Martin Kaymer Loses Tour Card for 2015-16

Mandatory Credit: Rob Kinnan-USA TODAY Sports

After tying for 14th place at the Wyndham Championship, Martin Kaymer finished the PGA Tour’s regular season ranked 139th in FedEx Cup points, well short of what he needed to advance to the playoffs.

More bad news: the Wyndham was Kaymer’s 13th event of the season. The tour requires its members to play 15 events. Now that his PGA Tour season is effectively over, the 30-year-old German will officially lose his PGA Tour card for 2015-16.

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This is a bad situation for Kaymer, a former world No. 1 who won both the Players Championship and the U.S. Open en route to a 10th place finish on the money list last season. Because of those wins, he’ll regain his membership for a few years beyond next season. As a non-member, he’ll be able to make a maximum of 12 starts and won’t be eligible for the FedEx Cup.

Of course, Kaymer didn’t set up his schedule for this season with the idea that he’d fail to play the required number of events. If he had survived to the Deutsche Bank Championship, the second leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs, he would have gotten to the required 15 starts and retained full playing rights for next year. At the end of last year, Kaymer was world No. 12 and probably didn’t imagine that he’d completely miss out of the FedEx Cup playoffs, but his 2015 hasn’t gone according to plan. A maddeningly inconsistent player over the past couple years, his results from this season strongly resemble those of last season, sans those two wins. With a tie for sixth at last fall’s WGC-HSBC Champions and top 15s in this year’s final two majors, he hasn’t done particularly poorly when he’s teed it up. However, middling results in most of his other starts and an overall light schedule have cost him.

What does this mean for Kaymer as he turns his focus towards the 2015-16 season? Well, PGA Tour fans will still get to see him in action a handful of times at the majors and WGCs–Kaymer is deeply entrenched in the world’s top 50 and will continue to score exemptions into those events. He might also get a sponsorship exemption here and there.

The two time major champion will likely focus more on playing the less lucrative European Tour. In fact, that could prove to be a blessing in disguise. 2016 is a Ryder Cup year, and four exemptions are awarded based on money earned solely on the European Tour. Kaymer, a veteran of three Ryder Cups, brings a ton of experience to the table, but he’d hardly be an automatic captain’s pick–he’ll want to go after an automatic berth. A full schedule on the European Tour could prove to be extremely conducive to accomplishing this, especially given that most of Europe’s bigger stars are often distracted by PGA Tour events; Kaymer has no such opportunity to be distracted.

Kaymer may not have had a very good PGA Tour season, but as a superstar player with a considerable cachet, his absence will be felt. In a sense, this incident harkens back to that old adage: “Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched.” Kaymer assumed that he would be able to make enough starts to retain his membership, but the Darwinism that is the race to the FedEx Cup had other plans.

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