Upon graduating from Duke University in 2001, most of Kevin Streelman’s friends headed for Wall Street or law school. Not Streelman. He used his mom’s Nissan Altima to travel to South Dakota for the 2001 Dakotas Tour. He burned out three cars logging more than 300,000 miles crisscrossing the country while playing various tours before earning his PGA Tour card in 2008 and has kept it ever since, which is no easy trick. Along the way, he’s won twice on Tour, including the 2013 Valspar Championship, banking more than $26 million and this week marks his 444th Tour start.
Streelman, 45, opened with a 64 to grab the first-round lead 11 years after notching his maiden victory at Innisbrook Resort’s Copperhead Course in Palm Harbor, Florida. It could be a big weekend for him if he were to win again, and certainly can go a long way to regaining his Tour privileges for yet another season. During his tenure Streelman also has been involved in Tour policy, serving on the Player Advisory Council, as a player director on the Policy Board (he noted that he mostly dealt with benign topics such as slow play and his tenure ending in 2019 was “the luckiest and greatest time to come off the board in the history of the game,” right before COVID hit and then the emergence of LIV on top of that), and most recently on the Tour’s Governance Committee, which was formed after the announcement of the PGA Tour’s framework agreement with PIF on June 6.
While he likely is on the back nine of his playing career, he still cares deeply about the Tour’s future and professional golf in general and has strong opinions about the direction it has been heading. The following conversation began in person at the Players Championship and resumed via phone after Streelman had weathered difficult conditions on Friday to share the 36-hole lead in Tampa.
