Julie Williams
| Special to Golfweek
Sixty years ago, the top three players in the Golfweek National Senior Amateur Ranking overlapped for a single season on Virginia Tech’s men’s golf team. Given that history, the three are quite familiar with each other’s golf games. And so John Osborne, who on Monday won the Golfweek Senior Tournament of Champions to wrap up Player of the Year honors in that division, knows exactly what his accomplishment means.
“I’m fortunate to get to the top of the list this year, that’s never happened to me before,” said Osborne, 77. “It is a real treat to be able to get there.”
All year long, Osborne, Sam Robinson and Bill Engel jostled around the top spots in the rankings. Robinson took some big wins late in the fall, notably at the Golfweek Super Senior, Legends & Super Legends National Championship and the Reynolds Senior Invitational, to take the advantage into the Golfweek TOC. Osborne, who splits his year between Virginia and Florida, thought it looked unlikely that anyone could catch Robinson, who lives in Jacksonville, Florida..
Osborne, however, won the Ralph Bogart Tournament last week and followed it up with a one-shot victory over Robinson at the TOC, played at PGA National’s Champion Course in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Osborne had rounds of 80-75-77. Engel, who lives in St. Augustine, Florida, was fourth.
Like the rest of the field, Osborne fought through a brutal wind in the final round on the Champion Course, site of the PGA Tour’s Cognizant Classic and a tough test for the TOC field.
“They have been working to get that in tournament shape, the roughs had been overseeded, were very difficult,” he said. “They were very fuzzy and the greens were very firm and faster than anything we played all year. It was quite a challenging couple of days here.”
Osborne and Engel also played high school golf together. They lost touch with fellow Hokie alum Robinson through the years but then, while playing on this senior circuit, saw the name Sam Robinson at a tournament they were playing in Ft. Myers, Florida.
“We thought, ‘Is that possible?’” Osborne said. “We walked over and he was teeing off and we were about 50 yards away and as soon as he stood up to the ball, we said, ‘That’s Sam.’”
Asked if the trio kept an eye on the points race throughout this season, Osborne confirmed that they did, and had fun keeping track.
“We always look at the points to see where we stand and we have a pretty intense rivalry between a handful of folks that play in enough events to get near the top,” he said.
While Osborne landed at the top of the Player of the Year points race in the Super Legend division, his younger brother Greg Osborne, 72, did the same in the Legend division. Greg Osborne finished fourth in his division at the TOC but had already wrapped up enough points in the rankings that he still prevailed.
Like his brother, Greg Osborne’s POY win marks the first time in his career he’s finished the year on top of his division.
“I don’t even remember where I was last year but last year was the first time I played in enough events to be close,” he said.
The Osborne brothers also spent a brief period early in 2024 ranked at the top of their respective divisions and that was believed to be the first time two brothers had ever done such a thing. This marks another first.
The fact that he was in the POY race kept Greg Osborne, who lives in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on the road late in the year. He teed it up in Las Vegas last month at the Golfweek Senior Desert Showdown to try to keep his edge.
At PGA National, he began the week with 79 then rallied with a second-round 71. As the wind howled in the third round, he backed up to 83 for his fourth-place finish.
“The real test of a good golf course is if you make a mistake, you pay for it. This golf course, if you make a mistake, you pay for it,” he said. “I don’t watch a lot of TV golf but when that tournament (the Cognizant Classic) comes around, I’m going to watch it. I want to say, ‘Yeah, I remember that hole.’”
In the Super Senior, Gary Durbin of Houston won the Tournament of Champions title by a two-shot margin over Keith Decker of Martinsville, Virginia. Durbin finished at 9 over after rounds of 77-72-76.
The closest division by far, however, was the Senior division, where three accomplished players finished 54 holes tied at 2 under. Michael McCoy of Norwalk, Iowa; Jerry Gunthorpe of Ovid, Michigan; and Michael Nealy of Boca Raton, Florida, all entered a sudden-death playoff at the end of regulation and McCoy, the reigning U.S. Senior Amateur champion, won it on the second hole with a birdie.
