To mark the debut of Memphis-area resident and PGA TOUR great Loren Roberts as a senior golfer, at the 2005 Senior British Open, I wrote a kind of mini-bio of the adopted Memphian’s remarkable rise from novice golfer at age 15 to extraordinarily successful champion.
I’ve made changes for understanding and flow – this ran over five days in July of 2005 but I’ve combined it into one. I also wrote this essay in 2019 updating Loren’s senior tour career, as he worked to come back from prostate cancer and retire on his own terms.
PART I: A golf beginning — early lessons helped build foundation for future
Two weeks ago, in late June, Loren Roberts was in Dallas, headed to the Pony Shop on the campus of Southern Methodist University.
His oldest daughter, Alex, was at freshman orientation, and Roberts was buying some official Mustang gear.
Alex, who went to Hutchison, grew up in Memphis, from the age of 5. She came to town when her father, then a winless PGA Tour professional, moved the family from San Luis Obispo, Calif.
Now she was 18 and Loren, an eight-time champion on the PGA Tour and among the Top 25 money-winners of all time, was enjoying the moment, basking in fatherhood.
“I’m really proud of her,” Roberts was saying. “We’re really excited.”
For Loren Roberts, who turned 50 in June, the last 10 months have been marked by transitions big and small.
Another one comes this week when Roberts plays in his first professional senior event, at the British Senior Open in Aberdeen, Scotland.
“It has been a busy year,” Roberts says, following his habit of understating things.
In September, his mother, Joan, died at age 77.
In November, his half-sister, Ann, died at age 61.
In February, his longtime golfing mentor, a former Tour player named Jim Swagerty, died at age 80.
Roberts is not a rear-view mirror type of guy. As one of his close friends points out, “Great golfers have short memories. And Loren Roberts is a great golfer.”
Yet, how could a man confronted with so much loss – and at so many crossroads – not reflect?
How could a parent taking his firstborn to college not think back over the years?
“It was so different,” Robers remembers. “You went to the state university, paid the $75 state tuition in California, bought your books and went.”
Loren Roberts has traveled a long way – from San Luis Obispo and the Pacific Coast Highway, to Memphis and the Mississippi River.
From a 17-year-old kid who struggled to break 90 to a licensed club professional at his hometown country club to the pinnacle of golf.
“I’m the last of a breed,” Roberts sometimes says.
By that, he means a PGA Tour pro who came up like many of golf’s legends – through the pro shop, picking his own shag balls off the range, driving from tournament to tournament in a car.
In a golfing universe where a 15-year-old girl plays in PGA Tour events and one of Roberts’s own neighbors turned professional at age 19, the story of Loren Roberts is a reminder of something else.
His is the lesson of the turtle – determined, deliberate, undaunted.
Worth telling, in full, to anyone who dares an audacious dream.
“I’ve gone a long way,” Roberts says, “by getting everything I have out of a little talent.”
After his mother died last fall, Roberts was back at his boyhood home, down the street from San Luis Obispo High, when he found the old briefcase.
It still contained the materials from something called the Success Motivation Institute.
When he was in college, all those years ago, Loren’s mother had signed him up for a 12-week motivational class.
“I was floundering a little bit,” Loren recalls.
The son of Hugh Roberts, a mailman who walked San Luis Obispo’s neighborhoods, Roberts had not taken up golf seriously until his sophomore year in high school.
He’d always thought of himself as a baseball player. He was a catcher who once threw out five baserunners in a game.
“Three at second, two at third,” he says.
He learned golf fundamentals – most notably the pendulum putting stroke, then an anomaly on slow-putting greens – from a pro and former U.S. Open champion named Olin Dutra, but a former PGA Tour pro named Jim Swagerty became his most important golfing mentor.
When he spoke at the memorial service in February, Roberts emphasized the debt he owed Swagerty.
“Jim retired when he was 50 from the golf business, joined the club and kind of took me under his wing,” Roberts says. “I don’t know what he liked about me, but I became a project. He just taught me how to play.”
