Columnist Dean Juipe: Lousy season costs Gamez his tour card

Let's not be morbid about it. The man is only 30 years old and his situation is far from hopeless.

By all appearances, he remains upbeat and determined.

Yet what has happened to Robert Gamez stands as a textbook example of the drawback of being too good too soon. Eight years after exploding on to the PGA Tour with two victories and visions of greatness, the Las Vegan now brushes elbows with obscurity.

He has lost his tour card.

Not lost it in the sense of misplacing it, but lost it as a result of not playing well enough to retain it. The PGA Tour season that concluded Sunday also concluded Gamez's nine-year run as a full-time tour member with unlimited playing privileges.

Once regarded as a budding superstar, Gamez will be reduced to begging for spots on the '99 tour. He says "20 to 25" tournaments may find room for him under the "sponsor's exemption" heading that allows individual tournaments to invite up to eight non-tour members to be included in the field.

Perhaps he's right and he'll play enough -- and play well enough -- to regain his card in a year.

Perhaps he's guilty of being foolishly optimistic, too.

Gamez played in 25 events this season and won a mere pittance by PGA Tour standards: $76,148. That wasn't nearly enough to finish among the top 125 players, each of whom is rewarded with a tour card for the following year.

While Gamez blames a hand injury suffered in a June car accident for his demise, in truth his game has been slipping for some time.

Here's where the disadvantage of great expectations works against him. He won his first professional tournament in 1990 and won again later that year by sinking a shot from the fairway on the tournament's 72nd hole.

Both were extremely dramatic. Winning his debut in Arizona stamped Gamez as a player to be watched, and nipping Greg Norman in Florida by a stroke after holing a 7-iron from 176 yards for an eagle and a victory stamped him as a player with electrifying ability.

It says so right in the tour's 1998 media guide.

In the 1999 version of the book, Gamez no longer will have his own page. He'll be in the "Others" section that includes the usual fringe characters like still-developing youngsters and over-the-hill veterans simply trying to hang on.

Is it possible that Gamez has already fallen into the latter category?

If so, that's a huge drop from his auspicious rookie season when he was thought to be a younger, stronger Ben Crenshaw. But he never lived up to that reputation, never duplicated that glorious rookie season, never won another tour event and spent most of this decade comfortable but hidden well down on the tour's money list.

Each year, younger and better players have passed him by. This year they drove him out of the top 125.

He has to be disappointed.

He may even be upset with unflattering reviews such as this one.

If so, it's unfortunate yet perhaps predictable, an offshoot of having promised so much while actually delivering so little.

archive