First off, a show of hands for those of you who before Sunday would've known Chez Reavie was the name of a PGA Tour player and not the best place in town for escargot and a decent soufflé. If your hand is raised, you're either: a) next of kin; or b) a sous-chef, next in command in a French kitchen.

Reavie -- whose first name is pronounced as it's spelled, not "shay" (even north of the border) -- won the RBC Canadian Open Sunday by three. After his first win in his first year on Tour, Reavie said he was "on top of the world." Not exactly, but you can see the top of the world from Ontario. The view in the other direction isn't bad either, if you're among those holding out hope that the future of American golf isn't solely in the hands of Tiger's toddling daughter, Sam (age 1), and/or any of the Woods' potential progeny.

At one of golf's oldest tournaments (b. 1904), another young Yankee became a PGA Tour winner. By my count, the 26-year-old Reavie is the 11th different U.S.-born player age 30 or younger to win a Tour event in the last year and a half. Of those 11, six have won more than once:

--Jonathan Byrd has three wins;
--Charles Howell III has II, as does Sean Of-the-Hair (who finished tied for third Sunday behind Reavie);
--J.B. Holmes and D.J. Trahan, whose initial victories came in 2006, have each won again this year;
--And then there's the youngest of the lot, 23-year-old Anthony Kim. All he's done is win twice in the last three months at a couple of big boy golf courses (Quail Hollow and Congressional), not to mention play in the final group with Reavie Sunday at Glen Abbey where he was in contention late before bogeys on 17 and 18 left him with a disappointing tie for eighth. That two years shy of being old enough to get reasonably priced car insurance he'd be disappointed with a third straight top 10 tells you all you need to know about how Kim's season is going. The kid with the diamond-studded belt buckle in the shape of the letters "AK" hasn't had an MC since the first week of April.

Reavie's the first of the 25 Nationwide Tour graduates of 2007 to win this season, as well as the first true rookie. Argentina's Andres Romero, who won in New Orleans in late March, is also in his first season on Tour. But Romero had already proven himself against the world's best players last summer by finishing third at last year's Open Championship, winning a big event on the European Tour, and tying for sixth at the World Golf Championship at Firestone in consecutive weeks.

(And that's saying nothing of a 2006 victory in an event listed in the PGA Tour media guide as "Masters Tournament Personal Cup [Arg]," which I understand is a golf competition of some sort in his native Argentina but which in print appears to be an itemized account of a major championship drug test complete with the anonymous participant's parenthetical reaction upon learning he failed.)

Reavie's win revisits the recent debate over which is the second-best Tour in the world. Some of the Nationwide Tour's American alumni are on record declaring their alma mater to be number two in the queue. When the question was posed in the press conference following Europe's second straight Ryder Cup rout in 2006 and third win in a row overall, Englishman Luke Donald needed clarification as to what the reporter meant when he asked which tour was second best:

"You mean after Europe?"

Ha! Now that's funny no matter where you're from. At least I think he was kidding. Europe's dominance in the Ryder Cup proves one thing for sure: They're better than us at the Ryder Cup. But there should be no debate over tour supremacy. Here it is, once and for all:

1. PGA Tour
T2. Every Other Tour

Not only do the Euros know it, it's one of the reasons they're so motivated to keep slapping "Kick Me" signs on American kids' backs every two years. The Ryder Cup in reality has been evenly matched for nearly 20 years, but the U.S. has been the biennial favorite of the mainstream media, primarily because the Tour based here is superior.

Winning the Cup, preferably handily, is one small way the Empire (British and otherwise) can strike back at the courtesy cars and the billion-dollar TV contracts and air-conditioned hotel rooms and everything associated with the PGA Tour and America, for that matter, going back to the Tea Party.

Here's an easy way to tell the PGA Tour is in a league of its own: Check how many of their guys have come over here versus the number of ours who've gone that way. Here's another: Name one great international player of the last 50 years who didn't win on U.S. soil. The PGA Tour has always played for the most money and had the best-run tour, thereby attracting the best players. And if you want to be considered among the game's greatest, you have to beat the best.

Paging Colin Montgomerie. Monty won seven straight European Tour money titles but never played a full schedule here in the U.S. and never won an official PGA Tour event the few times each year he did play. As a free agent, he's been well within his rights to choose where he's played; but if he's never beaten the best straight up, he forfeits the right to be called one of the greats of his generation.

If you're not playing the PGA Tour, you're merely playing the one that serves you best. A homebody from Hamburg? Stay and try to carve out a career on the European Tour. If you want to eventually play the PGA Tour, regardless of where you're from, you either take your chances at Q-School or your hacks on the Nationwide Tour (if you can elbow your way in) where the top 25 on the money list at year's end get to move up to the big leagues.

And if you're not sure what you want to do, you lap up sponsor's exemptions from every tour in the world, presuming you have something tournament sponsors find exemption-worthy. Like being a teenage girl who bombs it three bills off the tee.

In other words, you're Michelle Wie.

The once-rising star is now merely a rising sophomore at Stanford. She'll tee it up for the eighth time in a PGA Tour event this week at the Legends Reno-Tahoe Open, having failed to make the cut in her first seven tries.

Mind you none of this -- not the 11 under-30 American winners of the past two years, the PGA Tour's preeminence, certainly not Wie -- will likely have any bearing on this year's Ryder Cup. Even if the young guns are coming, they probably won't get here by September. Kim's the only one of those 11 to have secured a spot on the U.S. team so far.

Meanwhile, the Europeans, in addition to always being sufficiently motivated, also happen to have better players one through 12. Ten Euros are currently in the top 30 of the world rankings compared to just seven healthy Americans. Plus, Europe has serious mojo after winning the last two Cups by a combined score of 37-19.

At this point, it seems like the only thing that could keep the same result from going down would be if Europe's team dinner the night before comes back up. A word of advice for Captain Faldo: If Paul Azinger tries to offer you "snails from the sous-chef at Chez Reavie," you might want to send out for pizza.

Grant Boone is a husband, father, broadcaster, and journalist born in Tennessee and living in Texas. During his nearly 20 years in sports journalism, he's been heard on tape delay in pizza joints half-filled with fully-drunk beer league softball teams and around the world covering major sporting events for ESPN, Turner Sports, Golf Channel, and CBS Radio. To read past installments of Grant Me This, click here. You can contact Grant at pgagrant@hotmail.com.