THE SHOWDOWN CLASSIC that will be played this week at the Jeremy Ranch Golf Course is the 29th stop on the 1990 Senior Tour calendar that includes 42 official tournaments and $18 million in official prize money.
That is in sharp contrast to the first Senior Tour event held at Jeremy Ranch, back in 1982. That year's tournament, called the Shootout at the Jeremy Ranch, was the seventh stop on an 11-stop Senior Tour that awarded $1,372,000 in official prize money.This year's Showdown alone offers a $350,000 purse.
With its nine years of uninterrupted play, Jeremy's event is exceeded in tradition by only eight other Senior Tour stops. Jeremy's first year, 1982, was only the third year of the Senior Tour's existence. In 1980, the Senior Tour's inaugural year, there were a grand total of two official events, with $250,000 in total prize money. Don January was 1980's leading money winner, with $44,100. The champion at this week's Showdown will make $52,000.
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ADD SHOWDOWN: Lee Trevino, a Senior Tour rookie, comes into the tournament with six victories already to his credit. Trevino thus continues a Senior Tour tradition of having players who grab the Tour and dominate it all season long.
No one's been able to ascertain exactly why the Senior Tour is so domitable. But it always has been. Here's a year-by-year look at the dominators: 1981 and 1982 - Miller Barber won four tournaments both years; 1983 - Don January won six tournaments; 1984 - January, Barber and Arnold Palmer won four times each (and there were only 24 events); 1985 - Peter Thomson won nine times; 1986 - Bruce Crampton won seven times; 1987 - Chi Chi Rodriguez won seven times; 1988 - Gary Player and Bob Charles won five titles each; 1989 - Charles won six more tournaments.
Clearly, age, or lack of it, has had something to do with this domination. Barber was 50, 51 and 53 in his dominating years, Crampton was 50, Chi Chi was 51, Player was 52, and Charles was 52 and 53. January was 54 and 55 when he won his 10 tournaments in 1983 and 1984 and Thomson didn't hit his peak until he was 56 in 1985 - when he won his record-setting nine tournaments, a figure Trevino still has a shot at.
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BRONCOMANIA IS A ALIVE AND . . .: Any suspicions that interest in the Denver Broncos would take a nosedive after two consecutive Super Bowl flame-outs are apparently unfounded - at least they are if media coverage in Denver for last weekend's Broncos at Indianapolis preseason game are any indication.
The Rocky Mountain News carried no less than seven stories on the game, as well as a letters to the editors section that concerned itself almost exclusively with the Broncos. And a few days before that, when Broncos Head Coach Dan Reeves was hospitalized with heart/artery problems, KUSA, the ABC affiliate in Denver, led its newscast with that story before getting into the No. 2 story of the evening - Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
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THE OLDEST: Former NFL coaching stalwart George Allen is making headlines as the oldest college coach in the country now that he's preparing Long Beach State for the 1990 season. Allen is 72 - one year older than Grambling's Eddie Robinson, the winningest coach in college football history with 358 wins.
Allen is no wallflower, however. The Los Angeles Times reported that the veteran coach, always a fitness addict, doesn't break for lunch at noontime, but instead runs two miles and does 100 situps and 50 pushups.
"Actually I do 101 situps and 51 pushups," said Allen. "I always try to do one more than my goal."
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ADD ALLEN: Brigham Young Coach LaVell Edwards, a mere youngster at 59, when apprised of Allen's lunchtime regimen: "Personally, I can think of a lot better ways to spend the lunch hour."
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK: San Francisco 49er tackle Bubba Paris, after losing 37 pounds between mini-camp and the opening of training camp: "I'm just now getting from where I looked like a whale to where I look like a normal fat human being."