Mike Hill won three times on the PGA TOUR before becoming a star in the early 1990s on what is now known as PGA TOUR Champions. People never referred to the younger brother of 13-time TOUR winner Dave Hill as Dave’s “little brother” because Mike was about 40 pounds heavier — and it was seemingly all muscle.

While Dave was establishing himself and winning on TOUR, Mike went to Arizona State to play golf, then spent 42 months in the Air Force. Although he never reached the heights of his brother while playing the PGA TOUR, when he joined PGA TOUR Champions in 1989, Mike became an instant success on the over-50 circuit. In his second full season, in 1991, Hill won five times and captured the money-list title. With $1,065,557 in earnings, Hill was the leading money winner in all of professional golf.

Mike Hill died Aug. 4 at the University of Michigan hospital. He was 86.

Hill grew up on a 130-acre dairy farm in Jackson, Michigan, next door to Jackson Country Club. Hill followed in his brother Dave’s footsteps and worked as a caddie at the course, getting his start in the sport, making money and playing when he could.

“The golf course was built right up to our property line,” Mike Hill recalled. “All of us kids became caddies and all became pretty good golfers.”

After high school, Hill moved to Tempe, Arizona, to play for powerhouse Arizona State. The time he spent serving in the Air Force, as well as struggles at the PGA TOUR Qualifying Tournament, where he couldn’t earn his playing privileges, delayed his PGA TOUR ambitions. As he tried to get his career going, Hill also spent five years driving a beer manufacturer’s truck to pay the bills.

By the time Hill finally made it to the TOUR in 1968 at age 31, his brother Dave was already a proven player, a three-time tournament winner and a Vardon Trophy recipient as the player with the lowest scoring average (70.344). That season, Dave Hill finished second on the 1969 money list behind Frank Beard. It was Dave's table-setting on TOUR that drove Mike, and he was always quick to praise his brother for paving his way in golf.

“Dave became the best golfer in the family, and he deserved it because he worked so hard on his game,” Mike said. “Sometimes I kind of leach off Dave’s knowledge of the game and the courses.”

A year after Dave’s breakout year, Hill joined his brother as a TOUR winner, winning the Doral-Eastern Open in Miami by a comfortable four shots over Jim Colbert. That week, Dave Hill tied for 28th, 12 shots behind his brother. Mik Hill picked up win No. 2 in the final tournament of the 1972 season, the Valero Texas Open, shooting four rounds in the 60s to edge Lee Trevino by two strokes. Hill waited five more years to take home his third and final TOUR title. At the 1977 Ohio Kings Island Open, he shot a spectacular, final-round 64 to beat Tom Kite. Hill thought his perseverance, waiting so long between victories, proved something to himself.

“It’s really a moral victory to win after five years. If you’re on a downslide and you can turn it around, it means something. It showed I still had some heart,” he said.

Mike Hill never again finished inside the top 100 on the TOUR’s money list, so perhaps he had something to prove when he turned 50 and became a regular on PGA TOUR Champions. His debut came in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, at the 1989 Senior PGA Championship, where he battled to a tie-for-fourth finish with, coincidentally, his brother. Mike finished ninth on the money list as a rookie (Dave finished fifth) and then broke out in a big way in his second season.

In 1990, Hill won the GTE Suncoast Classic near Tampa, again getting the better of his good friend Trevino. Hill went on to win four more times that season and finished behind only Trevino on the money list. At one point, he reeled off 16 consecutive rounds of par or better. In 1991, Hill again won five times and finished atop the money list, sharing Player of the Year honors with George Archer.

For the first time in his career, the media made little mention of who Mike Hill’s older brother was. From then on, Hill never stood in the shadow of his brother again. Hill finished his playing career with 18 PGA TOUR Champions titles and more than $8 million in earnings. He also had an impressive 5-1 record in PGA TOUR Champions playoffs.

“Mike Hill was one of the players who made the PGA TOUR Champions so popular in the early 1990s as his name was seemingly on every leaderboard at a time he made winning a regular part of his game,” said Miller Brady, PGA TOUR Champions president. “We are saddened by Mike's death, and we extend our condolences to his family while we look back fondly on his career.”

While at the heights of their respective PGA TOUR Champions’ careers, Hill and Trevino teamed to win back-to-back Legends of Golf titles in 1991 and 1992. They then added consecutive wins in that tournament again, in 1995 and 1996. The Hill-Trevino duo added one more win to their victory ledgers when they captured the 2000 Legends of Golf Legendary Division, for players 60 and older.

Mike Hill’s last PGA TOUR Champions appearance came in 2007, at age 70, when he tied for a respectable 21st at the Commerce Bank Championship in New York. Hill remained actively involved in golf following the conclusion of his playing career. His family owns the 18-hole, par-69 municipal golf course in Brooklyn, Michigan, known as Hills’ Heart of the Lakes, where Hill played regularly and taught lessons.