Five things to know: Ryan Gerard

North Carolina native Ryan Gerard visited Quail Hollow Club for the 2007 Truist Championship as an elementary schooler, watching Tiger Woods earn his 57th of 82 PGA TOUR titles.

Gerard is now competing at Quail Hollow Club in a major championship – and he’s factoring into the early conversation, chasing his first PGA TOUR title.

Gerard, 25, opened the 107th PGA Championship in 5-under 66, reaching 7-under through 16 holes before back-to-back closing bogeys on Quail Hollow’s famed "Green Mile." Gerard posted the lowest score in Thursday’s morning wave, one clear of a quartet of pros: Luke Donald, Ryan Fox, Alex Smalley and Stephan Jaeger.

Here are five things to know about the University of North Carolina alum who displayed a penchant for the big moment in the first round of his first PGA Championship.

He took a circuitous route back to the PGA TOUR.

Gerard’s ascent in professional golf has been rapid yet winding. After finishing No. 20 on the 2022 PGA TOUR University Ranking (when just the top 15 earned status on a PGA TOUR-sanctioned circuit), Gerard qualified for PGA TOUR Canada via Q-School and finished fifth on the 2022 Fortinet Cup standings. That earned him conditional Korn Ferry Tour membership for 2023, but his schedule changed in a hurry when he Monday qualified for the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches and finished solo fourth – en route to earning TOUR Special Temporary Membership for the rest of the year.

He didn’t earn enough non-member points to earn a 2024 PGA TOUR card, though, and fell back to the Korn Ferry Tour. It was a redemptive campaign as he finished 12th on the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour season-long standings, with 30 TOUR cards available, to earn a TOUR card for 2025. He has started fast this year, notably in a two-event stretch where he followed a ninth-place finish at the Texas Children’s Houston Open with a runner-up at the Valero Texas Open, and moved inside the world’s top 100 to earn a tee time at the PGA Championship.

He has enjoyed golf since he was a toddler.

Gerard fell in love with golf at a young age, receiving his first set of clubs at age 2. His dad Robert, who played collegiate golf at Florida Atlantic and spent time on mini-tours after graduation, was always by his side. “I apparently just loved golf,” Gerard said. “I was told that as a little kid, I would take shovels and rakes I found at daycare and swing them around like golf clubs. I always got in trouble for doing it.”

Gerard grew up off the 15th hole at Wildwood Green Golf Club in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’d often do short-game work with hula hoops before play had reached the hole for the day. His dad would space them out at 20-yard intervals and he would attempt to hit into each one, honing his distance control. Gerard is a golf fan at heart; he remembers sneaking out of his room after bedtime to watch the conclusion of the 2012 U.S. Open, won by fellow Raleigh native Webb Simpson at The Olympic Club. Earlier this year at THE PLAYERS Championship, he waxed poetic about memorable PLAYERS moments including Ken Duke’s third-round 65 in treacherous conditions at TPC Sawgrass. “It’s always been the dream,” Gerard said of becoming a PGA TOUR pro.

His family and Grayson Murray’s family go way back.

A younger Gerard would often play “impossible chipping” contests with friends at Wildwood Green, where they’d give each other terrible lies and see who could get the ball closest to the pin. This group included the late Grayson Murray, a fellow Raleigh native who won twice on TOUR and three times on the Korn Ferry Tour. The close connection between the Gerard and Murray families doesn’t end there. In 2019, Robert Gerard and Eric Murray (Grayson’s father) co-founded the Tarheel Golf Foundation, a non-profit organization which operated the Tarheel Junior Golf Tour for middle and high school players and the Tarheel Future Stars Series for elementary school players. The foundation grew to more than 1,000 members by its second season.

He can play the violin.

Gerard’s non-golf interests can often run in short spurts. He had a dalliance with online chess, for example, and has dabbled in pickleball. But usually it’s not for long. “I never like doing something for super long because I’ll become too attached to it and it will be a time vacuum,” he said. “I have a new hobby almost every year and lose it halfway through or change it up.”

One hobby that stood the test of time, though, was the violin, which he played for 14 or 15 years, he estimates. He’s rusty now but remains inclined enough where he “wouldn’t embarrass myself in most social settings.”

He has drawn inspiration from Roy Williams.

As a collegiate golfer at the University of North Carolina, Gerard and his Tar Heel teammates tended to visit the driving range in the twilight hours. A notable presence often joined them on the range: former North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams, who led the Tar Heels to three titles in his esteemed career. The coach was wired to be the last one at the range, which resonated with Gerard as he pursued a career as a professional athlete.

“When you talk about a guy that gets it and an all-around amazing human being, he kind of embodies everything that you should aspire to be,” Gerard said of Williams. “He will compete with you to see how bad you really want it. … He'd try to out-wait us to see if he would be the last guy there that night, and we wouldn’t let him for the most part.”