Jeff Roth, 63, to tee it up at Rocket Mortgage Classic

DETROIT – Jeff Roth was hard to miss in a loud orange golf shirt, light blue shorts and PGA-crested Titleist staff bag as he hit balls at Detroit Golf Club on Wednesday. He has a squat, unchiseled build that harkens to an earlier era, and is the only person in the field this week who’s 63, making him the club pro equivalent of Bernhard Langer and the bookend to big-hitting Bryson DeChambeau.

While DeChambeau and others have flirted with 200 mph ball speed, Roth is at 140. He will be playing a very different game when the Rocket Mortgage Classic begins Thursday.

“The obvious – making the cut and playing the weekend,” he said of his goals for the week. “I’ve got people coming in from New Mexico, California, and of course I’ve got family and friends here in Michigan. My daughters are putting together a couple of Fatheads of me, so it’s gonna be pretty cool. I’m really looking forward to it.” All told, he added, his gallery might number 50-70 friends and family.

Older players are having a bit of a moment. Phil Mickelson won the PGA Championship at nearly 51. Tim O’Neal, 48, won The John Shippen tournament earlier this week to earn his place in the field at the Rocket Mortgage. Dick Mast, 70, Monday-qualified for this week’s DICK’s Sporting Goods Open on PGA TOUR Champions. And now we have Roth, who admires them all.

A resident of Farmington, New Mexico since 2010, Roth teaches at Michigan’s Boyne Golf Academy in the summer. He is, to borrow a movie title from 10 years ago, a human hot tub time machine. He played collegiately for Arizona in the 70s and made his first PGA TOUR start at the 1983 Buick Open won by Wayne Levi at nearby Warwick Hills Golf and Country Club. His game didn’t blossom until the 90s.

He qualified for the Rocket Mortgage by winning the 2019 Michigan PGA Professional Championship; his spot in the field was held over a year because of the pandemic.

If you haven’t heard of him, then maybe you’re not from here; Roth has won 17 Michigan PGA sanctioned “majors” and played in 21 PGA TOUR/PGA TOUR Champions majors. TOUR pro aspirations? Yeah, he had those, but once he settled down with his wife, Maureen, they began to fall away. “Plus,” he added, “I just wasn’t that good.” He made five of 20 cuts on TOUR.

Still, not everyone has played in six PGA Championships in four decades, from 1988 to 2020. Roth has stood the test of time, and will have 40 years on players like Davis Thompson and Joaquin Niemann this week.

“We figured when they met that it was the oldest and the youngest in the field,” said Thompson’s caddie Damon Green, who competed against Roth at the 2011 U.S. Senior Open at Inverness.

Green’s recollections of that week are commonplace amongst those who have seen the Roth magic up-close. Green was longer off the tee, sometimes by a lot, but Roth wouldn’t go away.

“I was outdriving him by 40 yards,” he said, “and then he hit his hybrids inside my wedges and short irons. It was impressive. My brother turned into a Jeff Roth superfan that week.

“He’s very accurate,” Green continued, “and very disciplined.”

He has to be, since he has no margin for error. Roth is so short, relatively speaking, that when he played in the 2020 PGA Championship at TPC Harding Park, he couldn’t reach six of the par-4s in two.

“So it was a par 76 for me,” he said. He shot 74-75 and missed the cut by eight shots.

And yet it would be foolish to write him off this week.

“I was always a long hitter,” said friend and college teammate Dan Pohl, who had a 30-plus-year PGA TOUR career before he built Pole Cat Golf Course in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan. “Jeff was a thinker who manages himself around the course very well. He doesn’t make many mistakes.

“Now at 64,” Pohl said with a laugh, “we make mistakes just getting up in the morning, but he’s still got the passion and the want to play at this level. He doesn’t have anything left to prove.”

Roth wears his staying power like a badge of honor.

“We grew up in an era where longevity was part of the formula for being a good player,” he said. “It’s just my opinion, but I don’t think today’s players look at it like that. I think they look at it where a career could be like five to 10 years. I don’t know if that’s the money, I don’t know if it’s that the physical part of what they put into it is so much greater than what we did.

“Nobody trained like that in my era, so there were probably fewer injuries,” he continued. “Or you never heard about them because you just played through them.”

If he could be gifted the career of Jay Haas or two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange, Roth added, he would take Haas, “because he’s still playing, still grinding, still lovin’ it.

“That to me is what it’s all about,” he said.

Roth will go off the first tee at 8:45 a.m. Thursday, with much younger Mark Anderson and younger still Daniel Wetterich. Roth will have a nice gallery in tow, Fatheads included. He figures his personal par will be 73, which means he’ll have to shoot around 6 under to make it to the weekend.

He’s still playing, still grinding, and still lovin’ it.