He used to race motorcycles for Michael Jordan. Now he’s a talented senior amateur golfer.
Julie Williams
| Golfweek
The scars on Jason Pridmore’s lower legs invite questions on the golf course. Pridmore guesses he has broken his legs four or five times in his life. He lost his spleen and has suffered the occasional shoulder, collarbone, hand or wrist injury but despite all that, Pridmore, 56, is checking in at a +1.8 handicap as he begins a second life in sport.
Needless to say, Pridmore brings a vastly different background to high-level senior amateur golf than most competitors. The Ventura, California, native raced motorcycles professionally for more than 20 years and his decorated career included 21 American Motorcycle Association national titles. He spent two seasons riding for the Michael Jordan Motorsports team (yes, that Michael Jordan) and then, as a swan song, spent the final six years of his active racing career competing in endurance championships across the globe.
Pridmore now works as an expert analyst for the MotoAmerica SuperBike Championship, which is considered the premier motorcycle road racing series in the U.S, but is diving deeper and deeper into senior amateur golf. He qualified for the U.S. Senior Amateur in 2025 and is currently gushing about what a cool experience he had at the Jones Cup Senior (where, by the way, he logged one of the lowest final-round scores to climb 23 spots up the leaderboard and into the top 10).
He insists there are many parallels between golf and racing, even if there is a very clear difference in pace.
“My sport was always fast, it was 180 mph, 190 mph at some of the race tracks we went to,” he said. “People say, ‘Man, there can’t be two things further apart.’ I say, ‘No, I’m a lot more comfortable going fast than I am over a three-foot putt.’”
While motorcycle racing is reactionary, Pridmore notes the obvious about golf: That there’s a lot more thinking time, a lot more time to prepare and also a lot more time to live with the consequences of any given shot.
“Being patient on a golf course was a lot harder for me because you go into holes thinking, this is easier, that’s harder or whatever and I’ve really learned how to adopt different ways of thinking around a golf course than obviously riding a motorcycle,” he said. “And to be fair, I’ve probably learned more about golf in the last year and half playing in tournaments with some of these guys that I’ve been able to meet than I have in the last 10 years of playing.”
Pridmore will tee it up in Golfweek’s back-to-back senior amateur events in Palm Desert, California, to end the month. The fields at the Golfweek Senior Division National Championship (March 27-29) and the Golfweek Senior Amateur (March 31-April 2) are typically some of the strongest on the calendar. They will offer Pridmore another step into the realm of competition in which he is already proving he belongs.
Pridmore has been playing golf since he was a teenager – borrowing a set of clubs one summer day in the 1980s when he and a buddy were both waiting for the top ends of their bikes to be rebuilt. From there, Pridmore was hooked.
As he barreled toward a racing career, however, Pridmore was so focused on motorcycles that competitive golf took a backseat. But before retiring from racing, Pridmore scored a breakthrough in golf by qualifying for the 2006 U.S. Amateur, to be played at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minnesota. Pridmore advanced through a 36-hole qualifier at Hacienda Country Club in Southern California.
Interestingly, Pridmore began that qualifier with a round of 4 over and trailed roughly 20 players entering the afternoon round. He snap-hooked his tee shot on the first hole of the second 18, watched it fly over a fence then ricochet back in bounds and from there, went on to post a bogey-free round of 4-under 67.
It earned him a spot in the tournament proper – only Pridmore would never make it that far.
Having flown to Minnesota to log some early practice rounds, Pridmore spent the weekend before the U.S. Am racing in Virginia. During the race, however, Pridmore broke his ankle.
“I actually got on the plane, I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m missing the U.S. Amateur,’” he said. “I got on the plane to try and go there and I couldn’t get off the plane, so I had to withdraw so that was a real shame.”
At the time, Pridmore was riding for Jordan, who was equally bummed that Pridmore didn’t get to play in the event. The incident “crushed me for like two years,” Pridmore admits, and he continued to play U.S. Amateur qualifying as his schedule and body allowed. The break to his left ankle haunted him perhaps more than any other injury, especially as he and longtime instructor Steve Holmes grooved his swing into one that relies on the ground for power.
“On good days it’s fine, but it was one of the reasons I kind of stopped trying to qualify for the U.S. Amateur was because I just couldn’t walk 36 holes, my leg wouldn’t allow it,” he said.
Pridmore has since qualified for two U.S. Mid-Amateurs (and made it to the tee unscathed in both) in addition to the Senior Amateur in the summer of 2025.
Since turning 55 in October 2024 and finishing eighth in the California Senior Amateur shortly after, Pridmore has been climbing in the World Amateur Golf Ranking and melding into the senior golf community.
“I like the camaraderie,” he said. “They’ve all got really interesting stories, a lot of them are CEOs or they played collegiate golf, which I never got the chance to do, and some of them are pros. So I find a lot of their stories very intriguing, so I really enjoy playing in them.”
Varied though the fields may be, it’s safe to say Pridmore remains one of a kind in this setting.