Gilmore gets dream job at Winged Foot head pro

Opportunity can knock even for someone who wasn't all that interested in seeking it. You can be just sitting there, minding your own business and enjoying a great job, as Mike Gilmore was last December at the end of his seventh year as head pro at Piping Rock Club.

The private club in Locust Valley is the sort of place that Gilmore had worked all his life to reach. It has a great course, supportive membership and a solid golf "feel." It was worth every minute of his sojourn as an assistant at Deepdale, Sewane and Muttontown and as head pro at Wheatley Hills. It was just the right job.

Then he was offered a dream job, and he just couldn't turn it down. So now, as this golf season really heats up, he is on a legendary course with members who had their pick of just about any pro in the country. He is the head man at Winged Foot.

It would be a little like a college basketball coach having the head job at a Big East school that goes to the NCAA tournament every year, and then being invited to coach Duke. Or, he likes to see it another way. "I liken Winged Foot to Yankee Stadium," he said from the pro shop the other day. "This is like playing for the Yankees."

And for a 45-year-old who attended Monsignor Scanlan High School in the Bronx, that is a no-contest choice.

Golf followers could make an argument that Winged Foot is the best head pro job in the country. "It's the dream of any club pro," he said.

He was careful in saying that, though, because he didn't want to sound like he was happy to leave his last spot. In fact, he was emotional about the goodbye party the members at Piping Rock gave him last week. "Piping Rock is a special place," he said.

It's just that Winged Foot has a distinct niche in American golf. "You drive in here and you see all that tradition. You know there were five U.S. Opens here and a PGA and a number of U.S. Amateurs," Gilmore said.

Exclusive private clubs are extremely guarded about saying how much their pros make. But it is generally assumed that Winged Foot pays more than Piping Rock. That is no small consideration for a father of six, ranging from a 23-year-old daughter just finishing up college at Stony Brook to 10-year-old twins.

He didn't want to uproot the family, so he is commuting from East Northport to Mamaroneck every day. "It's about 50 miles. Without traffic, it took a little under an hour today," he said. The Gilmores will decide as a family sometime in the next year whether to move to Westchester County. When he was told that Tom Nieporte actually enjoyed his commute from Long Island as a personal sanctuary during his 28 years as Winged Foot head pro (after having been head pro at Piping Rock), Gilmore said he might just think about looking at it that way.

One of the quirks at Winged Foot is that the members like their pro to be a good player, and do well as a competitor in local tournaments. Nieporte had won on the PGA Tour. Craig Wood and Claude Harmon, major champions, were head pros there. "When I first got to the clubhouse and looked on the wall, I was like, 'Holy cow! There's little old me here,' " he said.

In this era, long after the days when a tour player becomes a club pro or a club pro wins a tour event, little old Gilmore has done just fine. He played in the 1992 and 2008 U.S. Opens and 1999 and 2002 PGA Championships.

He was replaced at Piping Rock by Sean Quinlivan of Ballybunion, Ireland, most recently of the Fox Club in Palm City, Fla. Gilmore played with him at Seminole Golf Club in Florida this winter and assured, "He will make his presence felt in tournaments in this section."