Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Pinehurst pulls Gamez away from Hall night

Because of his day job, Robert Gamez will not be able to attend Friday's ceremony at Cox Pavilion, where he and four others will be inducted into the Southern Nevada Sports Hall of Fame.

He's planning on making the cut at the U.S. Open at Pinehurst in North Carolina, then working Saturday and Sunday, too.

"I'm going to have a good week, I know it," Gamez said Tuesday from North Carolina after playing a practice round on the fabled Pinehurst No. 2 with Rich Beem. "I've been thinking hard about what I want and where I want to be at the end of the week. I'm just going see it and go do it.

"You never know at a U.S. Open ... I think my golf game is better than it ever has been, even when I won. I just feel that way."

He said he has never thought about being inducted into the Hall.

"It never crossed my mind, but it hasn't sunk in yet," Gamez said. "It's a great honor, for sure, to be inducted into a Hall of Fame in the city I grew up in.

"It will be nice to be in there with the likes of Greg Maddux, Marty Barrett, Jim Colbert, Keith Kleven and all the others from Southern Nevada."

Gamez will join Kleven, a well-known sports physical therapist, and former baseball star Matt Williams, Nevada Sports Athletic Commission executive director Marc Ratner and former high school baseball coach Lou Pisani in the Hall's Class of 2005.

Gamez, 36, was nicknamed "El Grande" by buddies in Vegas in his youth. He played at Clark High School before excelling in the sport at the University of Arizona, where he won collegiate player of the year honors in 1989.

He won his first official PGA Tour start, in Tucson, in 1990, won again that year and has amassed approximately $6.27 million in winnings.

However, he admitted that he's a much different person than that fun-loving rookie who got accustomed to all but quitting the moment he fell out of contention.

He once said that's why he hasn't had the career he should have had, that he didn't work as hard as he should have and that his attitude wasn't right, that those bad habits kept him from having a victory in a major on his resume.

Gamez attributes that change to a single-car accident in 1998, when he was competing in the Kemper Open in Potomac, Md., that left him with multiple injuries.

Cruising toward his rental home, doing 40 mph in his courtesy car on a slick and serpentine stretch with a 25 mph limit and the pop group Sister Hazel blaring out of the car's speakers, the vehicle veered off the road.

It overturned, and Gamez crawled out of a window before blacking out. He awoke as medical personnel tended to him.

Gamez didn't compete for a month, after sustaining injuries to his neck, back and right hand, and bruising his liver and spleen.

He returned to the game too early, then his confidence drained out of him when he struggled on the links.

Gamez finally regained his PGA Tour card in 2002 and hasn't lost it, finishing 43rd on the money list, best since he ended 1990 in 27th, in 2003.

He finished in the money 20 out of 31 times last year, with a pair of top-10 finishes, and he has earned almost $300,000 this season.

"I learned a lot from it," he said of the car accident. "I kind of got through it. Now, things are really good. Great. It's nice, it really is. Things are going great now. I learned a lot, and I still have some learning to do.

"My golf game is better than ever, and that's the good part about it."

Though not the lone good part. Gamez, who moved to Orlando, Fla., three years ago, married his girlfriend, Lynn, two months ago in a ceremony in Florida.

"I still consider Vegas my home," he said. "Always will. I loved growing up there."

He laughed at the $6.27 million that he is recorded as having won on the tour, partly because the Internal Revenue Service has claimed a good chunk of it.

"And Vijay's up to that in five months," Gamez said.

Vijay Singh has earned $5.32 million this season.

"I wish I knew where that was," Gamez said, laughing, at his career money figure. "But it's just wonderful that I'm able to play golf and they can pay me like that. Some of the guys now, with the way the purses have gone up ...

"But I feel pretty fortunate to still be out here playing and doing what I do."

His father, Tony, started working in a warehouse at the old MGM Grand long before it became Bally's, after a tragic fire in November 1980, and Tony and his wife, Clara, have retired to Dallas to be near Gamez's brother's family.

Tony and Clara plan to attend Friday night's ceremony in Robert's absence.

"Over the last few years, I've realized that you have to keep trying, that anything can happen. If you stay in it, things can end up well," Robert Gamez said. "There's a lot of money to be made out here.

"The more I hang in when things are going bad, the better I'll be."

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