It's easy to draw comparisons between Jason Gore and Roy
McAvoy.
Physically the two men look nothing alike. Gore is built like a
marble column,
stout, a masher with a megawatt smile. McAvoy, as played by
Kevin Costner in
the movie "Tin Cup," is lithe and a little more graceful,
though arrogant and
bullish.
There's no doubt, however, that they both possess everyman
appeal as players
you root for because they look like you, talk like you and
grind it out like
you do. They are members of another group, too: golfers who
have suffered epic
meltdowns at the
U.S.
Open.
Gore's was real, of course, and McAvoy's cinematic.
But after Gore won the Miccosukee Championship on Sunday, a
comparison to
another Costner character emerged: Crash Davis, the catcher
from "Bull Durham"
who believes in the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good
scotch, and yada yada
yada.
Davis sets a dubious record at the end of the movie, then
returns to the wise
embrace of Susan Sarandon and a life of twilight sock hops on
the front porch,
apparently.
The record? All-time home run king. The dubious? For the minor leagues.
Gore set a record of his own on Sunday -- a real one. He became
the all-time
winningest player in Nationwide Tour history, capturing his
seventh career
victory on the developmental circuit.
While it's a stretch to call Gore's record dubious -- after all,
players like
Tom Lehman, Stewart Cink, Tim Clark and David Duval all won
multiple times on
the Nationwide Tour -- it remains a minor-league record.
The guys he moved ahead of? You don't know 'em.
None of this matters to Gore, of course, who said simply of the
win that it
"ranks among the best."
"It's just been so darn long," said Gore, who won by four shots
despite
closing with an even-par 71.
Yes, it has. It was the first time since 2005, in fact, that the
36-year-old
Southern Californian won anywhere. That was the year Gore
captured three
Nationwide titles to earn an in-season promotion to the PGA
Tour, where he won
again six weeks later.
That was also the year Gore came out of nowhere to play in the
final pairing
of the U.S. Open with Retief Goosen. Neither player broke 80
on Sunday --
Gore's infamous collapse led to an 84 and a tie for 49th
place -- and Michael
Campbell earned an unlikely win.
A week earlier, if you remember the story, Gore was robbed on
his way to
Pinehurst No. 2, the thieves taking his underwear and stereo
and just about
everything else in a car with no kitchen sink.
But you can't steal guts, and Gore's got plenty of that. How
else do you
explain him bouncing back from one of his worst seasons with
a victory that
could potentially save his career?
Gore's first win in more than five years netted him an $108,000
check, moving
him from 124th to 39th on the money list.
He is now safely inside the top 60 -- the cutoff for the
season-ending
Nationwide Tour Championship at the end of the month -- and
will have a chance
to improve his position even further at next week's
Jacksonville Open.
Why is that important? Because the top 25 players on the money
list will earn
PGA Tour cards for next year and Gore is among those (again)
fighting for a
spot.
Indeed, his record-setting win Sunday could hardly have come at
a better time.
Gore struggled in his 10 starts on the PGA Tour this season
and didn't fare
much better in 18 on the Nationwide Tour until Sunday.
"It's been a rough year," said Gore. "That was really the goal
this week, to
just make enough to keep playing."
That was the goal for Rocco Mediate, too, another good-guy
character in golf
who deserves better than he gets.
Mediate holed out for eagle from the 17th fairway on Sunday and
won the
Frys.com Open by one shot, his first victory since 2002. It
was the fourth
straight round that he holed out for eagle, including a
hole-in-one on
Thursday.
Fighting for his PGA Tour card at the beginning of the week --
he was No. 182
on the money list, 57 places from an automatic renewal --
Mediate locked up
his playing privileges for two years with the win.
"I have a job," he said afterward, charming and talkative as ever.
And he was prepared to fight for it, too. Mediate had already
signed up for
Qualifying School in case he didn't win or make the top 125
on the money list
by the end of the season.
"That's where I belonged about a half-hour ago," he said after
the win. "I
don't belong there anymore."
Going back to Q-school shouldn't be an easy thing for a
47-year-old veteran to
stomach, but Mediate, perhaps best remembered for losing a
playoff to Tiger
Woods at the 2008 U.S. Open, was prepared to suck it up.
"I'm not one of those guys," said Mediate, implying there are
others who would
rather skip the indignity of the whole thing than fight for
their job.
Of course he's not. Mediate, like Gore, is one of the nice guys.
And on Sunday, they finished first.