His coaching – “He’d say, ‘You are never going to be a player if you don’t learn to follow a bogey with a birdie,'” Roberts says – transformed Roberts from an 80s shooter to a scratch golfer, good enough to compete for the California state championship as a high school senior.
That took him to Cal Poly, where his mother worked as a secretary, and to the Division 2 golf team.
But after his sophomore year, the school eliminated the men’s golf program, and that is when Joan Roberts sensed her son drifting.
She came home one day with that briefcase, from the Success Motivation Institute.
Reluctantly, Roberts agreed to attend.
Twelve weeks later, he was making the to-do lists that plan his life to this day, setting a ladder of reachable goals, challenging himself to achieve.
“That had a profound effect on me,” Roberts says.
Over the next few years, his goals would lead inevitably to this one: Qualify for the PGA Tour.
He dropped out of Cal Poly and took a job at San Luis Obispo Country Club, where as a teenager he would jump the fence to play holes on the course’s perimeter.
“I couldn’t work on my game, work in the shop and go to school at the same time,” Roberts says. “Unfortunately, school lost out.”
Afternoons at the club, when business slowed, Roberts could be found on the putting green, 10 steps outside the pro shop, hitting chips and refining that pendulum putting stroke he learned from Dutra in his first lesson.
It is much the same stroke, with a few minor tweaks, that is now considered one of the purest in golf.
Playing with a weak fade – “He believed, you know, you can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen,” Roberts says – Roberts used that putting stroke to finish eighth in the PGA of America’s assistant professional championship in 1978 and won it in 1979.
“That’s what really made me decide maybe I can do this,” Roberts says.
Roberts played in three PGA Tour Qualifying events before, in 1980, finally earning his card at Fort Washington Country Club in California.
One of his fellow graduates that year was a golfer from Minnesota named Tom Lehman – who would later become one of Roberts’s best friends and was the No. 1 player in the world for a time.
Roberts is a very religious man, though he had not yet become an evangelical Christian.
When he discovered that the man who had helped design Fort Washington and was its first pro was none other than Olin Dutra, it seemed like more than just a coincidence.
Roberts had finally made it onto the PGA Tour, at a course with roots planted by the same man who gave the short-armed, short-hitting Roberts the pure putting stroke.
Playing with – and one day beating – the best players in the world no longer seemed like a dream.
It felt like destiny.
NEXT: Finding his way on the PGA Tour, Loren Roberts commits himself to the relationships that would define his life.
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Part II: Trials and triumph — Faith pulls him through after stretches of futility
It was a big, brown Oldsmobile 98 with light blue velvet interior and Loren Roberts loved that old car.
“It was a diesel, had an extra gas tank and you could go 500 miles in that thing,” Roberts says.
His golfing mentor, an old PGA Tour pro named Jim Swagerty, had given it to Roberts, to help him in his first year on the PGA Tour.
Swagerty would spend hours watching Roberts hit balls on the practice range at San Luis Obispo Country Club, but when Roberts spoke at Swagerty’s memorial service, in February, he talked about the other small ways Swagerty helped.
“He shared a lot more with me other than just how to swing a golf club,” Roberts says. “He played the Tour years back, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and he taught me about traveling. How to pack the car, what to take, this, that and the other.”
Some things, however, must be learned on the job.
Loren’s Lessons, No. 1
When he showed up for his first PGA Tour event, this was at the Joe Gariogiola-Tucson Open in 1981, the 25-year-old rookie headed out for a Sunday practice round … without a caddie, to save $30.
He had not yet taken an official swing on the PGA Tour, but already Loren Roberts had made double-bogey.
A Tour veteran named Wayne Cagle pulled Roberts aside and said: “Son, you need to have a caddie out here. This is the PGA Tour.”
“I slipped back off into the parking lot to try and find a caddie,” Roberts says. “That’s how green I was.”
