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Tour de las Americas
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Tour de las Américas is the men's professional golf tour for Latin America.
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 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 European Tour, such as José Cóceres and Ángel Cabrera.
In 2000 new owners relaunched the tour under the name Tour de las Américas 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. In 2006 there were twelve events that counted towards the Tour de las Americas Order of Merit, with prize funds ranging from US$55,000 to US$310,000.
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 Américas is hoping to be promoted into the World Ranking system in the future.