Meet the pro athlete who is thrilled to be in his 50s

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Just past a Dairy Queen near Houston last month, Steven Alker’s new status was up in the air: His name and face were on a lamppost banner.

Steven Alker, the professional golfer who won next to nothing until his 50th birthday, was in attendance with Ernie Els, Jim Furyk, Darren Clarke and John Daly, who combined for eight major tournament victories. Alker hasn’t even played so many majors.

On Thursday, however, he’ll step into a PGA Championship teebox as the man who’s gone from almost never-in-first to a toast to the PGA Tour Champions, as the senior circuit is called. He’s not exactly the gambling favorite, not in a field largely dominated by men in their 20s and 30s. He knows he might not even make the cut and finish the tournament, where a win would make Alker, 51, the oldest major champion in history.

But Alker defies the clock that is often the source of pain for professional athletes. For Alker, age and patience prove to be allies, as only in recent years has he unlocked the consistency eluded by decades of missed cuts, demotions and meager pro sports paychecks.

In 304 starts on the PGA Tour development circuit, which Alker first played during the Clinton administration, he won four tournaments. He turned 50 on July 28, 2021, competed on the senior tour, and has since turned his career of annoyances and knowledge into six wins, including one at last year’s Senior PGA Championship.

“You can say, ‘Why didn’t he do this before?'” said Hale Irwin, a three-time US Open winner.

“There are some things God keeps secret, and this is one of them,” said Irwin, whose 45 senior tour wins are the most ever recorded. “All I know is that he may have been the most prominent player in recent years.”

In the senior tour’s most recent full season, Alker made the cut in all 23 events he played. His four wins and four second-place finishes helped him earn over $3.5 million in prize money. He had earned about $2.3 million from 390 starts during his years on the PGA Tour and development circuit.

“I haven’t had consistently good golf in two years, I think, ever,” Alker said in a Woodlands Country Club weight room. “It’s a second chance, it’s a second career, and those don’t come along very often.”

Perseverance, he said, was probably more to thank than stubbornness. His status as one of the more youthful players in the senior fields has helped, but his thoughtful approach, combined with a refined short game and exceptional wedge play, has also proved particularly suited to a circuit Irwin calls “a temperamental one”. tour.”

“I think this tour is more about precision, knowing where your ball is going, scoring, just getting the job done,” said Alker, whose head became increasingly clear as a result of his financial windfalls and aging children.

With his patchwork of methods, he defended his Insperity Invitational title days later. This year and last year, he beat Steve Stricker, a former U.S. captain at the Ryder Cup, by four strokes.

It is not unheard of for the senior circuit in the United States to see athletic reinvention or renewal. Much of Bernhard Langer’s pre-50 success took place in Europe, but at age 65 he is one win away from taking Irwin’s record. And Gil Morgan claimed 25 senior tour titles despite never winning a major.

But Langer topped the Masters Tournament standings twice, and Morgan racked up eight top-10 finishes in majors, including two third-place PGA Championship shows. Alker? He has never appeared in a Masters or, to date, a PGA Championship, although he once tied for 19th at a British Open.

His arrival on the senior tour hadn’t exactly unnerved the circuit’s elite: “I’d heard the name here and there,” Langer said, “but it wasn’t like there’s an Ernie Els coming on tour.”

Then he saw Alker play.

“He should have been winning tournaments left and right because he seems to have it all,” said Langer. “He has a wonderful golf swing – I really enjoy watching his golf swing – and he hits the ball long and straight. His short game is pretty perfect, and he obviously gets better with age, like red wine or something.

As a boy in New Zealand, Alker enjoyed football, tennis and cricket, having not been big enough, he complained, to make much of an impact in rugby. But Alker’s father was a golfer and the son got serious about the game when he was 10.

“I just got hooked on the little things, the discipline you needed,” he said. “It wasn’t just one thing you had to be good at. You had to be good at everything.”

Around his mid-teens, he recalled, he began to wonder if he would make it as a professional. He wasn’t made to hit balls, but his short game was exemplary and he seemed to control a round better than his peers.

A whirlwind of tours followed: the various circuits of the PGA Tour, but also the European Tour, where the wildly changing conditions provided valuable experience, the Asian Tour, the Canadian Tour and the premier tour in Australia. He had only sporadic success, losing his PGA Tour card three times, dropping him into the American golf version of baseball’s minor leagues. He insists he never thought about quitting — some in his family wondered if he should — but instead anticipated his 50th birthday and a tour he wasn’t sure he would qualify for. come to play for the long haul.

He quickly embodied how golf, as Langer put it, “has a thin line between good and bad, or between really good and just good.”

The whirlwind that comes with being really good hasn’t upset Alker. He now stays in fancier hotels, he said. Sometimes, he confessed reluctantly, he flies first class. But he still lives in the house his family bought for less than half of what Tiger Woods earned as a 19-year-old.

“I’ve handled it pretty well,” Alker said of the attention, “because I haven’t had much of it.”

Oak Hill Country Club, home of the PGA Championship, will be a formidable test. He comes in with minimal expectations: “keep playing the way I’ve been playing and doing the things I’ve done well and see how well it holds up and see what happens.”

Irwin, who has played majors at Oak Hill, suggested the course could be beneficial to Alker’s strengths.

“He’s got the length to handle most of those long holes,” Irwin said. “Can he reach the par-5s in two? Maybe. But you have to keep the ball in the fairway at Oak Hill – you just have to keep the ball out of the trees and in play – and he does that extremely well.”

The cut is expected on Friday and the tournament ends on Sunday. Next week Alker will try for another Senior PGA Championship.

“I’m just happy to be here and still have this opportunity at 51, to still play for this money, to play in this environment with these guys,” said Alker.

“That was one of the amazing things about being here,” he added, “just getting to know the Hall of Famers and major champions that I never really got to know.”

Of course they know him now. If not, they can find him on a lamppost.