Jak Hamblett, Andy Sullivan, Sam Foster, Ben Stafford, Neil Taylor, Rob Browning.

This is the 1000th European Tour event and in the past 30 years, the Tour has established itself as a brand as well as one of the pre-eminent sporting bodies in the World. Europeantour.com now has over 350 000 unique users and in recent years and if you are already a user of the site, you will know about europeantourholidays.com. To compliment this there is now europeantourshop.com.

For the past two years, the Swedish Clothing Company Oscar Jacobson has supplied the Tour Clothing for over 100 management and events staff from the European Tour. Oscar Jacobson celebrated its Centenary last year and its involvement with the European Ryder Cup team has been going since 1987 (as trouser supplier). With the new web site, and an agreement with Premier Style for the site to market Oscar Jacobson clothing, the company will have the added marketing World-wide for is very high technology ranges through being associated with the Global golf tour.

Premier Style will also design produce and market a new PGA European Tour Collection, with the new range actually launched at Wentworth this week. It’s a major step towards providing a complete range of outlets for the Tour clothing, from high quality retailers and Pro shops and now one of the most successful web sites (let alone sports media) in Europe.

As for 1000 European Tour events – the total prize money played for has exceeded £500M in the last 30 years, the youngest winner has been Dale Hayes, the oldest Des Smyth and Seve has the most individual wins – 50 – one in every 20 of the Tour events that has ever taken place and if his signals of retirement because of a chronic back problem do come to be final, its as much of a testament to his record as all his Order of Merits, his status as a player something endorsed by the first round leader Ernie Els.

‘Seve is the Arnold Palmer of the European Tour. All of the charisma, the excitement that you wanted to see, you know, that was Seve. He totally – he changed the Tour in his way. If there was one guy I always wanted to watch play golf, it would have been Seve.’

Sam Torrance holds the Tour record for numbers of cuts made (525) and from the press conference held through the introduction of the Tour web shop, he also holds another notable record.

For the 2002 Ryder Cup, Sam signed 1250 limited edition Baxter prints in under three hours, in one session. As a comparison, this year’s Captain Bernard Langer took two days and five hours in total – and his withdrawal from the Volvo PGA was not due to the sore shoulder from his efforts with a pen (nor Teutonic efficiency).

There have been 12 scores of 60 in the past 30 years, and four players have had 12 birdies in a single round. 34 countries have been visited and there have 293 winners of events, with the leading number by Country coming from … England (65).

All in all, the celebrations will go on throughout the week of an organisation which has done incredible things in the last 30 years, and from who so many Major winners and Ryder Cup Champions have developed their games and continued to be part of what is considered the most friendly of sports tours. The Tour does not have the history of the Amateur game as yet but it is now the main reason why so many people try to become as good at the game of golf as they can. With the foresight that our Union has, the Amateur game is there for players who do decide they are not quite good enough to play for money and to provide a continuing (and growing) stream of talent so that the winning will go on.