This town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we’re young. —Bruce Springsteen, “Born To Run”

“How could we be lost like this? We’re in fuckin’ New Jersey.” —Paulie Walnuts, The Sopranos

There is a particularly Jersey malaise—the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres. ―Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Everything is legal in New Jersey.” —Hamilton The Musical

“What I like about New Jersey is the variety of it. The classiness, the vulgarity, the humor, the clutter.” —Novelist P.F. Kluge

The dark old factories—Civil War factories, foundries, brassworks, heavy-industrial plants blackened from the chimneys pumping smoke for a hundred years—were windowless now…It was Newark that was entombed there, a city that was not going to stir again.—Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Credit: Carmen Mandato/TGL

Chris Gotterup is a proud New Jersey man. He is a native of Little Silver, just off the Garden State Parkway. You can see the Jersey influence in the shiny gold chain that Gotterup flaunts like a latter-day Pauly D. What you can’t see beneath Gotterup’s Nike polos is the tattoo on his back that shows the outline of New Jersey. He made a pact with his college teammates at Rutgers that they would all get the same tattoo. He volunteered to go first— “I was dead sober,” he says, surprisingly—and then all of the other homies reneged. Gotterup has no regrets because he loves his home state that much. He says, “You grow up there and you deal with a lot: traffic, cold winters, stuff like that. People like to take shots at Jersey but we take pride in being from there. It will always be home for me.”

Gotterup, 26, is built a little like Tony Soprano and carries himself with some of the same swagger. But Gotterup metes out violence only with his driver, smashing his tee shots an average of 319.9 yards (fifth on the PGA TOUR) and ranking 14th in strokes gained off-the-tee, even though he often throttles back with a 13-degree mini-driver…which still propels his golf ball 315 yards or so. Last season, only Gotterup’s second on Tour, he took the golf world by storm, staring down Rory McIlroy to win the Scottish Open and then a week later finishing third at the Open Championship in only Gotterup’s fourth career start in a major championship.

But since then he’s gone to a different level, with an upgraded game that evokes the all-around excellence of Gotterup’s favorite New Jersey athlete: Jason Kidd, from his days toiling at the Meadowlands, before the Nets moved to a flashy new home in New York, the kind of forgetting of one’s roots that O.G. Jersey folks disdain.

Gotterup spent the off-season working on his putting and wedge play and then began 2026 with a victory at the Hawaiian Open, on a short, fiddly, finesse course that would not seem to suit a player who previously displayed all the delicacy of Lawrence Taylor roaming the gridiron just off exit 16W of the Turnpike. Then in Phoenix, Gotterup earned his fourth career TOUR victory by birdying five of the final six holes and dispatching Hideki Matsuyama with a 27 foot birdie putt on the first hole of sudden death.

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Photo by Alex Goodlett/Getty Images

Suddenly, Gotterup is up to ninth in the World Ranking and has to be considered among the best American golfers under 30. Folks close to him have seen this coming for a while. “In college, on the Korn Ferry, he’s always been a guy who’s unbeatable when he gets it going,” says close friend Jacob Bridgeman. “He’s got that firepower to blow the field. You can tell on a Tuesday at the range—if he’s hitting it a certain way, look out.” (Bridgeman traveled with Gotterup on the KFT and offers the following scouting report: “He’s a little grumpy in the morning. And he can look kind of scary on the course but I promise he’s really a big teddy bear.”)

With his stellar play over the last two years, Gotterup may have already earned an honorific that is rarely discussed: the greatest New Jersey golfer of all time. Asked to cite the competition, Gotterup says, “Oh man, I can’t remember his name. There is this guy who has won the state open a million times. I think the trophy is named after him. Gawd, I’m trying to think of his name. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

Gotterup’s father Morten was a stick who won a handful of tournaments at the state level. Chris grew up playing with his dad and then furthered his golf education by caddying as a teen at Rumsom Country Club. He and his buddies were golf nuts who attended every pro tournament they could. He was gutted when his guy Jason Day didn’t win the 2016 PGA Championship at Baltusrol, and, at a long-ago Northern Trust Open at Liberty National, Gotterup caddied for a family friend in the pro-am. Patrick Cantlay was in the group and the teenage Gotterup was impressed by the persnickety pro. “I appreciated how seriously he took it,” he says. “Even now I get a little spaced out, not exactly dialed in all the time, but I’ve never forgotten how focused he was on everything at all times. That was a lesson. Still is.”

Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

But Gotterup has always had something that a plodder like Cantlay can only dream about: terrifying clubhead speed. At 13, Gotterup began working with swing coach Jason Birnbaum, who cited three ballstriking gods while describing his pupil’s idiosyncratic swing to Golf Digest: “He’s got like a Jack Nicklaus build”—especially the redwood tree thighs—“but he has a [Lee] Trevino setup. He’s got a little bit of Ben Hogan in his legwork. There’s a lot of the greats in Chris’ overall game, which he’s really had since he was a kid, and that’s something you can’t coach.”

Befitting the hardscrabble Jersey narrative, Gotterup did not compete in glitzy AJGA events and thus attracted minimal interest from big-time college golf programs. So he stayed home and played for Rutgers University (where at football and basketball games he often saw rabid fan James Gandolfini, the real-life Tony Soprano). Gotterup enjoyed three strong seasons at Rutgers and then transferred to Oklahoma for his final year of eligibility. The stiffer competition and world-class facilities brought out the best in Gotterup, who in 2022 won the Ben Hogan Award and Jack Nicklaus Award, cementing his status as the best college golfer in the land. (And yet, no Oklahoma-related tats adorn his beefy body.)

In his second start as a professional, Gotterup proved his bona fides by finishing tied for fourth on a sponsor’s exemption at the John Deere Classic. He apprenticed for one season on the Korn Ferry Tour and then reached the PGA TOUR in 2024, giving a glimpse of his firepower by winning the Myrtle Beach Classic by six strokes.

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Gotterup’s low, screaming drives instantly became a cult favorite and his rising star has become evident with an invitation to play in the TGL and alongside President Trump at his eponymous golf club in—where else?—New Jersey. (Gotterup says he is apolitical and would tee it up with any president out of respect for the office.) Outdueling McIlroy and U.S. Open champ Wyndham Clark on a bouncy, quirky Scottish links course was proof that Gotterup’s game travels. “He showed no fear,” says Clark, who was paired with Gotterup in the final round in Scotland. “It was very impressive.”

Photo by Justin Edmonds/Getty Images

One of Gotterup’s strengths is that he is brutally honest with himself. Even though the wins were coming, he was still missing too many cuts and there were weaknesses to address. Gotterup decided to invest in himself: Over the last year he has hired sports psychologist Brett McCabe, putting coach Tim Yelverto and caddie Brady Stockton, an unflappable former professional golfer. Together, they have smoothed over the rough edges of Gotterup’s game.

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In 2025, Gotterup ranked 149th on Tour in proximity to the hole from 125-150 yards; this year he’s up to 22nd. Last season, Gotterup was 113th in making putts in the crucial 10’-15’ range and this year he’s 35th. He has also improved nearly 70 spots in 3-putt avoidance. Add it all up and Gotterup has become a menace. Improving his mid-range putting and, especially, his wedge play was Rory McIlroy’s formula for finally conquering Augusta National. Gotterup has turned himself into a trendy darkhorse pick for this Masters and he is not cowed by the expectations. “It’s flattering to hear people call me a contender there,” he says about the Masters. “I believe my game is up to the challenge. But it all comes down to execution.”

This no-nonsense attitude is part of Gotterup’s appeal. He has earned $4.2 million in this season’s first three months—“I’ve already made more money than I ever dreamed of,” he says—but Gotterup is just a regular dude with extraordinary gifts, kind of like the pitcher in Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” (For the record, Gotterup’s favorite song by the Boss is “I’m On Fire”; when I noted that it’s a good makeout song he said nothing but laughed knowingly.)

Gotterup recently benched 265 lbs.; if he slips a green jacket over his meaty shoulders it will settle an old debate. On the subject of the greatest Jersey golfer, some folks in the Garden State try to claim Craig Wood, who lived in Joisey for years and worked at various country clubs while winning the New Jersey PGA four times between from 1928-32. He was even inducted into the New Jersey PGA Hall of Fame. But Wood was born in New York and died in Florida. In between, he won the Masters in 1941. That’s nice and all, but it’s time for a real Jersey boy to win one.

More from Alan Shipnuck:

Cameron Young Is Who We Thought He Was

A Star Is Born: Jacob Bridgeman

Inside Brian Rolapp’s Thunderdome at The Players Championship