Leonard Thompson Makes 1,000th Official PGA Tour Appearance
9/28/2009 12:00:00 AM | Men's Golf
Sept. 28, 2009
With his appearance this past weekend at the Champions Tour's SAS Championship, three-time Wake Forest letterwinner Leonard Thompson became just the 10th player in history to start 1,000 official PGA TOUR/Champions Tour events in his career.
Thompson, a native of Laurinburg, North Carolina, made 651 starts on the PGA TOUR and won three official events. He also has won three official events on the Champions Tour in his 348 career appearances.
Last week at the SAS Championship at Prestonwood Country Club in Cary, N.C., Thompson carded rounds of 74-74-73=221 (+5) to finish tied for 64th. He was the highest finisher of five former Demon Deacons in the field.
Thompson came to Wake Forest in 1966 and helped the school add to its impressive collection of ACC Championships by playing on league-winners in 1967, 1968 and 1969. The Deacs finished among the top five teams in American in each of those years as well.
Individually, he earned his time on the spotlight too, with a pair of individual titles as well as he was runner-up at the 1967 ACC Championship. He then earned second team All-American honors in 1969.
Thompson's first PGA Tour event came back at the 1971 US Open at Merion Country Club and his first victory came at the 1974 Jackie Gleason Inverrary Classic. For his efforts, he was presented the winner's prize of $52,000, which was the second-highest winner's check on Tour that season. Then, in a show of extreme class, Thompson immediately donated $10,000 of his first-ever tournament victory to the Boys Clubs of America, the charitable beneficiary of that event.
He captured another Tour title in 1977 at the Pensacola and then persevered through 12 more years on Tour before winning again at the 1989 Buick Open.
Thompson, who was born on January 1, joined the Champions Tour in 1997 and went on to win three more times. Ironically, 1997 was the same year that Thompson was inducted into the Wake Forest Athletic Hall of Fame.
At 62, Thompson will likely not catch Miller Barber's record of 1,292 combined starts between the two Tours.