John Cook leaving his mark on the Champions Tour
We never had any reason to expect the 2011 Champions Tour to look like anything but the 2010 Champions Tour. After all, last year saw Bernhard Langer and Fred Couples leading the show by such a margin that their momentum looked like no player could ever
quite catch up to. These two were the only players even worth considering for “the player of the year” award and they had a whopping nine combined victories to their credit.
Come 2011, things suddenly got really shuffled up and now Langer is sitting pretty on the 7th spot of the Charles Schwab Cup points list, and Couples, by virtue of having played in just two events so far this season, is on the 22ndplace.
With these two out of commission so to speak, the top spot was left for anyone to grab and Tom Lehman chose not to disappoint and now it seems like John Cook wants a slice of the pie as well.
Lehman and Cook both have two victories to their credit, a score that Cook evened out by his win at the Outback Steakhouse Pro-Am last week, and what a dramatic win it was. At one point in the game, the player looked like he had thrown away the title for
good, but he managed to recover from the ugly double bogey not a minute too soon on the final hole and beat out Jay Don Blake for the title.
If we take a look down history, Cook’s appearances on the Champions Tour have been quite good and consistent over the years. The player has been doing some good groundwork to get to the top and this might be the year when he finally reaps the rewards.
Cook has had an impressive record throughout his career on the Champions tour with a total of seven titles under his belt and this includes his big win in 2007; a win in just two starts. To add even more prestige to these numbers, the player also has a whopping
43 T-10 placements to his credit. Translation: Cook has finished in contention in half of his total starts. Now if that isn’t impressive then we don’t know what is!
Cook has been playing consistently well since day one and has won 11 times on the regular tour and is perhaps best known for his superb performances when he won the Bob Hope Classic twice; once in 92 and again in 97. His 11 wins in 702 career starts aren’t
a bad set of stats for the PGA Tour at all. However, these stats do accentuate the fact that his seniors career maybe the best he has ever played.
For now, Lehman really does have a better winning percentage on the senior tour. However, the fact remains that talk as we may about the potential that Lehman and Cook posses, by no means are we suggesting that at the end of the year Langer and Couples won’t
be back in power. Langer is a strong player and we are sure that he won’t end the season with just the one victory he has been able to manage so far this season. If we know anything about the golfer, we know that he will be making a comeback and soon.
Couples maybe the more doubtful comeback artist of the duo, bad luck seems to follow him like a shadow and despite displaying some very strong performances on the PGA Tour the player hasn’t been able to really work his magic yet.
No matter what happens with the power dynamic, at the end of the day one thing we are sure of is that the 2011 edition of the Champions Tour has all the makings of a good, suspenseful watch. You wouldn’t want to miss it, we certainly won’t be!
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