Bruce Fleisher

Bruce Fleisher's career had the strangest shape in professional golf: a U.S. Amateur championship at nineteen, a single PGA Tour win in three decades of trying, and then, past fifty, an eruption — 18 wins on the Champions Tour, including seven in his 1999 rookie season alone, and the 2001 U.S. Senior Open title.

Birth and Death Dates:
b. Oct. 16, 1948 — d. Sept. 23, 2021

Career Highlights:
Fleisher won the 1968 U.S. Amateur at nineteen, then the third-youngest champion in the event's history, and took golf gold — individual and team — at the 1969 Maccabiah Games in Israel. The professional career that followed refused to match the promise: on the regular PGA Tour he won exactly once, the 1991 New England Classic, on the seventh hole of a playoff with Ian Baker-Finch. He spent much of those years as a club professional, good enough at that trade to win the 1989 PGA Club Professional Championship.

Then he turned fifty. Fleisher won his first two Champions Tour starts back-to-back in 1999 — the first player ever to do so — and kept going: seven wins that season, both the Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year awards, and eighteen senior titles by 2004. The crown came at the 2001 U.S. Senior Open, where his even-par 280 beat Isao Aoki and Gil Morgan by a stroke and gave him a second USGA championship 33 years after his first — one of the longest gaps between national titles any golfer has managed.

He died of cancer in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in September 2021, at 72. The Greater Wilmington Sports Hall of Fame had inducted him in 2017, and golf writers still cite his late-blooming senior career as the standard example that a golfing life can begin again at fifty.

Origin:
Union City, Tennessee