On the practice range Friday, before the second round of Charlie Beljan's final chance to avoid having to requalify for the PGA Tour, his throat tightened and his heart began hammering.
"Up until that moment just now I had a big weight on my shoulder," said Silver, who was forced, essentially, to requalify for the team after sustaining a broken right hand at the finish of her last race of the trials in July.
Simpson needs to rank in the top 10 of the QS to requalify for the WCT.
Huntington's Brett Simpson, surfing in the Qualifying Series (QS) in an effort to requalify for the WCT, placed equal-ninth in the Billabong Pro Cascais in Portugal last week, helping raise him in the QS rankings to No. 31.
Oh, what a scramble used to ensue to hit those mileage-flown benchmarks by Dec. 31 to requalify for elite status for the coming year.
Right now, more of them are like me — anxiously looking at my mileage account and calculating how many more miserable miles I need to fly by the end of the year to requalify for a lowly level of "elite status".
The opportunities I missed out on to earn frequent-flyer points; the wrong airlines I flew which meant I failed to requalify for higher élite status on my preferred carriers; the poor choices of hotels I made; even those occasions when I stupidly opted for the dreaded pre-pay fuel option and ended up giving the car rental company back half a tank of petrol – a particular irritation.
Furthermore, she was told at the airport, she would not earn elite-status qualifying miles for the trip, which she had been counting on to hit the 25,000-mile minimum requirement to requalify for next year.
It does, though, make much of the announcement this week by Ed Joyce — an Irishman who played one-day internationals for England, but never made the test team — that he intends to requalify for Ireland.
Matthew Bennett, publisher of the online premium air travel newsletter Flightbliss.com, suggests that the discounts are a good way for elite-status frequent fliers to take holiday trips in comfort while padding their year-end totals of miles needed to requalify for elite status next year.
