tour. The rest earn conditional status on the Nationwide Tour. Three golfers with ties to Southern California earned their PGA Tour card for 2006. Matt Hansen, who lives in Atwater, Alex Aragon, who lives in San Diego, and Hunter Mahan, who grew up in Orange, will be playing on the PGA Tour this year. Aragon and Hansen went through all three stages to earn their cards, and both finished tied for 18th in the final stage. Aragon was born in Mexico City and grew up in San Diego, where he went to Torrey Pines High School and earned a scholarship to Stanford. He turned professional in 2001 and toiled on the mini-tours. This wasn’t the first time Aragon reached the finals of Q-School. He made it the year before and earned conditional status, which gave him the ability to play in 11 events, where he missed eight cuts. Hansen was an All-American at the University of Pacific in 2002 after finishing in a tie for the Big West individual title. He went to the NCAA tournament in each of his four seasons, either with the Tigers as a team or as an individual competitor. In addition to his All-American honors, Hansen was a three-time member of the All-Big West team, earning honorable mention in 2001 and first-team selections in 2002 and 2003. Mahan spent his first full season on the PGA Tour in 2005 and was battling for one of the 125 exempt spots on the money list until the last event of the season. His first top-10 finish came in his second start of the season when he tied for ninth at the FBR Open in Phoenix. His lowest round was at the John Deere Classic, where he shot an opening-round 63 and wound up tied for seventh. He finished 131st on the money list and was exempt to the finals of Q-School where he finished tied for ninth. |
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