Rob Labritz is a well known PGA Professional in the New York Metro Section and now he’s heading for the PGA Tour’s Champions Tour.
The Director of Golf at Glen Arbor Golf Club in Bedford Hills, N.Y., earned a Champions Tour card last Friday at the Q-School finals at the TPC Tampa Bay.
Labritz shot 17-under par to finish first, thanks to a closing 64.
The Champions Tour is perhaps the hardest Tour to gain playing privileges. Only the top five finishers gained full exempt status for 2022. Joining Labritz were former PGA Tour player David Branshaw, European Tour stalwart Thongchai Jaidee, Roger Rowland and Tom Gillis. Gillis was the last man in. He was solo fifth, shooting eight-under par.
Former PGA Tour players who didn’t make it last week included names like Olin Browne, Harrison Frazar, Omar Uresti and Frank Lickliter.
It was a lifetime dream come true for Labritz. “I’ve been envisioning this happening. And it did, which is crazy,” Labritz said after achieving his dream of 15 years. “It shows the power of the mind. I’m beyond the moon. I’m almost speechless. I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this, to know that my golf game held up.”
Labritz has some big-time experience. He’s played in eight PGA Championships, including the last three and was low club professional at the major championship in 2010 and 2019. He finished sixth at the Senior PGA Professional Championship in October.
Champions Tour Q-School Results:
Storied Golf Writer Kaye Kessler Dies At Age 98:
Kaye Kessler was one of the best-known golf writers in America. He wrote for the Columbus Citizen and first met a 10-year-old youngster in 1950 named Jack Nicklaus, a student of Jack Grout, who had been hired that year as head professional at Scioto in Columbus.
Kessler passed away this past Saturday at age 98, 11 days short of his 99th birthday.
He lived an incredible life. He became one of the best known golf writers in America thanks to his longtime relationship and chronicles of Nicklaus and his incredible golf career.
Kessler served in Army intelligence during WWII. During those war years, he was on London. He came to know baseball catcher and legendary spy Moe Berg Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist working in Germany in the late 1930s who helped split the atom but was left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize for chemistry in part because of politics.
Kessler eventually came home after the war, settled into his hometown of Columbus where he became Nicklaus’ personal chronicler.
