Players Look for Relief on Hogan Tour : Golf: It’s created for potential stars looking for a game, veterans getting ready for the seniors and even a few who are merely down on their luck.

Five hours up through the brown, dormant winter of the San Joaquin Valley, then west through the Coastal Range to the Monterey Peninsula, 180 professional golfers were teeing it up last weekend with Clint Eastwood, his show biz pals and assorted lions of industry on some of golf’s lushest layouts.

There was $1 million in prize money available, along with business contacts that help solidify the golfers’ financial futures.

Rick Dalpos knows the difference between his game and those that were played at Pebble Beach.

“One shot,” he said. “I averaged 72 (strokes per round) last year on the (PGA) tour, and I had to go back to qualifying school. One shot a day. Four shots a round. Make a putt, anything.”

The putt goes in the hole, and he’s taking home six-figure payoffs, and writing magazine articles about getting up and down from a greenside bunker, with golfers reading and emulating his technique because they’ve seen it on television on Sunday.

The putt misses, and he makes $28,821, 182nd on the money list; and he was in Bakersfield last week, playing in the inaugural tournament of the Ben Hogan Tour, which advertises itself as producing the “champions of tomorrow.”

It’s a 30-tournament cross-country traverse, with stops ranging from Bakersfield to Falmouth, Me.; from Ft. Myers, Fla., to Boise, Ida. The tournament sites are close enough to be driven between to save money, and also are placed well out of the drawing range of PGA, Senior and LPGA tour events.

At each tournament, golfers pay a $250 entry fee--compared to $100 on the regular tour--to play for $100,000 total, $20,000 to the winner. The money has been posted by the Ben Hogan Co. on a five-year contract, and the PGA Tour underwrites the expenses of administration along with local sponsoring organizations.

The PGA Tour also provides the bait that brings most of the 132 entrants. The top five money winners on the Hogan tour will advance to next year’s PGA Tour without having to endure the 108-hole qualifying tournament and regional qualifying steps over which so many trip.

“We went to the Player Advisory Council and asked them what it would take for players of the Hogan tour to earn their way to the regular tour,” said Jay Edgar, executive director of the Hogan tour. “They said, ‘We feel like after a player plays in 30 events and he’s risen to the top of the money list, he’s proven that he can play this tour.’ ”

The exemption easily outweighs the Hogan tour’s prize money.

“I can play maybe 12 to 15 of the regular tour events,” Greg Ladehoff said. “But if I’m in the top five on this tour or close to it near the end of the season, I may skip regular tour events and play the Hogan.”

Being able to bypass the qualifying tournament would seem to be in Ladehoff’s best vocational interests. He made about $62,270 on the regular tour a year ago--including $2,000 at Pebble Beach--but that wasn’t enough to put him on the list of 125 players who keep regular tour status.

He seemed well on target toward renewing his tour card in the qualifying tournament at Woodland Hills in Houston, but a final-round 79--”I had three water balls and one out of bounds,” he said--brought him back to earth. The top 50 and ties in the qualifying tournament earned PGA Tour cards.

Ladehoff missed by one shot.

The Hogan tour is a brainchild of PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman, who sold his players on the idea of a financial commitment that Edgar said will be about $1.3 million for the five years.

“I’ve always wanted a system for younger players to play and experience the game,” Beman said. “We decided to take a regular PGA event and scale it down a little. Selling it to the players was the easiest part.”

For all of the questions that preceded the Hogan tour, one never involved players.

There seems to be an endless supply of people who can shoot an occasional 68 and would like to make money doing it.

For many of those golfers, California’s Golden State Tour or Florida’s Space Coast Tour, or foreign tournaments presented the only opportunities to hone their games.

“There’s a tremendous amount of golf talent,” Edgar said. “We asked ourselves, ‘What can we do to keep those players from having to go overseas?’ ”

When 264 players showed up to pay $100 to play in a Monday qualifying round for eight spots in the 132-player Bakersfield tournament, Edgar and other Hogan tour officials smiled. So did the Southern California PGA, beneficiary of the $26,400 qualifying money.

The procedure is a throwback to the days of the golf rabbit, a player who went 18 holes on Monday, hoping to get into a tournament, then, if he missed, hopped away to the next site to try again.

Edgar sees the Hogan tour in nostalgic terms, from the Monday qualifying to the sites chosen--many of them had tournaments until the tour became so expensive that it moved to larger venues--to many players staying in sponsors’ homes and sharing cars for transportation.

Thirty years ago, the Bakersfield Open paid in both cash and local currency to golfers passing through. Jack Fleck won the tournament in a one-hole playoff against Bob Rosburg and collected $3,500 and a year’s worth of oil well royalties. Rosburg got $2,300 and a steer. Jim Ferree won $1,800 and a bale of cotton for finishing third, and Gay Brewer $1,200 and two sheep for fourth.

It was a sign of the times, and so was last week’s effort. The inaugural Hogan event raised more than $100,000, with money going to a scholarship fund and the Special Olympics. Other charities will benefit at the tour’s other sites.

For all of the emphasis on youth, there is a remedial aspect to the idea of the Hogan tour. The Bakersfield tournament included golfers from several categories, from the PGA Tour qualifying school to a separate Hogan tour qualifying tournament to older PGA Tour players down on their luck.

The field included Mike McCullough, who collected $17,500 for finishing in a tie for 15th at Pebble Beach a year ago, and who has 18 years on the regular tour, as well as Bob Lunn, who won the 1971 L. A. Open at Rancho Park, and there were better-known veterans such as Peter Oosterhuis.

There is a separate category for golfers 40-49 who want to get their games prepared for the Senior tour.

For many, it’s a comedown after playing on the PGA Tour. For others it’s an opportunity.

“I feel I’m getting better at this game,” said Dalpos, “I want to keep up with the game. It’s something I like to do. I think every player has said, ‘That’s it. I’m done,’ and I have to (eventually). But I don’t want to quit.”

Instead, he was playing Bakersfield last week, searching for that one stroke that he says kept him from playing Pebble Beach.