Champions Tour Insider: Thompson's 1,000th event

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Leonard Thompson poses with his cake at the SAS Championship, his 1,000th event.

A thousand tournaments. Think about that.

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OK. Now that you have, how many golfers would you guess have achieved the distinction of playing in that many events?

If you said, "Not many," you'd be correct. If you said, "10," you'd be a magna cum laude graduate in golf history studies.

Leonard Thompson became No. 10 in September at the Champions Tour's SAS Championship. Thompson, 62, has been playing tournament golf on the PGA TOUR (651 tournaments) and the Champions Tour for 37 years.

"It's not something you set out to do," Thompson said. "When you start, you don't think about it."

Now that he has joined the elite group of Miller Barber, Dave Eichelberger, Charles Coody, Arnold Palmer, Dale Douglass, J.C. Snead, Gay Brewer, Gene Littler and Jim Colbert, Thompson has time to think about it -- and he has.

"As I look back, four or five things had to happen for this to be possible," Thompson said. "You had to have pretty good health. Your family has to have been with you 100 percent. You couldn't spend that much time away from home without an understanding wife and family.

"There has to be an organization, like the PGA TOUR, that is good enough to have that many tournaments to play in. And you need people to come out and watch you play. I guess I'm just pretty lucky to be one of the guys who was around at the right time when something like this was possible."

After all these years, Thompson said he has only one regret.

"I would put more emphasis on the major championships," he said. "The only thing I'd do different if I started over is that I didn't figure it out until it was too late. That's the way you're going to be measured by the golf public -- major championships and how you did.

"I thought they were ridiculous, made 'em impossible to play. Maybe that was part of the test. Maybe you were supposed to figure it out, accept it and go on. I never did that and I regret it."

Thompson won three times on the PGA TOUR and three times on the Champions Tour. His first victory came at the 1974 Jackie Gleason-Inverrary Classic. He won again three years later at the Pensacola Open. The third victory came at the 1989 Buick Open.

On the Champions Tour, Thompson won the 1998 Coldwell Banker Burnet Classic, the 2000 State Farm Senior Classic and the 2001 Enterprise Rent-A-Car Match Play Championship.

"I think the first one is always special for everybody," Thompson said. "And the Buick Open was really special for me because it had been so long since I had won. Then coming to the Champions Tour basically to start another career, the first one out here was pretty special, too. It was in a playoff. I wanted to be in a playoff to see if I could handle it."

Thompson handled it twice. He birdied the second playoff hole to defeat Isao Aoki in 1998 at the Coldwell Banker Burnet Classic. Two years later, he birdied the third playoff hole to again defeat Aoki in a playoff and win the State Farm Senior Classic.

But when all is said and done, nothing can top that first victory at the Inverrary Classic.

He remembers standing on the 18th green and knowing that if he got down in two putts, he'd be a PGA TOUR winner.

"I remember a lot about it, looking at crowd and thinking I better remember because this may never happen again," Thompson said.

"I putted out before the other guys finished. Bud Allin and Roy Pace were the two guys I was playing with. I think I said to Buddy, 'I'll wait.' He said go ahead and get that. It was about 18 inches.

"I'll tell you something I didn't know about that tournament. If you'll look at the leaderboard at the end of that tournament, Hale Irwin was second, Lee Trevino was third, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer were fourth and fifth, even Sam Snead (was in contention). A Hall of Fame leaderboard, everybody but me. When someone showed me that leaderboard, I had no idea.

The SAS Championship was the 10th tournament this year for Thompson, who is officially retired and limited to 11 starts annually. The plan is to play six or seven events in each of the next few years.

"I'll continue to play as long as I'm not getting in the way out here," Thompson said. "If I'm being a problem during the round because I'm not playing well enough, then it's time to stop. I said as long as I could have one or two top-10s a year, I'd keep playing. I've had one every year until this year but I didn't play much this year. I won't embarrass myself."

Thompson played his college golf at Wake Forest and was inducted into the school's Hall of Fame in 1997. His hero is a fellow alum, Arnold Palmer. Thompson was a standout high school basketball player who turned down scholarship offers to play college golf.

A North Carolina native, Thompson turned professional in 1971 and had more than 70 top-10 finishes on the PGA TOUR with nearly $2 million in career earnings. He has won nearly $8 million in 13 Champions Tour seasons.

Playing in 1,000 tournaments didn't occur to Thompson until recently. And he kept going because, well, let him tell you.

"It's in your blood," he said. "This is our family, has been for 30 or 40 years. We live together, play together, cut each other's heart out and then go out for a beer together."