THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Simply previous a Dairy Queen close to Houston final month, Steven Alker’s new standing was aloft: His identify and face have been on a lamppost banner.
Steven Alker, the skilled golfer who received virtually nothing till after his fiftieth birthday, was there with the likes of Ernie Els, Jim Furyk, Darren Clarke and John Daly, who’ve mixed for eight main match victories. Alker has not even performed that many majors.
On Thursday, although, he’ll step right into a P.G.A. Championship tee field as the person who surged from nearly-never-in-first to toast of the PGA Tour Champions, because the senior circuit is thought. He isn’t precisely the betting favourite, not in a area largely headlined by males of their 20s and 30s. He is aware of he might not even make the reduce and end the match, the place a victory would make Alker, 51, the oldest main champion in historical past.
However Alker has been defying the clock that has usually been the etiology of agony for skilled athletes. For Alker, age and endurance are proving to be allies, as a result of solely lately has he unlocked the consistency that eluded him via many years of missed cuts, demotions and paltry paychecks for professional sports activities.
In 304 begins on the PGA Tour’s developmental circuit, which Alker first performed throughout the Clinton administration, he received 4 tournaments. He turned 50 on July 28, 2021, joined the senior tour and has since channeled a profession’s value of aggravations and data into six victories, together with one eventually 12 months’s Senior P.G.A. Championship.
“You may say, ‘Effectively, why didn’t he do that earlier?’” stated Hale Irwin, a three-time U.S. Open winner.
“There are some issues that God retains secret, and that is one in all them,” stated Irwin, whose 45 senior tour victories are tied for essentially the most on report. “I simply know that over the past couple of years, he’s perhaps been the pre-eminent participant out right here.”
Within the senior tour’s most up-to-date full season, Alker made the reduce in all 23 occasions he performed. His 4 wins and 4 runner-up finishes helped him to earn greater than $3.5 million in prize cash. He had made about $2.3 million throughout 390 begins throughout his years on the PGA Tour and its developmental circuit.
“I haven’t had two years of persistently good golf, I feel, ever,” Alker stated in a Woodlands Nation Membership weight room. “It’s a second likelihood, it’s a second profession, and people don’t come alongside fairly often.”
Perseverance, he stated, was most likely extra to thank than stubbornness. His standing as one of many younger gamers within the senior fields has helped, however his conscious strategy, joined with a refined brief sport and distinctive wedge play, has additionally proved to be notably well-suited to a circuit that Irwin calls “a temperament tour.”
“I feel this tour is extra about precision, realizing the place your ball goes, scoring, simply getting the job executed,” stated Alker, whose thoughts has more and more cleared because of his monetary windfalls and growing old youngsters.
Together with his patchwork of strategies, he defended his Insperity Invitational title days later. This 12 months and final, he beat Steve Stricker, a previous American captain on the Ryder Cup, by 4 strokes.
It’s not unheard-of for the senior circuit in the US to yield athletic reinvention or renewal. A lot of Bernhard Langer’s pre-50 success performed out in Europe, however at 65, he’s a victory away from seizing Irwin’s report. And Gil Morgan claimed 25 senior tour titles regardless of by no means having received a significant.
However Langer completed atop the Masters Match leaderboard twice, and Morgan had eight top-10 finishes in majors, together with two third-place P.G.A. Championship showings. Alker? He has by no means appeared in a Masters or, till now, a P.G.A. Championship, although he as soon as managed a tie for nineteenth at a British Open.
His arrival on the senior tour had not precisely unnerved the circuit’s elite: “I had heard the identify right here and there,” Langer stated, “however it wasn’t like an Ernie Els is approaching tour.”
Then he noticed Alker play.
“He ought to have been successful tournaments left and proper and everywhere as a result of he appears to have all of it,” Langer stated. “He’s received a wonderful golf swing — I truly take pleasure in watching his golf swing — and he hits the ball lengthy, straight. His brief sport is fairly spot on, and clearly he’s getting higher with age, like pink wine or one thing.”
As a boy in New Zealand, Alker reveled in soccer, tennis and cricket since he had not been large enough, he lamented, to make a lot of a mark in rugby. However Alker’s father was a golfer, and the son took up the sport significantly across the time he was 10.
“I simply received hooked on the small issues, the self-discipline you wanted,” he stated. “It wasn’t only one factor you needed to be good at. You needed to be good at the whole lot.”
Across the center of his teenage years, he recalled, he started to wonder if he may make it as an expert. He was not constructed to be a ball-basher, however his brief sport was exemplary, and he appeared to have better psychological command over a spherical than his friends.
A whirlwind of excursions adopted: the PGA Tour’s assorted circuits, in addition to the European Tour, the place the wildly variable situations provided beneficial expertise, the Asian Tour, the Canadian Tour and the pre-eminent tour in Australia. He discovered solely sporadic success and misplaced his PGA Tour card 3 times, kicking him again into American golf’s model of baseball’s minor leagues. He insists he by no means thought of quitting — some in his household puzzled whether or not he ought to — however as a substitute got here to anticipate his fiftieth birthday and a tour he was not sure he would qualify to play long-term.
He swiftly got here to embody how golf, as Langer put it, has “a advantageous line between good and unhealthy, or between superb and simply good.”
The whirlwind that has include being superb has not ruffled Alker. He stays in snazzier accommodations now, he stated. Typically, he confessed reluctantly, he’ll fly firstclass. However he nonetheless lives within the house that his household purchased for lower than half of what Tiger Woods earned in his first skilled season.
“I’ve handled it fairly good,” Alker stated of the eye, “as a result of I haven’t had a variety of it.”
Oak Hill Nation Membership, the place the P.G.A. Championship will probably be performed, will pose a formidable take a look at. He’s coming into with minimal expectations: “hold enjoying the way in which I’ve been enjoying and do the issues I’ve been doing properly and see how properly it holds up and see what occurs.”
Irwin, who has performed majors at Oak Hill, urged the course may very well be favorable to Alker’s strengths.
“He has size to deal with most of these lengthy holes,” Irwin stated. “Can he get to the par-5s in two? Effectively, perhaps. However you must hold the ball within the fairway at Oak Hill — you simply need to hold the ball out of the timber and hold it in play — and he does that extraordinarily properly.”
The reduce is anticipated on Friday, with the match scheduled to conclude on Sunday. Subsequent week, Alker will attempt for one more Senior P.G.A. Championship.
“I’m simply completely happy to be right here and to nonetheless have this chance at 51, to nonetheless play for this sum of money, to play on this atmosphere with these guys,” Alker stated.
“That’s been one of many wonderful issues about being out right here,” he added, “simply to get to know the Corridor of Famers and main champions that I by no means actually received to know.”
They know him now, after all. If not, they’ll discover him on a lamppost.