In his first year on Tour, Loren Roberts won exactly $8,935. He had only two Top 25 finishes, made only eight cuts. One good omen: His best check, for $2,704.29, came at the Danny Thomas Memphis Classic, played then at Colonial South.
Instead of going back to Q School, Roberts decided to spend the next year finishing up his PGA apprenticeship. He worked at Morrow Bay as an assistant pro, took his required exams and got his A license.
Roberts also got another important certificate: his marriage license.
He had met Kim at, of all things, a fashion show, one arranged by the ladies at the club to raise money for one of Loren’s winter trips to play on the Australian Tour.
Kim, an aerobics instructor for one of the ladies, took to Loren, and eventually fell in love with the dark-haired, dark-eyed “nice guy.”
She also fell for his golf dreams.
“When you’re young, you don’t have a clue of what you are getting yourself into,” Kim says now. “Youth is great because you’re not scared of anything. You look forward to the challenges.
“If he didn’t do well, we’d just try something else.”
In the PGA Tour media guide, the only mention of 1982 on Roberts’s two-page spread is this – two tournaments entered, no money earned.
But in many ways, it was his most important year.
“My wife doesn’t like me to say I tied up all the loose ends,” Loren says. “But that’s what I was doing.”
Loren’s Lessons, No. 2
In his second trip to Memphis, Loren discovered one of the city’s many geographical quirks.
“We drove nonstop, all the way from New Hampshire to Memphis. I had their address and phone number, and I was driving up and down Kirby Parkway, up and down, looking for their house. It was Kirby Road , you know, one block over.
“I’d talk to his wife, Carla, from some phone booth: ‘I hate to keep bothering you, but I can’t find your house.’ Her accent was so Southern. She’d say, ‘Whu-elllll.’ I’d say, ‘Excuse me? Pardon me?’ I couldn’t understand.
“But that was the start of a glorious, glorious relationship.”
Memphis can thank Frank Brown for luring Loren Roberts and his family to Memphis.
Through his connections with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Roberts arranged to stay with Brown in 1983.
Roberts missed the cut that year in Memphis, but he earned something else – a lifelong friendship with a man who eventually became his sponsor.
“We just hit it off,” says Brown, who now lives in Fort Myers, Fla. “We fell in love with them.”
In 1984, his second year with the Browns, Loren held the lead after 36 and 54 holes, but shot a 4-over 76 on Sunday to finish tied for fifth, three shots behind Bob Eastwood.
The $19,000 check, however, was by far the biggest of his career – yet another sign of things to come.
Memphis became a kind of second home to Kim and Loren. Rather than travel all the way back to San Luis Obispo, Kim and Loren would camp at chez Brown.
“It was great getting to know Memphis,” Kim says. “The city is a great city, but the people make Memphis.”
Two weeks after meeting the Browns, at the Greater Milwaukee Open, came another crucial moment in Loren’s life.
This is the testimony Roberts gives to area churches: “I was struggling, not getting anywhere. I’d missed the cut Friday afternoon, was running out of money. I just reached a point where I said, ‘There’s got to be something better in life than this struggle. There’s got to be something worth all this struggle.’
“Through the Tour Bible study, I had progressed enough in my faith that I knew I had to make that decision to trust Christ with my life.”
Roberts rejects the notion of a deity who makes putts roll in the hole or keeps drives in the fairway. He points out that he still lost his Tour card at the end of 1983.
“What it did for me was to help prioritize my life,” Roberts says. “You start to learn what the more important things are in life.”
Loren’s Lessons, No. 3
In 1987, Roberts lost his PGA Tour playing privileges for the fifth time in six years. His best check, once again, had come in Memphis.
Going into the final round of the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament, he was well outside the Top 50.
He called Kim that night and told her, if he didn’t play well in the final round, he would apply for the vacant head pro position at San Luis Obispo Country Club.
Loren found out later that Kim, at home with their infant daughter, Alex, had spent that night crying.
“You have a husband with a career he’d like to do, and he’s telling you it might not work out,” Kim says. “It wasn’t for my sake. It was more about his dreams.”
