Club pro Jason Caron in position for remarkable senior major win

The leaderboard at the Senior PGA Championship is filled with vintage PGA Tour star power, with names like Retief Goosen, Lee Westwood, Padraig Harrington and Vijay Singh all in the mix.

But quietly tied for the lead at five under par with one round remaining is a less familiar name: Jason Caron. Caron will play in the final group on Sunday alongside Goosen and Angel Cabrera, and regardless of how the round transpires, on Monday, he’ll return to his “real” job, as the head golf professional at Mill River Club on Long Island’s North Shore, in Oyster Bay, where Caron works alongside his wife, Liz, a former LPGA pro.

Caron’s remarkable year in senior golf is worth a quick refresher.

In the early 2000s, Caron competed on both the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour before starting a career as a club pro in New York’s Metropolitan section. Then last year, Caron qualified for 2024 Senior PGA Championship and finished T4 — the best result by a club pro since 2002.

In June, Caron got into the field of the American Family Insurance Championship as an alternate, finishing T31.

Next up was the U.S. Senior Open, which Caron had gotten into via a local qualifier. He missed the cut but had the chance to tee it up again just over a month later at August’s Rogers Charity Classic, where he again got into the field as an alternate. That week, Caron was T3 — a finish that got him straight into the following week’s Ally Challenge field, where he was T47.

In October, Caron received a sponsor’s exemption to play the Constellation Furyk & Friends, where he again capitalized, finishing T4, and earning another entry into the following week’s tournament, the SAS Championship, where he finished T47.

Caron’s performance in those seven events alone were enough to qualify him for the Charles Schwab Cup Championship playoff series, which, in similar fashion to the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup, whittles down to the top 36 players at the end of the regular season. That group of 36 earns an invite to the season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship at Phoenix Country Club, as fully-exempt status for the following year’s tournaments.

Caron finished T3 at the final playoff series event, launching him to No. 35 on the Charles Schwab Cup points list after playing just nine events — an incredible achievement. And even more impressively, Caron said that despite clinching the full season of exemptions, he intended to keep his job at Mill River and play as much as he could.

The strategy appears to be paying off. With the busy season just getting started in the Northeast, Caron is making his ninth start on the PGA Tour Champions since February this week. He came close to notching his first senior tour victory at the Cologuard Classic in Tucson, where he lost to Steven Alker in a playoff.

Now, Caron is back at the tournament where it all started, tied for the lead, with a chance to earn not only his first PGA Tour Champions title but a major championship victory, too.

“A year ago, I definitely would have said, whoa, this can’t happen,” Caron said on Saturday. “Now that I’ve played, let’s just say, maybe 20 events, I feel much more comfortable. I look at it and I go, listen, it’s going to be what it’s going to be. If I play my golf and if I play well, it could finish high up there, and it’s happened already.

“I think deep down, I know it could happen,” he continued. “Will it happen? I have no idea. But yeah, I feel pretty comfortable with it.”

You can tune in to the final-round action at the Senior PGA Championship starting at 3 p.m. ET on NBC.