Todd Doss finds his breakthrough with Golfweek Senior Amateur title

Even after climbing off the airplane, hundreds of miles from Palm Desert, California, Todd Doss was still talking about a 9 he made at Desert Willow Golf Resort’s Mountain View Course a week earlier in the Golfweek Senior Division National Championship. In a way, Doss said, that 9 propelled him to a breakthrough that has been more than a year in the making.

Doss, 56, is a birdie machine. He had seven of them in the final round of the Golfweek Senior Amateur on April 2 at Desert Willow’s other layout, the Firecliff Course, which was enough to catapult him to the top of the leaderboard. Doss had rounds of 69-73-67 for a 7-under total that left him four shots ahead of Jerry Gunthorpe, a titan of senior amateur golf who won the Golfweek Senior Division National Championship four days earlier.

It’s a significant win for Doss in one of senior golf’s deepest stroke-play fields, and one that validates the work he has been putting into his game for the past year and a half, but the big numbers are something Doss still feels he needs to reckon with.

“I was leading the (Golfweek Senior Division National Championship) at one point and I promptly made a 9,” he said with a laugh. “Those are the kind of things that I have to avoid. I learned from that and so today, even this week, I was like, just don’t make big numbers.”

Even as Doss laments the score, he admits that he played the hole correctly – he went back to the tee after hitting his shot in the trees. It’s this kind of introspection that has helped Doss reach the top of a sport in which he only began competing in recently.

Doss, a college tennis player, retired from his career as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in early 2020. While he calls Louisiana home now, he spent much of his working life in Southern California. Before competing in the back-to-back Golfweek events, Doss had finished runner-up at the San Francisco City Senior Championship, a match-play event. He fell to Bob Niger in the final round.

Doss spent the past year and a half bouncing all around the top 5 of national events as he worked his way through a national schedule. In January, he won the Society of Seniors Jack Hesler. The Golfweek Senior Amateur still feels like a breakthrough victory.

“It feels good that I can compete at a level with probably 15 or 20 of the top 50 guys in the WAGR ranking in the world and now it’s just a matter of my game stacks up,” he said. “It’s just if I can avoid – and I hate to use the word – but the amateurish mistakes I think I can just hang in there.”

Doss works with top Dallas teacher Cory Gladstone, an AimPoint certified instructor who has quite the following as a putting coach. Gladstone frequently tells his player that his ballstriking is more than strong enough to hang and that his putting stroke is there.

“If you can just hang enough for your putter to get hot, it will happen,” Doss said in repeating the words of his coach. “That’s kind of what happened in the final round.”

Doss made four birdies on the front nine of the Firecliff Course and mixed in three more on the back despite two bogeys. At the start of the day, he might not have predicted such a low round, considering the wind was blowing pretty hard and his opening tee shot was a little wild – way right but, luckily for Doss, landed in another fairway. He told himself par would be a good score on Thursday given the conditions, walked away with par on that first hole and then at the second, striped a drive down the middle and hit his approach to 30 feet despite a howling wind. He made the birdie putt and was off.

“I was like here we go,” he said. “Let’s see if we can keep this good ballstriking going and I just kind of rode that momentum for the whole front nine. I just kept hitting good shots. It was fun.”

Doss also relished his pairing alongside Gunthorpe, whose game he describes as surgical. A big part of the learning curve Doss is on involves watching the discipline of veteran players like Gunthorpe, whom he describes as so meticulous and confident in his decision-making on the course that it’s like he never makes a wrong decision, even if the outcome isn’t perfect.

“Whereas I’m like the complete opposite, I’m just like a mess, right?” Doss joked. “I’m just like, nah, just go for the pin!”

Doss, now 56, acknowledged early on in this senior amateur journey that he needed tournament reps and a bit more experience with the game all around in order to truly be successful. With this victory, he may have crosse that bridge. He named course management as his biggest growth area over the past year and a half. Combine that with physical ability and his is a name that could reach the top of many more leaderboards in the coming years.

“I do feel that’s sort of my superpower,” Doss said of his physical health, “in the sense that I do take my health and my gym workouts pretty seriously.”

Besides finishing ahead of Gunthorpe, Doss also topped players like Randy Haag of Orinda, California, the second-round leader who finished tied for third at 2 under. Defending champion Bryan Hoops of Scottsdale, Arizona, was T-6 at 1 over.

Kevin VandenBerg, the top-ranked player in the Golfweek Senior National Amateur Rankings, and Mark Strickland, winner of this event in 2024, tied for 12^th at 3 over.

Scott Masingill of Payette, Idaho, won the Super Senior title after leading all week. He was 4 under and one ahead of Mark Morgan of Shingle Springs, California.

Craig Calkins of Manhattan Beach, California, took the Legends title in a runaway after finishing at 5 under, nine shots better than runner-up Jeffrey Knox of Jupiter, Florida.

A similar story played out in the Super Legend division, where David Rasley of Payson, Arizona, won by 10 shots with his 3-under total.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Todd Doss finds his breakthrough with Golfweek Senior Amateur title

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