Across the 2025 DP World Tour season Jordan Gumberg hit 7,124 golf shots – he saved the best til last.
Playing his 34th event of the campaign, he arrived at the Genesis Championship 127th on the Race to Dubai and knowing that he needed a good week to keep his playing privileges, but things were not going his way.
After getting himself into a decent position over the first three days, he made just one birdie in 16 holes on Sunday and when he failed to pick up a shot on the 17th, it appeared all hope was lost.
Then something remarkable happened.
“After missing the birdie putt on 17 in Korea, I thought it was already done,” says Gumberg from the range at the Bear’s Club in Florida almost six months later.
“I thought I needed at least two more and turns out I did but I already had the thought that I was going back to Challenge Tour and Q School so I didn’t have a lot of pressure.
“I’m trying to hit the best shot I can on 18 and give myself a chance but there wasn’t pressure.”
Stood in the middle of the fairway on the par-five last, Gumberg saw his third shot pitch in the very edge of the fringe and roll down the green before tumbling into the hole for an eagle
Arms raised with a look of disbelief on his face, he ran and leapt into the arms of caddie John Rawlings before hugs were exchanged with playing partners Keita Nakajima and Ewen Ferguson and their caddies.
Over the course of nearly 12 months, Gumberg had played every event possible barring one and with the final blow of the year, he had secured his job for 2026.
“When I drove up from the 18th hole to the scoring area and I had my friends and the guys there that I’ve been friendly with over the years all sitting there ready to congratulate me and lift me up it was definitely comparable to a win,” he says. “It felt like a win.
“I looked up to my wife in the stands and she was crying, I was crying, she made me cry! She has made such wonderful friends out on the DP World Tour with the other wives and girlfriends and everybody, it was a sigh of relief that we don’t have to say goodbye to them.”
For those who do not play professional golf, it may be difficult to understand why a player who was already a DP World Tour winner and has won again since would wildly celebrate finishing 110th on the Race to Dubai.
But having a place to play is the only way to consistently have a place to win and Jordan Gumberg has learned to live with that more than many throughout his golfing career.
“If there’s a Q School, I’m going to play it,” he says. “If there’s a qualifier I’m going to play, it doesn’t matter where it is in the world.
“Professional golf is tough and getting tougher, getting your foot in somewhere is very hard.”
Introduced to the game as a toddler by his father Andrew, who had been a professional skiier prior to a successful career in real estate, Gumberg quickly fell in love but did not begin playing tournaments until his teens when he felt “ready to take it seriously”.
It was a few years later while embarking on the collegiate journey so common to American and now many international players that Gumberg was truly given fuel for his fire.
Competitive by nature, being doubted gave him an extra spur to succeed.
“It all comes from being told I was not good enough and wanting to prove people wrong,” he says.
“I’d gone on several college recruiting visits back in the day and certain coaches when they asked ‘what do you want to do with your life after college?’, I said ‘I want to play on the PGA TOUR’. And a few coaches said to me that that just wasn’t going to happen.
“I had a chip on my shoulder and wanted to prove them wrong.
“It’s a total love affair, I love this game, I love competing and am very competitive but at the same time I really don’t like being told I can’t do something.”
He initially studied at the University of Tennessee, where he was room-mates and struck up a friendship with HotelPlanner Tour winner Lorenzo Scalise, before a move to the University of Arizona and into the paid ranks.
Between 2017 and 2019 he would play just 17 ranking events, making two cuts, but giving up was not an option.
“Golf has always been what I wanted to do, what I felt like I could do,” he says.
“I battled around on the PGA Tour Canada, PGA Tour Latinoamérica for a little while, I was fortunate enough to get some Korn Ferry starts and didn’t really make the most of them.
“I played well, played decent, I just don’t know if I was mentally prepared for professional golf when college ended. I think it took a bit of a learning period of ‘how do we adapt to the professional game?’.
“In college golf, two under takes you a long way and in pro golf two under might not make a cut so it took a little while to get comfortable out there.
“Being there and knowing that I belong was a little bit of a challenge for me. Not that I have a confidence problem by any means but just by seeing your idols that you’ve looked up to in front of you and playing in front of you and measuring yourself against them is a tough little learning curve.”
During Covid, Gumberg was fortunate enough to be a member at Dye Preserve, a club in a county that had no restrictions and where he could keep playing golf.
And it was there, once more among some of the best in the world, that the learning curve continued.
“Covid actually helped me a lot,” he says. “Living and playing in South Florida I was a member at a course called Dye Preserve and during that Covid period it was the only golf club in the state of Florida that had no restrictions at all because of the county we were in.
