Daley’s long, hard road to Players Championship

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Joe Daley learned at rookie orientation that as a PGA Tour member, he had access to the vast TPC network. He was at tour headquarters that week and wasted no time taking advantage of this perk, sneaking out to play the TPC Sawgrass and holing out from the 10th fairway for eagle.

That was December 1995.

Ben Crenshaw was the Masters champion. Tiger Woods was a two-time U.S. Amateur champion in his second year at Stanford.

Daley could not have imagined it would take him more than 17 years to get back to Sawgrass, and certainly not under these circumstances. He finally returns next week, at 52 the oldest player to make his debut in The Players Championship.

“I’ve played a lot of courses between then and now,” Daley said.

The most significant course was Fox Chapel in Pittsburgh, where last July he won the Seniors Players Championship by two shots over Tom Lehman to earn a spot in The Players Championship, the tournament with the strongest field and richest purse.

That he never played Sawgrass except for that casual round is not surprising. Daley only had two full years on the PGA Tour. He spent 10 full years in the minors, long enough to play under three umbrella sponsors – Nike Tour, Buy.com Tour and Nationwide Tour. When he turned 50, he had to Monday qualify for Champions Tour events. He finally got his big break with a 66-64 weekend in the Senior PGA Championship to tie for fourth, which make him eligible for the Senior Players.

And here he is.

“It’s a lot of years of hard work, man,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

To put some of that into perspective, the winner of The Players Championship gets $1.71 million. That’s nearly as much as Daley’s earnings ($1.96 million) in two decades playing the PGA Tour, the Champions Tour and what is now called the Web.com Tour.

Other than his two wins in the minor leagues and his one big win on the Champions Tour, the highlights have been limited.

Daley, who didn’t start chasing his dream until he was 32, remembers the first time he played a PGA Tour event. He was a Monday qualifier for the old Anheuser-Busch Classic at Kingsmill, made the cut and wound up getting paired with Curtis Strange in the third round.

“I had to remember to breathe on the first tee,” he said.

He was playing in the final round at the Greater Milwaukee Open in 1996 when a 20-year-old making his pro debut – Woods – had a hole-in-one. And, in 2000, he became the image of all that can go wrong at Q-school, which even now might be what Daley is remembered for the most. He rapped in a 4-foot par putt that dropped into the bottom of the cup at such an angle that it popped back out. Daley was so stunned that he flung his cap to the ground. He wound up missing his card by one shot.

“I’ve had people overseas says, ‘I know you.’ And that happened 12 years ago,” Daley said with a laugh.

“We still love the journey,” he said. “And it’s been a cool journey.”