Tour de las Américas

The Tour de las Américas (TLA) was a men's professional golf tour for Latin America. It was replaced by the PGA Tour Latinoamérica in 2012.

Top level tournament 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 incorporated the existing national opens of the main Latin American countries. This had considerable success in creating a popular and coherent tour over its almost two decades of operations and was notable for the quality of some of the players it exported to the PGA Tour and the European Tour, such as José Cóceres and Ángel Cabrera.

In 2000, new owners relaunched the tour under the name Tour de las Américas with aim of creating a schedule which would cover the whole region from Argentina to the Caribbean, and gain wider media exposure. The tour soon introduced a policy of co-sanctioning some events with Europe's second tier Challenge Tour, and some years later, in 2008, a similar arrangement was agreed with the Canadian Tour. The TLA also co-operated with the Nationwide Tour; whereby some of the leading Tour de las Américas players are given entries to certain Nationwide Tour events.

If the Sunshine Tour is considered to be the main tour for all of Africa, then in the early 21st century, Latin America was the only region of the World which did have a professional tour which is a full member of the International Federation of PGA Tours, the Tour de las Américas having joined the federation as an associate member on July 30, 2007. In August 2010, the Governing Board of the Official World Golf Ranking made a provisional announcement that the tour would offer ranking points starting in 2011.[1] The first tournament to receive ranking points was the 2011 Abierto de Chile[2]

Order of Merit winners

Season Player Country Points Earnings (US$)
2012 Marco Ruiz  Paraguay 26,884
2011 Joaquín Estévez  Argentina 51,970
2010 Julián Etulain  Argentina 56,593
2009 Peter Gustafsson  Sweden 40,934
2008 Estanislao Goya  Argentina 58,104
2007 Miguel Rodríguez  Argentina 60,180
2006 Fabrizio Zanotti  Paraguay 68,790
2005 Daniel Barbetti  Argentina 41,514
2004 Rafael Gómez  Argentina 59,220
2003 Eduardo Argiro  Argentina 48,174
2001–02 Rafael Gómez  Argentina 55,987
2000–01 Angel Romero  Colombia 49,396
South American Tour
1999 Scott Dunlap  United States
1998 Raúl Fretes  Paraguay
1997 Ricardo González  Argentina
1996 Pedro Martínez  Paraguay
1995 Ángel Cabrera  Argentina
1994 Raúl Fretes  Paraguay
1993 Carlos Franco  Paraguay
1992 Eric Woods  United States
1991 Angel Franco  Paraguay

References

External links

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