In the final round, Roberts went low, and tied for 41st, good enough to regain his Tour card.
“That,” says Kim, “was his crossroads.”
Roberts would never again attend Q School.
In 1988, he had 14 Top 25 finishes and, in 1990, his seven Top 10 finishes boosted him to $478,522 in winnings, 24th on the money list.
He was on his way, but one crucial life decision remained.
In 1992, with 5-year-old daughter (Alexandria) and newborn daughter (Addison), Kim and Loren decided it was time to leave San Luis Obispo.
As much as Loren felt connected to his hometown – he was a Giants fan, had cut his teeth at the country club, had a grandfather who moved to town as a boilermaker for Southern Pacific – he hated the thought of long trips away from the family.
Memphis had the Browns, who Alexandria called Mimi and Pawpaw. It had a central location and the Northwest Airlines hub. It had the Tournament Players Club at Southwind, and its world-class practice facility.
Looking back now, it seems like a no-brainer.
“We always said we were Southerners living in California,” Loren says.
With the move came a new resolve for Roberts. He was making a comfortable living now on the PGA Tour – $1.18 million from 1988-1991 – but he hungered to win.
In a motivation course he’d taken in college, one motto always stuck with Roberts.
Failure is when you achieve one goal but do not immediately set another.
At his new home in Germantown, Roberts would find himself setting the biggest goals a golfer could imagine.
NEXT: Heartbreak, followed by triumph
Part III: Breakthrough year changed everything — 1994 defined golfer with win, heartbreaking loss
It was, as Loren Roberts recalls, a 50-foot putt for birdie, on the 16th hole at Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh, and “no telling how many times it’s going to go back and forth and break.”
A young lefthander named Phil Mickelson was playing with Roberts, who, in June of 1994, was just a week shy of his 39th birthday and in the midst of a breakthrough year.
Mickelson had hit his long-iron approach stiff, but it was Roberts who created roars out of the Pennsylvania hills when the putt dropped dead center for his sixth birdie of the day. He would make one more birdie on the 18th hole for a 7-under par 64 that still stands as the best third round in U.S. Open history.
“Gosh,” Roberts remembers thinking, after holing the long putt on 16, “I’ve got a chance to do something here.”
That weekend is famous in the American memory for another reason: O.J. Simpson, in that white Ford Bronco, being chased on the Los Angeles freeway.
For many Memphians, it was the weekend they first became acquainted with a different Californian, this one their new neighbor.
“Journeyman could become star with Open win,” read the headline in The Commercial Appeal the next day.
It did not say what might happen if he didn’t.
Going into 1994, Roberts had earned more than $2 million in 12 years on the PGA Tour, but owned the dubious distinction of being the richest nonwinner on Tour: 340 starts, zero victories.
But Roberts felt close to a breakthrough. He had moved his family to Memphis in the summer of 1992, in time for 5-year-old Alex to start kindergarten at Hutchison. Nobody in town appreciated the practice facility at the Tournament Players Club at Southwind so much as Roberts, who had been shagging his own range balls just two years before, back in his native San Luis Obispo, Calif.
The help he sought from Jim Suttie, one of the country’s top teaching pros, had begun to build confidence. A stronger grip promoted more consistent ball striking, and Roberts also began bringing more power from his legs.
Suttie saw something else, too, that convinced him Roberts was on the cusp of victory.
“He’s the most competitive guy I’ve ever been around,” said Suttie, who has worked with several PGA Tour players over the years. “He doesn’t like to lose at anything.”
The growing circle of friends in Memphis was discovering the same thing. Roberts played with a regular group of older golfers, including his former sponsor and close friend, Frank Brown. It was Loren’s ball vs. the best ball of the seven others, and Roberts never lost.
Roberts arrived at his first event of the season, in Tucson, with a blank bag, bereft of endorsements.
Despite getting the chicken pox early in the week, Roberts fired a final-round 64 to tie for second place.
