Golf Tours - Tour de Las Americas
The Tour de las Americas is the men's
professional golf tour for Latin America.
Tour golf in Latin America has had an unstable history. Some of the
national open championships in the region are long established, but they
did not traditionally form a coherent tour. In the late 1970s and early
1980s the Caribbean Tour attracted entrants from leading European and
American golfers such as Seve Ballesteros and Curtis Strange, but it
folded after a few years. The next attempt was the "South American Tour"
of 1981 to 1999, which was based around the existing national opens of
the main Latin American countries. This had limited success in creating
a popular and coherent tour, and was mainly notable for the quality of
some of the players it exported to the PGA TOUR and the PGA European
Tour, such as José Coceres and Angel Cabrera.
In 2000 new owners re-launched the tour under the name Tour de las
Americas with aims of creating a schedule which would cover the whole
region from Argentina to the Caribbean, and gaining wider media
exposure. The tour soon introduced a policy of co-sanctioning some
events with Europe's second tier Challenge Tour. It also co-operates
with the Nationwide Tour; for example some leading Tour de las Americas
players are given entries to certain Challenge Tour events.
If the Sunshine Tour is regarded as the main tour for all of Africa,
Latin America is the only region of the World which does not have a tour
which is a member of the elite International Federation of PGA Tours and
where the main tour does not offer Official World Golf Rankings points.
The Tour de las Americas is hoping to be promoted into the World Ranking
system in the future.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_de_las_Americas
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