Turning 50 in March – and with a PGA Tour Champions card earned at Q-School – has given Brendan Jones a new chapter in a storied career
When you’re a young person, 50 seems quite old. When you get there, there’s a lot of signs that you are 50. Your body’s not as good as it used to be – aches and pains, that type of thing. But it’s not scary turning 50. It’s scary when you think more than half your life’s over, if you want to get deep into it that way. But 50 for me, and getting on the Champions tour, is exciting.
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I’ve been competitive right through my career, but I could tell the past couple of years – through injuries and things like that – my game wasn’t as sharp as it had been. Now that I’ve managed to qualify, I’ve got that excitement back again. I feel like I’m embracing 50.
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It’s been difficult for me as a single dad trying to play on tours. Coming home, looking after your boys and then trying to find time to get any golf-related stuff done is difficult. When I do get home, all my time goes into my boys and then I go back and deal with how the game’s feeling. But this is different.
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Last year on the Asian Tour, I was injured, I was sick and then you get to 50 and go, Well, this is too hard, going to some of these countries that I’m going to. The Japan Seniors is always a fallback for me, but I just thought now’s the time to do something that I probably didn’t see myself doing. Getting beat up by those young kids on tour, it’s not a lot of fun when you’ve been one of those guys beating up on the young kids.
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I’m playing with the guys I watched on TV growing up, which is pretty cool. At the same time, I’m a fresh 50 and raring to go, and these guys have been there doing it for years and years.
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With the number of Aussies on the Champions tour, it’s good to see some familiar faces and just take it all in. I haven’t had a lot to do with Mark Hensby before, but he was one of the first guys to reach out, welcome me to the tour and say if I needed anything to just run it by him, which is great.
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I went to Japan when I turned pro and everyone else went to America or Europe or somewhere else, so I haven’t played an awful lot with a lot of those guys. Richard Green and I, we played a couple of World Cups together.
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Seriously, Q-School is the worst. It’s the worst experience that you can possibly go through as a golfer. I’ve played pretty much all the tours around the world, but all of a sudden you’re not as good as you used to be on the tours that you’ve been playing and you see a big opportunity like this. The added pressure, even for me, who’s had quite a bit of success along the way, it’s a horrible thing. You know that the top five players have got a great opportunity to extend the life of their careers once again, so there’s a big carrot at the end of it, but it’s a horrible thing. The stress levels are through the roof.
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Everyone’s jittery, but I played some of the best golf I played all week on that back nine in the final round. That’s comforting going forward, because I know that on the Champions tour, I’m not going to be as nervous at any stage as I was trying to get there.
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When Dicky Pride missed his putt for par on the final hole, that was pretty unfortunate. And it’s horrible, but it is part of our game. And unfortunately for Dicky, it was him that time. You never want to really celebrate that type of thing. I just didn’t want to be overly showing too much emotion for something that he’d be devastated over.
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I was preparing myself for a playoff and then for it to not happen… We ended up still having a playoff to decide who got the third, fourth and fifth cards. It was the stupidest playoff ever… no one cared. I was like, Give me the fifth card. I don’t even want to go out. It was an emotional day and an emotional week.
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I would’ve been happy just signing off on my career as it was, but when I went and played the PGA Tour in 2005 and 2006, my game was pretty good then. But I did everything wrong. I was an absolute novice, a rookie that thought that you had to do things differently now that you’d made the PGA Tour. I’ve had a lot of years to think about my performances in 2005, 2006. I could have extended my time in the US for who knows how long if I had have just done it the way I had done to that point.
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When I got there, I was practising more, I was playing more, and I was burnt out by May. And I was thinking, I can’t take time off because I’m sliding down the moneylist each week. I’ve got to keep working at it. That’s not the way I’ve played my best golf. If I could go back, I’d change a lot about the way I approached it, but now I’m more experienced. I’m not much different in terms of a player than I was when I tried as a 30-year-old, 20 years ago, but these are the things I’d learned by the time I was 40. I just didn’t have any way to act on it until I turned 50.
Feature photograph by Andy Cheung/getty images