“I felt more ready to start this year than I ever have,” he told The Commercial Appeal. “I’ve just got a good feeling about this year.”
Two months later, at Arnold Palmer’s tournament in Orlando, the premonition was confirmed.
Roberts shot 9-under par on the weekend to overtake Vijay Singh, Fuzzy Zoeller and Nick Price.
Brown and his wife, Carla, had followed Roberts the first three days of the tournament. They had befriended Roberts and his wife, Kim, while serving as their Memphis hosts in 1983, and had been instrumental in convincing Loren and Kim to relocate in 1992.
But they had left Sunday, and driven all day and into the night when Frank finally stopped at a truck stop in Moss Point, Miss., to call Kim.
“You haven’t heard?” Kim gasped.
“We screamed a little bit,” Brown said, “and a few tears were shed.”
Roberts would tie for fifth at The Masters a few weeks later, and finish third at Hilton Head.
But nobody could imagine the drama Roberts would stir at Oakmont, in the Open.
When he came to the 18th green at Oakmont Country Club, on his 72nd hole of the 94th U.S. Open, Loren Roberts was tied for the lead with Ernie Els. Like Mickelson, Roberts’s third-round playing partner, Els was young and ferociously talented.
Els was the “Big Easy,” a former rugby player from South Africa with a smooth sledgehammer of a swing. Roberts was the “Boss of the Moss,” known for his putting prowess, his lack of length off the tee and a growing reputation as one of the Tour’s grittiest competitors.
Lurking one shot back was Colin Montgomerie, the Scotsman known as “Monty.”
Roberts faced a 4 1/2 -foot putt for par. Not automatic by any means, but Roberts would’ve won a lot of votes in the Tour locker room as a player you’d most want hitting a meaningful putt.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Roberts would say after the round, “I had trouble getting the putter back.”
The ball trickled below the hole. He’d missed.
Els, not knowing Roberts had bogeyed, choked his driver way left. Having received the benefit of two very friendly USGA rulings – one that ultimately turned out incorrect – it appeared Els’s inexperience might eliminate him.
But, needing a 5-foot putt for bogey to tie Roberts and Montgomerie at 5-under for the championship, he drained it, forcing a three-man, 18-hole playoff on Monday.
“I could kick myself,” Roberts said.
But: “I still have a chance to win the Open.”
With Monty fading in the heat, a duel between Roberts and Els developed, resembling taut match-play golf.
Back in Memphis, in clubhouses all over town, golfers congregated around TV sets to watch.
One of them was Nick Price, a major winner in town for a promotional visit at the TPC-Southwind.
When Roberts nailed a 10-foot putt on 18 to send the playoff to sudden death, Price joined in the applause.
“Unbelievable!” said Price. “Unbelievable!”
Both players parred the first extra hole, but then Roberts’s dream ended at the second – his 20th of the day – when his long putt for par hit the back of the cup, popped into the air and spun away.
In many ways, the tournament had been the best of Roberts’s career. He had gone to the ninth hole on Friday at 6-over par and just hoping to make the cut, then put his name in the U.S. Open record book with the 64 on Saturday and made that clutch putt to extend the playoff to sudden death.
But the cold reality was impossible to evade. Needing to make a 4 1/2 -foot putt to win the U.S. Open, Roberts did not execute.
Kim had chartered a jet to fly to Oakmont, and Loren remembers a somber flight back to Memphis.
Back at the house in Germantown, they unplugged their phones for three days.
“We had to choke it down,” Kim says. “It was hard. When you get so close you can almost taste it, it’s disappointing.
“We handled it like a death.”
“We did our grieving,” Loren says, “and we got past it.”
NEXT: Showing an indomitable spirit, Roberts embraces his new hometown.
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Part IV: A generous Mr. Memphis — Adopted city reaps rewards of his charitable side
A few years ago, Loren Roberts happened upon Mike Donald. Like Roberts, Donald is famous in golf circles for a wrenching moment on the sport’s biggest stage – missing a short putt that would’ve won the U.S. Open.
