Happy to be here at Deere

SILVIS, Ill. - The John Deere Classic has its $828,000 first prize, and its two-year exemption on the PGA Tour to the winner, and its Ryder Cup and FedExCup points, and its exposure for all the corporations who sponsor the Tour players.

That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is a guy playing golf his whole life who wants to get a chance to play in a Tour event, to be with and compete against some of the world's best players on a big stage.

Chris Black of Independence is 41. He said he has wanted to play in a PGA Tour tourney “since I was 5.”

“Thirty-six years,” he said. “I never thought I wouldn't do it.”

Thursday and Friday here, he did. He shot even-par 71 for a two-day total of 2-over 144 and missed the JDC's 36-hole cut. But he got here. And he finished with a flourish.

Black made a 15-foot birdie putt on the 17th hole. His third-shot pitch at the par-4 18th hit the flagstick and rolled 17 feet from the cup, but he made his par putt to leave on a high note.

Black had known for almost a year that he would be playing in the Deere. He earned his spot by winning last July's Iowa PGA Professional Championship, and by seven shots at that. He came to the Quad Cities last Friday to begin trying to get to know the TPC Deere Run course.

For a year, he said, playing here had been in “the back, the middle, the front” of his mind. “I've really been excited about it.”

“It was his lifelong dream to play in a PGA tournament,” said Black's wife, Jennifer. “He talked about it a lot. He set goals all winter, to be in shape, that kind of stuff.”

Like most Tour events, the JDC has a Monday qualifier in which the top four players out of 65 or 70 advance to that week's main event. How many of those had Black played over the years without qualifying?

“More than I can count,” he said.

However, this is a good player. He won three of the Iowa PGA's four majors last year. He qualified for last month's PGA Professional National Championship in Seaside, Calif. About 14,000 players try to make the tourney, and just 312 get there.

Black made the 36-hole cut (top 70 players and ties). He finished in a tie for 76th.

But he isn't a jet-setter. If anything, he's one of the people who keep golf alive at the grass roots level.

He and his partners (his sister, brother and brother-in-law) own Edgewater and Hickory Grove golf courses in Oelwein, and manage River Ridge Golf course in Independence and the Jesup Golf and Country Club.

“It's a lot of work,” Black said. “But I've got great partners and we work hard together.

“They've really picked up the slack since I've been gone a lot. I couldn't do it without them. There's no way.”

The brother-in-law is Mike Lewis, the men's and women's golf coach at Upper Iowa University. Lewis was Black's caddie here.

“It's nice to be inside the ropes with my brother-in-law,” Lewis said. “The two guys we were paired with (PGA Tour pros Billy Hurley III and Scott Brown) were very welcoming.”

The difference in the quality of Black's game and those of Brown's and Hurley's seemed negligible, but Black acknowledges the difference between PGA Tour guys and really good players who aren't on the Tour.

"Throughout the years I've played with a lot of Tour players,” Black said. “I think the way they think separates them. They think at a higher level when it comes to competing.

“They think differently, they talk differently, they act differently.”

Maybe. But they're no more admirable than a club pro who never stopped pushing himself to see how far he could go in his sport, to chase down that elusive spot in a PGA Tour event.

“I cant wait to come back,” Black said.