It all comes from being told I was not good enough and wanting to prove people wrong
“So every week we would have 50-person money games with pretty much everybody that lived in the area from the PGA TOUR, Korn Ferry, PGA Tour Canada and so on.
“That period of playing money games and playing with guys that were better than me and more established on Tour for pretty much that year was actually a huge help. Just going out there and competing with guys like Corey Conners and Charl Schwartzel and Adam Long, you name it, there were guys in our money games. Louis Oosthuizen played a few.
“Just being around guys like that and hanging out with them and learning from them and picking their brain really, really helped me during Covid.”
2021 brought a “building block”, a first ranking top ten on a course where Gumberg had been a member at high school but with just three other starts that year, he headed to Europe for new opportunities.
By this time fellow South Floridian Brooks Koepka was a four-time Major Champion but he had played two seasons on the HotelPlanner Tour en route and that was a journey from which Gumberg could take inspiration.
“Growing up in South Florida, Brooks Koepka is a guy that we look up to down here through junior golf and he went over to Europe and played and always said it was what made him a well-rounded player and I agree with that method,” he said.
“It wasn’t necessarily my first choice, my first choice was obviously get on Korn Ferry quickly and get onto the PGA TOUR but it took me a little while to find footing anywhere and coming over and playing Challenge Tour and grinding it out there and finishing top 45 on that money list and having a little bit of success was not really my plan but it just kind of happened and I’m so glad that it did.”
That top 45 came in 2023, the season where Gumberg would claim two top threes in three events at the Irish Challenge – which he got in to via a Monday qualifier - and Farmfoods Scottish Challenge supported by the R&A.
The week in Scotland also saw him start working with experienced caddie Elvis Seme, who had previously carried the bag for Scalise.
With status now secured on the HotelPlanner Tour and with that limited starts on the DP World Tour, things were looking up, although Gumberg would only make two of his first seven cuts in the 2024 season.
Then, once again, something remarkable happened.
Having been hovering around the top of the leaderboard for the first 54 holes, a closing 68 thrust Gumberg into a play-off at the SDC Championship and when he birdied the second extra hole he was a winner.
The man who was trying to belong, the man with just three top tens from 67 ranking starts over eight seasons was a DP World and Sunshine Tour champion.
“I definitely surprised myself, it came as a shock to me,” he said. “I was in on a sponsor invite and just trying to have a good week but the golf course really suited my eye and the way that I play.
“I had the mindset that after a good first round let’s just keep our head down and keep plugging away. To find myself in a play-off that I probably shouldn’t have even been in in the first place was an added plus.
“I thought second place, even if we don’t win this play-off is a great week for me, let’s just keep going and see if we can win this thing.”
He added: “I love that pressure: this is a play-off and I've got to do something. My play-off record over the years has been pretty stellar, I think I’m 11-1 so I leaned back on that.”
The victory, however, only gave Gumberg an exemption until the end of the following year so he was soon back to the grind in his marathon 2025 season.
Battling for his card, you would think that gruelling schedule would come from necessity but the truth of it is, Gumberg loves to play.
This is a man, after all, who on one of his rare weeks off won the Coral Springs Summer Classic and the US$920 prize that goes with it two days before the U.S. Open.
“I don’t like taking weeks off,” he said. “I hate seeing my name fall down the points list so it’s out of necessity but also self-driven. This year with the win I plan to take a few more weeks off but not many.
“I like playing. Growing up in Florida, I never really took a day off growing up and I’m just used to it. When I’m home for off-weeks I play on a tour called the Minor League Golf Tour and they have a couple of one-day events a week in my area and I like to stay sharp playing those. I don’t like to let the competitive juices die out, I like to keep them going and it keeps me sharp.”
During our conversation while Gumberg is at the famous Bear’s Club, he speaks of discussing the Hero Indian Open with Alex Fitzpatrick, of how Rory McIlroy has been recommending team members and his contact with Shane Lowry.
“It’s been a huge help being out here around these guys.” he says.
And as he hits balls at the centre of the golfing universe, less than a month after a second DP World Tour win at the Hainan Classic presented by MAEXTRO, the high school kid who was told he was not good enough is starting to feel at home.
“It was nice to validate the first win,” he says. “For the last two years from the win in South Africa I kind of had the feeling of, ‘was it a fluke? Was it just a great week? Did all the stars kind of align?’.
“To have the struggle after that and the period of grinding through it and possibly losing the card and then to win again was the validation I think I needed to know that it wasn’t a fluke. I can do it again, I can do it hopefully many more times.
“It has definitely given me the confidence to know that I belong a little bit more.”
