At the Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey, Jason Gore outdrove his playing competitor, Dustin Johnson, by 13 yards on the second hole, a 445-yard par 4. Gore, who is 4 inches shorter than Johnson and easily 50 pounds heavier, flexed his right bicep.
Gore’s gesture during the third round of the Barclays, the first event of the FedEx Cup playoffs, elicited laughter from Johnson, who is built like a 6-foot-4 small forward to Gore’s 250-pound beer league shortstop.
Gore, 41, grew up playing junior golf with Tiger Woods, whose dominance and dedication to running and off-course conditioning helped spawn a generation of millennial golfers as sculpted as ancient Greek statues. Gore brings a different look, and sensibility, to the FedEx Cup playoffs, which will continue Friday with the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston.
He takes pride in his appearance, offering it as proof that golf’s stage has room enough to accommodate those who do not fit the dashing leading man prerequisites. For Gore, making history has never been his main motivation for playing golf. The sport’s appeal is that it has afforded him the opportunity to make a comfortable living, to support his family in a job that has seldom felt like work.
“I’m not a 6-2, 180-pound gym rat robot — not pointing fingers, but there’s a few who are just golf studs,” Gore said last week. “I’m a little pudgy around the waist, sweat a little bit too much. I’m just like everybody else, and that’s all I ever really wanted to be was just like everybody else, and maybe just get a few more people to want to play golf.”
Gore represents a different kind of success story than Jordan Spieth or Jason Day, whose eight combined PGA Tour victories this season include three majors. A strong finishing kick enabled Gore to maintain his tour playing privileges, and he has carried that late-season momentum into the playoffs.
Gore is the 79th-ranked golfer in the standings. The top 75 after Monday’s finish will move on to the BMW Championship, the third of four playoff events.
This month is the 10-year anniversary of Gore’s lone victory on the PGA Tour, at the 84 Lumber Classic in Pennsylvania. More was expected of Gore when he turned pro in 1997, when Spieth, the youngest full-fledged PGA Tour member, was 4.
As a junior player, he won the Pacific Coast Amateur, the California State Amateur at Pebble Beach and the California State Open. Gore won the Pacific-10 individual titles as a freshman and sophomore while at Arizona before ending his collegiate career at Pepperdine, where in 1997 he led the Waves to their only men’s golf NCAA championship.
Gore grew up roughly 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles, and he has not strayed far from his roots, making his home in Valencia.
To many who followed his amateur career, Gore is frozen in their memories as the young golfer full of promise. They are the well-meaning souls who wonder aloud where Gore’s career went wrong, which irritates to no end Gore’s wife, Megan, whom he has known since high school.
“People will say, ‘Oh, we expected so many good things from you,'” Gore’s wife said in a telephone interview. “To the casual fan, he should be a worldbeater. I don’t think they realize how hard it is to be one of the top 125 golfers in the world.”
She believes her husband over the years has internalized the outside expectations, setting himself up for self-defeating feelings of inadequacy when he falls short.
In 2012, Gore experienced a low point in his career. In 27 tournaments, including 19 on the Web.com Tour, golf’s Class AAA circuit, Gore made roughly $105,000, which did not go far after he covered his traveling expenses and support-staff costs.
With two young children at home, Gore took stock of his career and decided the costs of his nomadic lifestyle had come to greatly outweigh the benefits.
“I was beat up, defeated,” Gore said. “And out here, you always have to think that you’re really, really good.”
He added, “You have to think that deep down or you’re just going to get run over by guys who just think they are better than you, and probably at that point they are.”
Gore took it as a sign when the men’s golf head-coaching position opened at Pepperdine around this time. Gore, who is enshrined in the university’s athletic Hall of Fame, applied for the job. He was devastated when he was passed over.
“I tried to give it up,” Gore said, referring to his playing career. He laughed. “I couldn’t even do that right.”
During the interview process, Gore said, his history of profanity-laced exclamations after bad shots caught up with him. “Apparently I wasn’t the guy that was going to further the Christian mission at Pepperdine University,” he said.
Gore added: “Which believe it or not, I’m actually very, very religious. I’m the guy that told my pastor that I’m going to say the f-bomb. If that doesn’t get me into heaven, so be it. He kind of looked at me, kind of shook his head and he goes, ‘Well, you’re a professional golfer, I understand.’ I don’t know, it’s not something I like to share very much, but deep down inside I try to do the right thing.”
The rejection cut Gore to his core. “I felt a little stabbed in the back,” he said.
But three years on, he can see that everything worked out for the best. The Pepperdine graduate hired by the school, Michael Beard, led the Waves to the West Coast Conference title this year, which qualified Pepperdine for its first NCAA regional appearance since 2011.
And Gore, figuring he better make this playing gig work because he had nothing to fall back on, rededicated himself to the game. This week is Gore’s 26th PGA Tour start of the 2014-15 season, the most he has made since 2008. His season earnings of $1,101,246 are more than he made on the tour in the previous six seasons combined.
“I think the thing that I most want to show people is that golf is fun,” Gore said. “So many people get mad on the golf course. I always say this to my buddies at home: ‘You’re not good enough to get bad. Just have fun.’ Nobody’s good enough to get bad. Go have fun.”
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