Roberts said Donald told him: “I sit in my den and watch that putt on tape all the time.”
Roberts recounts this with some incredulity. He understands, but cannot fathom allowing one moment of the 1994 U.S. Open to define him.
After three days of “grieving” his eventual playoff loss to a then-young golfer named Ernie Els, Roberts chose to focus on the implications of his reach for history at Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh.
Perhaps a licensed club pro who had lost his PGA Tour card five times and averaged 250 yards with his driver should know better, but, Roberts says that week “told me I could play with anyone.”
In the next major of 1994, at the British Open, Roberts finished in the Top 25. At the PGA, he tied for ninth. He was second at the Greater Milwaukee Open and tied for eighth at the season-ending TOUR Championship.
For the year, he made $1.02 million. He also made the President’s Cup team, and here is where the story of Loren Roberts, who this week makes his senior golf debut at the British Senior Open, hits an important and inevitable fork in the road.
Each member of the U.S. President’s Cup squad, which played an international team in matches over three days, received $25,000 to donate to charity.
Roberts pledged half of it to a then-fledgling group called the Mid-South Junior Golf Association, based at the Pine Hill golf course in South Memphis. It was the largest donation the group, now known as the MSJGA/First Tee of Memphis, had ever received.
“It’s really going to help us blossom,” Charles Hudson, the Pine Hill pro and founder of the organization for youths in some of Memphis’s least-privileged neighborhoods, said at the time.
Roberts had moved to Memphis two years earlier from his native San Luis Obispo, Calif., and already he was focused on making an impact.
When, at the end of 1994, Roberts was named as The Commercial Appeal’s first Sportsman of the Year, Roberts pledged to do even more: “One thing I was hoping for about next year is that I can get a little bit more involved in the community.”
Fast forward to 1999, at the FedEx St. Jude Classic, Memphis’s annual stop on the PGA Tour. Nearly 100 young golfers comprised a weekday gallery for Roberts, most of them with a different skin color than their golfing hero.
“We thought it would be nice to come out and let him know how much we appreciate him,” said Hudson, whose Mid-South Junior Golf Association had, by then, grown six-fold in size and become a national model for the First Tee programs that proliferated to inner-city communities around the country.
The street leading to Hudson’s clubhouse at Pine Hill: Loren Roberts Drive.
Earlier that year, Roberts had won the GTE Byron Nelson Classic, setting a tournament record for low score.
It was his sixth PGA Tour victory, fifth since missing that putt at the Open in 1994. On the flight home from Dallas, Roberts made a decision.
He would donate $100,000 of the $540,000 first-place check to Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center. Every year, Roberts hosted a pro-am tournament of his own to benefit the Memphis hospital’s sickle cell disease program.
“It was,” Roberts said, “the right thing to do.”
That’s become a theme since Roberts and his family began putting down roots in the Memphis area, and his generosity and reputation as a kind, considerate man knows no geographic of socio-economic boundaries.
It was in 1999 that Roberts promised to play in the Tennessee Golf Association’s State Open. As it turned out, that meant skipping the Kemper Open, where Roberts needed only win a small check to stay in the Top 10 of the money list and thus earn a spot in the U.S. Open.
Roberts never wavered. He won the tournament – and the $6,000 check – but missed qualifying for the U.S. Open.
“He might not be playing in the U.S. Open this year,” said his friend Bob Wolcott, then a pro in Nashville who now runs Tunica National. “He’s going to be able to look back and know that he did the right things for the right reasons.”
For many years, Roberts would participate in a regular golf game with what he would describe as older gentlemen who came from country clubs all over town. Doctors and lawyers and businessmen, they all got to know Loren through Frank Brown, the man who hosted Loren and his wife, Kim, at the 1983 Danny Thomas Memphis Classic and eventually got them to move to town.
The members of the group don’t play much these days, but they try to get together for lunch, as they did last week at Southwind while Roberts was preparing for the Senior British Open.
