Minnesota Golfer - Summer 2022 - 25

But he was also a member at Village Green GC in Moorhead,
which made him eligible to play in the Minnesota State Am,
which he won in 2009 and '10. The former TCU All-American
claimed his first PGA Tour victory this winter, at the AT&T
Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and he's been in the top 10 on the tour's
money list ever since.
Merritt is from Idaho, but his family moved to Fridley before
Tom Lehman
The Champions
The three fixtures in HTD since the beginning are now all on
the Champions Tour-Tom Lehman, Tim Herron and
Cameron Beckman.
Other than Patty Berg, Lehman is the most successful golfer
that Minnesota has ever produced. He remains the only person
to have been the Player of the Year on the Hogan (now Korn
Ferry) Tour, the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour. That was
after he was an All-American at the University of Minnesota
and won pretty much everything there was for him to win in
Minnesota golf-the Players Championship (1980, '81), the
State Amateur ('81), the State Open ('89, '90) and the Tapemark
Pro-Am ('90).
The 63-year-old from Alexandria has won 35 times as a professional,
including one PGA Tour major (the 1996 British
Open), three senior majors, and earned a combined $35 million
on the Hogan, PGA and Champions tours.
Herron, a former State Am champion (1992) from Wayzata,
won four times on the PGA Tour and made more than $19 million
out there. He hasn't won on the Champions Tour in the two
years since he turned 50, but he's come close.
Beckman, who was on the Burnsville team that made it to the
championship game at the state hockey tournament in 1987,
won the 1991 NAIA individual championship in golf while he
was at Texas Lutheran. He won three
times on the PGA Tour and, having
turned 50 (Feb. 15, 2020) nine days after
Herron, earned his first Champions Tour
victory last July in the Dick's Sporting
Goods Open.
Minnesota Connections
The three players listed this year for the
PGA Tour in HTD-Tom Hoge, Troy
Merritt and Erik Van Rooyen-aren't
quite as closely connected to Minnesota
as Lehman, Herron and Beckman, but
they all played a lot of golf here.
Hoge grew up in Fargo and won multiple
North Dakota state championships.
he started ninth grade, and he went to high school at Spring Lake
Park. He spent two years at Winona State before going back to
Idaho and transferring to Boise State, where he won the last five
tournaments of the regular season when he was a senior and
led NCAA Division I golf
that year with a 69.2 scoring
average.
On his first try at the
old 144-hole PGA Tour
Q-School Final Stage,
in 2009, he led wire to
wire. He won in '09 on
the Korn Ferry Tour,
which was then called the
Nationwide, and he's won
twice on the PGA Tour.
He made more than $2 million during the 2014-15 season, and
he's made more than $1 million in each of the last five years for
a total of $12.5 million-and counting.
Van Rooyen is from South Africa, but for some reason he
Troy Merritt
chose to spend his winters in Minnesota for four years while
he was playing for the Gophers. During that time, he spent one
summer here and won the 2012 State Am. Although he didn't
stay the next summer to defend the title and turned pro instead,
he did come back three years later and earned his first victory as
a professional at the 2016 Tapemark Pro-Am.
The next year, he won on the Sunshine (South African) Tour
and later in 2017, he won on the European Challenger Tour.
That helped to get him status on the European Tour, where he
established himself in the top 10 on the Order of Merit, and he
won the 2019 Scandinavian Invitation.
Van Rooyen played well enough in tournaments
co-sponsored by the European
(now DP World) Tour and PGA Tour
that he was able to gain status on the PGA
Tour, and last year he won the Barracuda
Championship, his first PGA Tour victory.
After being outside of the top 125
on the money list with only a few weeks
left in the 2020-21 season, he played well
enough to make the Tour Championship
and finished the season with more than
$2.2 million.
On the LPGA
Amy Olson
The most prominent woman in HTD in
recent years has been Amy Olson, formngolf.org
Summer
2022 MINNESOTAGOLFER
25
http://www.mngolf.org
Minnesota Golfer - Summer 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Minnesota Golfer - Summer 2022
