As his time on the Champions Tour starts to wind down, Dana Quigley is now mulling a move to the broadcast booth.

AP / Ed Zurga

Happy birthday, Dana Quigley.

He turned 61 on Monday and, while cause for celebration, it was nowhere near as momentous an occasion as the day he turned 50.

Among the many movies that the homespun, cowboy comedian Will Rogers starred in was a 1935 release titled “Life Begins at Forty.” The film wasn’t memorable, but the title has become an oft-repeated phrase, uttered hopefully, if not always entirely convincingly, by folks of a certain age.

It was never true in Quigley’s case.

For the former Crestwood Country Club pro, the best years of his life began April 14, 1997, when he became eligible to play on what was then called the Senior Tour.

“I didn’t know if I’d last the year,” he said Sunday night by phone from his home in Florida, as Trevor Immelman was playing the final holes in that annual invitational tournament held at Augusta National Golf Club.

“I didn’t know if I’d even get into a tournament. I knew there was no future if I had to continue trying to qualify on Mondays. I thought that probably, after a year or two, I’d go back to being a club pro for the rest of my life.”

Quigley’s life changed forever when, on the same day his father, Wally, passed away after a long battle with cancer, he won the Northville Long Island Classic. He had to get through a qualifying tournament to even earn a spot in the field, and then went on to win the event in a three-hole playoff with Jay Sigel.

“How could any of my wins be more important that that first one?” Quigley said. “That took me off the hook as far as playing in Monday qualifiers and having to go to Senior Q-School.”

Since then, he has won 10 more times and ranks third in all-time earnings on the Champions Tour, having pocketed more than $14 million.

He would have had to give a lot of lessons at Crestwood over the last dozen years to come close to that figure.

“These have been the best years of my life, no question,” Quigley said. “Looking back on them, I wonder: ‘Where did they go?’ I feel like it’s been a blur, it’s gone by so fast.

“Winning all those tournaments, winning all that money — it’s something I never envisioned happening. And to have rubbed elbows with every top player in the world in our era is the coolest thing.”

That’s the thing that nobody, certainly not Quigly himself, ever envisioned — that, as a Senior, he would emerge as one of the top players in the world.

After all, in a brief and undistinguished stint on the PGA Tour in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he played in 100 tournaments, earned less than $100,000, and never finished better than sixth. Those were the days when Tom Watson was winning five British Open championships, along with a green jacket at the Masters, and a U.S. Open championship. Yet three times on the Champions Tour, Quigley has beaten him in head-to-head competition in the final round to win tournaments.

“When you go on the regular Tour and have no success, it’s hard to feel good about yourself,” Quigley said. “From age 35 to age 50, I felt I was pretty good, but wasn’t able to prove it.”

He certainly has proven it over the last 12 years.

He won two tournaments in 1998 and earned over $1 million for the first time. Although he didn’t win in ’99, he had 18 top-10 finishes. He won at Kansas City in 2000, draining a 12-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole after Watson had set up a possible playoff by hitting his approach shot to within a foot of the cup. Quigley won again in 2001, at the SBC Senior Open outside Chicago. In 2002, he won two more tournaments and lost another in a playoff. He won the season-opening MasterCard Championship in 2003 in Hawaii. He missed defending that title by a single stroke in 2004, and then won it again in ’05, beating Watson in a playoff.

That was the start of a career year for Quigley, who, at 58, became the oldest player ever to finish atop the Champions Tour money list. He was named Player of the Year in 2005 after winning two tournaments, and losing in playoffs in two of the Tour’s major events. Amazingly, he shot in the 60s in 42 of his 84 competitive rounds that year. He also tied a Tour record by making eight consecutive birdies at the Bruno’s Classic.

Yet the biggest news Quigley made in 2005 was when he decided not to travel across the Atlantic to play in the British Senior Open. That snapped his record streak of playing in 278 consecutive events for which he was eligible, and 264 in a row overall.

“The streak is what I’ll be remembered for,” he said. “I doubt that record will ever be broken. But my greatest satisfaction was being Player of the Year.

“For me, the streak was simple. It was no big deal because I wake up every morning wanting to play golf. There’s never a day I don’t want to play.

“It’s a sickness,” he said, laughing. “I still think I can play better. The only thing I ever wanted to do is play golf. I never could have worked in an office job.”

Even though he’ll always be known as the “Iron Man” of the Champions Tour, Quigley knows he can’t play competitive golf forever.

Bothered by problems with high blood pressure, he fell out of the Top 20 on the money list last year for the first time since his rookie year in ’97, finishing 23rd. He’s 43rd this year, with earnings of $111,731. And so, the first weekend in May he’s skipping the FedEx Kinko’s Classic in Austin, Texas, in order to work in the broadcast booth, alongside Dave Marr III, for the Golf Channel’s telecast of the tournament.

“He’s always asking me if I’m ready to come up into the booth,” Quigley said. “This will be sort of a trial run. If I do any good, I think I could be ready for the next stage of my career.”

Given his personality, Quigley probably will do very well. Even though it promises to be the hardest job he’s ever had — watching other guys play golf.

jdonalds@projo.com