If anyone ever wanted to roast Roberts, they could provide ample material. Even worse, at least for a spotlight-shy guy like Roberts, they would embarrass him with praise.
“I’ve known many a type,” says Edgar Bailey, one member of the group, “and he is one of the most considerate human beings I have ever known.”
When it comes to being nice, considerate and humble, athletes are often graded on a curve. With Roberts, it works the other way around. He’s the genius in class whose good works must be thrown out, otherwise everyone else would flunk.
“Anybody that’s met him is crazy about him,” says George Coors, a local doctor also in the group.
Coors talks about how, when his mother took a turn for the worse before passing away, Roberts would visit her.
“Mother would tell me, ‘There was a Mr. Roberts come by,'” says Coors.
Last week, after Hurricane Dennis came through the Florida panhandle, Bailey got a phone message from Roberts.
“We have a place in Destin,” Bailey said. “He was just calling to see if everything was OK.”
One member of the group, Ralph Levy, has been very ill the last few years. He got a visit from Roberts last week.
“Ralph has Alzheimer’s and had a stroke five years ago, and Loren, he knows, because his mother had Alzheimer’s,” Bailey says. “He’ll call Ralph at least once a week whether he’s in town or on the road.”
Bill Garner, a former pastor who now helps his family run Windyke Country Club, is a close friend who caddied for Roberts one year at the par-3 tournament at The Masters.
Garner remembers walking up a big hill and running into Gary Player, the great South African golfer.
“Of course, Loren always introduces me and Gary Player says, with that accent of his, ‘Law-ren, you are the gentleman of golf,'” Garner says. “For Player to say that, what a great compliment. Loren is a great gentleman.”
In golfing circles, where being a “gentleman” for many years could also mean leading an exclusive, privileged existence, that word can have a double meaning.
Not so for Loren Roberts, the son of a mailman who did not take up the game until high school and moves into the next phase of his career with his legacy secured.
As a determined golfer who never surrendered his championship dreams.
And, as a Memphian who has made a deep impact in his adopted hometown.
“He’s not one of these guys who takes what he’s had or his life for granted,” says Garner. “He doesn’t look at what he has as he is entitled. He really earned what he has.
“He’s a common man who has worked hard to get to where he is and appreciates what he has accomplished.”
NEXT: Loren yearns to add one missing piece – a major title.
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PART V: Move to senior circuit has 1 main goal — win a major
Inside Loren Roberts’ office, where pecan-colored wood paneling gives the new house in Germantown an old-fashioned feel, souvenirs of his remarkable career are on display.
The two scimitars he won from Arnold Palmer, at the golfing legend’s PGA Tour event at Bay Hill near Orlando, are framed on the wall.
There are the pair of crystal goblets from the Greater Milwaukee Open, where the locals love Loren but will miss him this week because he is making his senior debut today at the Senior British Open.
There are commemorative pieces from his appearances in the President’s Cup and Ryder Cup. There is a photo of Roberts with golfing immortals like Byron Nelson, who has become his very good friend, and Gene Sarazen.
Roberts is planning to add more hardware to the collection, and he is unabashed in declaring what sort of trophies he’s after.
On the senior circuit, he wants big goblets, the kind that come from major tournaments like the Senior British and next week’s U.S. Senior Open.
“I’m hoping I can go out there and be an instant contender,” Roberts says. “That’s my feeling. But we’ll see.”
And he is emphatic about continuing to compete for prizes on the regular PGA Tour. Roberts, who turned 50 in June, has all but clinched a spot in the Top 125 of the money list to keep his card for a 24th season and has built enough status on the career money list to ensure himself a full 25th season.
He wants to stay on Tour at least until he’s 53.
Roberts has been closer to winning this year than many realize. He has five Top 25s, has made 9-of-14 cuts and might have won the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic (where he tied for fourth) except for a sloppy front nine on Sunday. In 2004, he tied for third at the Southern Farm Bureau Classic in Madison, Miss., and had 12 Top 25 finishes.
