Roy Moon: Journeyman with a Dream

Filed in archive Golf News on January 28, 2007

Courtesy: UCLA Bruins

The Big Show is well and truly underway.

Tiger Woods is back in action. He's in his first tournament of the season at the Buick Invitational and the media have cranked up their golf coverage as a result.

But, out in the boonies, the struggle continues.

The far-flung tours in the world of golf are the starting points for many professional careers. They call them the "journeymen", the "Monday qualifiers". They're the guys who are trying to make a living playing the game they love. And playing it anywhere they can.

Tiger came out of two years at Stanford and began to win right away. He is the exception and we all realize that.

But the journeymen know only one road to The Big Show. And it's long, slow and mostly uphill.

Roy C. Moon is a case in point.

Roy is a college golfer who graduated from UCLA in '03 where he played on the UCLA Bruins NCAA team.

His college record was pretty good. His amateur record, good.

Good, but not great.

Now Roy is playing on the Asian Tour. He just finished the Pakistan Open at the Karachi Golf Club in Karachi. Roy finished in a logjam for 9th and picked up just over 5 thousand bucks US for his efforts.

The Pakistan Open is the first tournament in the UBS Order of Merit on the Asian Tour so Roy is effectively 9th on the Asian money list at the moment.

More than 300 thousand bucks was won on the Asian Tour last year by the top money earner. Roy would love a piece of that.

But there are nearly 180 players on the Asian Tour this season, many of them experienced players on the tour. They know the courses; they know the countries, the airports, the places to stay in and the ones to avoid.

Roy is starting from square one. He's going to eat food he's never heard of, let alone ever seen; he'll encounter cultures and languages that are completely foreign and there will be many a moment when he'll wish he was back at UCLA, teeing it up with his team mates.

He's on his own, "no direction home", to quote Dylan.

I really enjoy watching Tiger play the game. But I root for the guys like Roy C. Moon who fight for their 15 minutes of fame and their time in the winner's circle.

Roy and every golfer like him epitomize what is great about the human spirit and the game of golf.