Miguel Angel Jimenez is known more for his cigars, his love of a good red wine , and his crazy pre-tournament warmups than for being the leading money winner and points leader on the PGA Tour Champions circuit. But right now, he’s at the top of the pack heading down the stretch of the season.
The Schwab points winner is usually a Bernhard Langer or Hale Irwin or Tom Watson or Steve Stricker, guys who have won a lot of tournaments in several seasons. But this year, the money leader, and therefore Schwab points leader so far, has been Jimenez with four victories. The points are, thankfully, easy to understand.
A dollar equals a point until the playoffs, when a dollar equals two points. It’s the PGA Tour Champions' version of the regular PGA Tour's FedEx Cup playoffs, but it escaped that period where the points were so convoluted that no one could understand them.
With just one tournament left in the regular season and three in the playoffs, it would be difficult, but not impossible for someone to overtake Jimenez and win the title. The winner of the Cup receives more than a half-million dollars for his trouble.
Right now, after a T38 finish at the Constellation Furyk & Friends event, Jimenez is projected to have 2,987,947.53 points. Stewart Cink is second with 2,511,921.67, Steven Alker is third with 2,340,369.67 points, and Ernie Els is fourth with 1,972,092.76, just slightly more than a million points behind Jimenez. Padraig Harrington is even farther back in fifth with 1,833,485.76.
This week’s tournament winner, Tommy Gainey, received 315,000 points. It will be a similar total for next week’s SAS Championship. Then, the points double. That means a player would have to get on a real roll for three weeks and then finish in the top 36 to be invited to the final event, the Charles Schwab Cup.
Stewart Cink is more than 476,000 points behind Jimenez, and Alker needs 647,578 points to take over the top spot. But with two regular tournaments and the final Charles Schwab Cup remaining and double points in the offing, it is possible for either of them to catch and surpass Jimenez.
The points for first at the Dominion Charity Classic and the Simmons Bank Championship, the first two playoff events, become more like 550,000 to 600,000 for each of those events.
Two high finishes could knock Jimenez out of the title and put Cink or Alker there in his place. A big year-end rally by Els or Harrington could do the same for them.
In other words, when it comes to the Charles Schwab Cup, the race is still on.