If competing against the best isn’t incentive enough, there is also this: The No. 10 player on the PGA Tour’s money list has earned $2.28 million so far in 2005, while No. 10 on the PGA Champions Tour has $706,559.
“I really believe if I can get it all going one week, I can win on the regular Tour,” Roberts says. “Obviously it’s not going to be at a place that’s 7,500 yards and a bomber’s paradise, but … at the right place, I still think I can win.”
Then again, golfers in good shape like Hale Irwin and Gil Morgan have made a lucrative second career on the senior circuit.
Irwin has career senior earnings of $21,698,853. In almost 10 years, Morgan, a former Memphian himself, has made right at $15 million, or as much as Roberts has made in almost a quarter-century on the PGA Tour.
“I’ve had guys tell me they wish they were back on the regular Tour,” Roberts says, “and I’ve had guys tell me the senior tour is absolutely the greatest thing going.”
Those close to Roberts do not sense ambivalence. A creature of old habits, he’s managed to set reachable goals for both Tours and compartmentalize his ambition.
In some ways, his mature approach at 50 is not much different than the college kid back in his native San Luis Obispo, Calif., applying lessons learned in a 12-week motivational course his mother made him take.
“I still love making lists,” Roberts says. “It’s the last thing I do before I go to bed every night.
“And I love checking things off.”
Roberts has put a big line through so many of his golfing goals, but there is one that remains.
Win a major championship.
That quest begins today.
One thing to consider, as Roberts embarks on his senior career, is that many of the players on the senior circuit were ascendent when Roberts was a struggling pro in the ’80s, when he lost his PGA Tour card five times. Even with the success he enjoyed as a late-blossoming professional, friends say there is a part of Roberts that burns to beat the Hale Irwins, Craig Stadlers, Tom Kites and Curtis Stranges of the golfing world.
And just wait until Greg Norman gets out there, they say. Then you’ll really see some fire.
“He loves to beat you,” says Bill Garner, a friend whose family owns Windyke Country Club. “Oh, gosh, he loves to win. Doesn’t matter what it is.
“He comes over here one winter, we’d just converted the greens to Champion Bermuda and all the members are complaining about missing putts. He shoots 62 and makes 2 miles of putts.”
Loren’s old swing coach, Jim Suttie, sees him becoming dominant. The putting stroke is still one of the best in the world – one of the best that’s ever been, say some – and the shorter courses on the senior circuit will make Roberts, who rarely misses fairways, even more formidable with his steady iron approaches.
“I don’t think he’ll have any trouble winning,” says Suttie, one of Golf Digest’s top 50 national teachers. “I would look for him to win five a year, minimum, if he keeps in shape and keeps his body good.
“You never know, but he might be the next Hale Irwin.”
Going into today’s first round as a senior, at the Senior British in Aberdeen, Scotland, Roberts would settle for being the next Peter Jacobsen.
Like Roberts, Jacobsen made his senior debut in a major, winning the 2004 U.S. Senior Open.
However, Jacobsen never got as close to winning majors as Roberts, who missed a 4 1/2 -foot putt that would’ve won the 1994 U.S. Open and, in 2000, actually took the lead at The Masters with nine holes to play before falling to Vijay Singh.
Though Roberts still has “Win PGA Tour event” on his list of goals, he realizes it is unrealistic to think about winning a major on the regular Tour because of the lengthening of so many classic major championship tracts.
“Obviously, my shot to win a major championship is a senior major,” Roberts says. “Winning the Senior British or Senior U.S. Open would be fantastic.”
Sometime late last night, six hours ahead of Memphis time, one can imagne Loren Roberts tidying up his Thursday to-do list.
Eat good breakfast.
Hit some balls.
Hit some putts.
Go win a major.
Bring trophy back home.
To Memphis.
No, knowing Roberts … for Memphis.
“I think it’s exciting,” says Kim Roberts, Loren’s wife. “We’re fortunate to have a second phase to our career. It’s pretty awesome.”