Kindred

He's An Old Pro Now

In a rare feat, this longtime amateur qualified for the Champions Tour

Jim Roy made his debut at the ACE Group Classic in February. The next week he finished T-34.

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By Dave Kindred

Photos by Jensen Larson

May 2010

Maybe leader boards would light up with his name many more times.

But maybe not.

So at 2:08 p.m. on Feb. 19, 2010, in Boca Raton, Fla., a woman who three minutes earlier had shouted Oh my God! flipped open her cell phone to take a picture of the names on a board near the sixth green.

"Lookeeee," Cheryl Roy said to her son Kyle and to a dozen friends who had escaped the snowfields of upstate New York.

The board showed the leaders.

"Roy -6."

"Jenkins -6."

"Pavin -6."

This is Jim Roy's second time around, 27 years after his first dreamer's reach for golf's brass ring. He's now a rookie on the Champions Tour as he was once a kid on the PGA Tour. He had moved to six under par on the first day of the Allianz Championship with an eagle when his pitch up a greenside slope caught the cup's high side, spun clockwise half a turn, and disappeared. He didn't see it go in, but he heard the gallery's shoutings, among them his wife's OMG.

Because he'd chipped in for an eagle five holes earlier -- he's a short-game master -- Roy lifted his cap in celebration, turned his palms up and shrugged, as if helpless and grateful when fate decides it's time for good things to happen.

For Jim Roy, this is such a time. He has done one of this game's most difficult tricks: qualifying for the Champions Tour as an amateur. Only a dozen or so men have ever done it because the tour is designed to showcase PGA Tour veterans to a baby-boomers-grown-old crowd (thus, a diamond-jewelry concession stand near the 18th green).

There must be thousands of aging dreamers who think they can play out there with the creaking old-timers who need a handrail to climb stairs. Of those thousands, 260 came to the 2009 Champions Tour Q school to compete for five spots. Of the 75 who reached the finals, 47 had been full-timers on pro tours. Only two had been amateurs the previous 13 years. The second was Jim Roy.

Except for his long, liquid swing that comes without a roller-coaster schematic, Roy has a Jim Furyk look about him, tall, lean, and this strong: He prepared for the old guys' tour by running in the knee-deep snow of Syracuse, N.Y., while carrying logs found on his home course, Bellevue Country Club. When bored with running, Roy and his workout buddies did sit-up competitions -- with the logs on their chests. "Forty pounds," he says. He plays basketball, too: "I can still shoot the rock." Made 112 straight free throws before leaving for Boca Raton.

At age 50, Jim Roy knows life is not a dress rehearsal. Five years ago, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. His father, a retired judge now 81, was 23 when diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; as a boy, Roy picked up his father's legs so he could climb stairs. His mother, "an amazing spirit," survived breast cancer, and now, at 82, has Alzheimer's.

Just out of college and PGA Tour Q school, Roy played 27 events on the 1983 tour; he made nine cuts but didn't earn enough money to keep his card. The more he changed his game to get better, the less confidence he had. "At Doral, I found myself on the range between Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf," he says. "The only club I had the guts to hit was a wedge."

He then failed at tour Q school nine times. The beauty of that was, it seemed to matter less each year. He had married Cheryl Smith, his classmate from grade school on -- and did it memorably. Jeff Sluman, then just another New York kid, now a veteran tour star, says, "As the priest came to 'love, honor and obey,' I heard, 'Catch him! Catch him!' " In an airless church on a summer day, the groom fainted away.

The Roys now have three children: Kyle, 22; Kevin, 20; and Lauren, 15, all athletes in basketball, golf and lacrosse. Roy built a career in finance, dealing in mortgages, stocks and real-estate management. By 1996 he had regained his amateur status and become one of New York state's premier players. He had made a sweet life that would be the envy of some PGA Tour stars.

But there it was, 50 rushing toward him, the Champions Tour a temptation. Dare he think, after all these years, that he was good enough to hold his own, as he put it, "amongst the legends"? At every stage of his ambivalence, Roy says, "The kids were saying, 'Dad, come on. You gotta try it.' "