Columnist Dean Juipe: Gamez falters after fling at Greensboro

Dean Juipe

Monday, April 29, 2002 | 9:03 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

As an infrequent visitor to the leader board and a national television audience, Robert Gamez caused a number of his fans, acquaintances and followers to sit up and take notice over the weekend.

And if you're wondering how long it had been since such a thing had happened, let's just say "years" and leave it at that.

Gamez, 33, challenged for the tournament championship of the PGA Tour's Greater Greensboro Classic, and that was newsworthy in and of itself given his lengthy stay in the shadows.

Once the brightest young star on the tour, Gamez has since battled injuries and the doldrums as he has fallen from public view. His quick rise and equally rapid descent marked him as something of an anomaly in the sport: He experienced his heyday before most of his college friends had settled into their first jobs.

It was 1990 and Gamez, just out of the University of Arizona, won not only his first official tournament as a pro but another tournament two months later. He electrified a massive crowd in Tucson with the first win and dumbfounded much of the country's golf fans with his second, coming as it did with a 7-iron shot that dropped into the 72nd hole for a tournament-winning eagle at the Nestle Invitational in Florida.

The Las Vegan was the next big thing, a dynamic young player with daring traits who excelled at crunch time.

Amazingly, he has neither won since nor rekindled notions of inevitable stardom. In fact, he drifted from sight and became something of a potential footnote for golf historians: If he never wins again, he will be the only player in the modern era to win twice as a rookie who never found his way back to the promised land.

Those who know Gamez treat his decline with a mixture of pity and chagrin. Even if his practice habits weren't the best, as he has admitted was once true, surely an element of bad luck has been conspiring against him.

An auto accident in 1998 compounded his slide and he has not been fully exempt on the tour since. Numbers such as 195, 208 and 145 found their way next to his name when it came time to tally up where he stood on the tour's final money list in recent years, and he came into Greensboro ranked a dismal No. 201.

After making only six of 22 cuts last season, Gamez is reliant on sponsor's exemptions and Monday qualifying to crack a tour field this year. Denied a sponsor's exemption this past week, he got into the event only when six exempt players who had committed at an earlier date later decided to withdraw.

As such, his schedule is written in pencil and is largely hectic and subject to nonstop change.

For at least two days in Greensboro he made the best of his situation and halfway through the event he was tied for the lead. "A win would get me over the hump," he said at the time, but a win would not be forthcoming.

Saturday he drifted six shots off the leader's pace and Sunday he fell a bit further behind, bringing a disappointing conclusion to his tournament and a continuation of his winless saga.

The "hump" is there and remains formidable. In a sport driven by a never-ending succession of terrific young talent, Gamez is still trying to prove he's not living in the past.