Rozner: PGA future alive and well on Web.com Tour

Walk a golf course during a Web.com Tour event and you might not immediately grasp the magnitude of what's at stake.

But spend five or six days following a player or group, and you get an entirely different understanding of what's occurring at a course like Ivanhoe, a lovely track that's hosting the Rust-Oleum Championship this week.

This isn't Triple-A baseball or the American Hockey League, where you can clearly see the two or three players on each team that have a future at the highest level of the game.

Most of the rest are there to fill out a roster.

What you see on golf's "junior tour" are at least 100 players - of the 160 teeing off to start the week - who have a chance to play at the PGA Tour level.

And win at the PGA Tour level.

There is nothing minor league about the talent in play.

But "chance" is the most crucial of words here. They simply need a chance.

Players must finish in the top 25 of the regular season standings or top 25 of the playoff standings to earn a PGA Tour card for the following season, and it is there that a player's life can change forever.

That's where they can fly instead of drive, have others carry their bags and - most important - earn a living and support their families.

As they leave Ivanhoe and head to Wichita next week, before driving back to Illinois and Springfield the week after, that time spent on the roads instead of a driving range is ample opportunity to wonder about an uncertain future.

It's the part that leaves you with a lump in your throat and a rumble in your stomach, because there is little difference between the players on the Web and the players on the PGA.

They are so very close to making it big, so close to being on national TV on Saturday and Sunday.

The talent is there and sometimes it's as simple as a lip-out here, or a bounce off a fairway berm there, the one that kicks left into a bunker instead of right into the short stuff.

It's so obvious when you are so close to the action.

Just 75 miles north in Hartford, Wis., tens of thousands will flock to Erin Hills in a few days to watch the U.S. Open, America's national golf championship.

At Ivanhoe the galleries are modest, but the egos are not. They can't be. They have to know they're good enough, or they won't be good enough.

Here you find former PGA Tour winners, like Jason Gore and Ted Potter, Jr., the two men tied for the Rust-Oleum lead heading into Saturday's third round.

You find the very young, just getting started in their professional careers, and those like 48-year-old Robert Gamez, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour who made his first cut Friday - on the number, going 2-under in the final 5 holes - since quadruple bypass surgery three years ago.

He's playing the Web and waiting patiently to start a new career on the Champions Tour in two years.

And in between you find several dozen players who know they can win on the PGA Tour if they can simply get there, if they can overcome the injuries that have kept them from competing at their best, or the one shot separating them from a promotion.

The proof is in every PGA tournament field, where players just graduating from the Web finish in the top 10 every week, and win every year.

So far this season, 2016 Web.com Tour grads who have won already include Cody Gribble, Rod Pampling, Mackenzie Hughes, D.A. Points, Wes Bryan and Cam Smith.

Web alums have produced 468 wins on the PGA Tour.

They toil here, on the Web, in relative anonymity, yet there is virtually no difference between their play and that of their PGA brethren, give or take a Dustin Johnson or Rory McIlroy.

Outside of the top 10 or 15 players on the PGA Tour, these players are just as good, witnessed by their record once achieving PGA Tour status.

They get there and they win there, skyrocketing from unknown and struggling financially to world famous and instantly wealthy.

It happens that fast and it happens every year.

Yup, the line between getting there and not can be as fine as a good bounce or bad, a horseshoe at the cup or a burned edge.

These guys are good. They just need a chance. And the Web gives them precisely that.

brozner@dailyherald.com

• Listen to Barry Rozner from 9 a.m. to noon Sundays on the Score's "Hit and Run" show at WSCR 670-AM and follow him @BarryRozner on Twitter.