We”re now into week three of the PGA Tour”s Fed Ex Cup playoff format. Steve Stricker, Tiger Woods and Heath Slocum hold the top three spots in the playoff race, which is kind of like having the Warriors, the Lakers and the Clippers as the three top teams in the NBA playoffs. In PGA Tour language, it”s all about volatility.
Lack of real playoff fever aside, the tour returns to Cog Hill just outside of Chicago for stage three. Cog Hill has served as the site for the Western Open since 1991 and has also hosted the U.S. Public Links and the U.S. Amateur. For approximately 15 years, the Western was played over Fourth of July weekend at Cog Hill, attracting enormous crowds. There is a giant picture in the downstairs grill room at Cog Hill from the 1997 Western Open to prove the point. Tiger Woods and his caddie Fluff are marching toward the final green with an enormous gallery alongside them, similar to final-hole scenes at past British Opens. The galleryites had broken through the ropes and the 18th fairway was a mass of humanity. It was certainly a picture-perfect moment in Western Open history.
Nowadays, Cog Hill hosts the BMW Championship although the winner does receive the very same Western Open trophy from 1899 that has been hoisted by past greats such as Chick Evans, Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and the aforementioned Mr. Woods. However, the Fourth of July weekend Western Opens had a whole lot more flavor than the current BMW with its limited field of 70 contestants. By early July, the PGA Tour was a hot-ticket item in a sports crazy Chicago. Most years, the White Sox and the Cubs were floundering and the tour was a welcome respite from bad baseball. The second week of September is way too distracting for Chicagoland golf fans with football, namely the Bears, Big Ten teams Northwestern and Illinois, and major independent Notre Dame, all in action.
The BMW is also not an exclusive Chicago event. Last year it was played at Bellerive in St. Louis, and plans are afoot for it to be contested at Crooked Stick in Indianapolis and Hazeltine in Minneapolis. Of course, Cog Hill has its own aspirations, too. It has undergone a redesign by Rees Jones, the Open Doctor, and with the awarding of the U.S. Open to public courses such at Bethpage, Torrey Pines and Chambers Bay, it is the hope of the course”s owners, the Jemsek Family, that Cog Hill will be awarded an Open sometime prior to 2020. With Medinah firmly in the PGA Championship/Ryder Cup camp, the USGA will most probably use Cog Hill as an Open site the next time its National Open rotates to Chicago.
Meanwhile, the USGA will be observing the redesigned Cog Hill from close range this weekend. The United States Senior Amateur is being contested some 12 miles away from Cog Hill at historic Beverly Country Club on Chicago”s South Side. The stroke play portion of the Senior Am is being played this Saturday and Sunday, with match play scheduled from Monday through Thursday.
When the Western Open used to rotate through Chicago area courses, Beverly hosted the tourney a handful of times with winners, including Hall of Famers Chick Evans (1910), Arnold Palmer (1963) and Jack Nicklaus (1967). It also hosted a very historic U.S. Amateur Championship in 1931.
When I worked at Beverly in the 1960s and 1970s, some of the old-time members had fond memories of that 1931 Amateur. The way the story was told, the membership truly looked forward to hosting the ”31 Am up until the moment of the 1930 Amateur at Merion was decided. That Amateur was won in runaway fashion by the top golfer of that era, Bobby Jones. His victory at Merion put an exclamation point upon a brilliant season that saw Jones win the British Amateur, British Open and the U.S. Open, a feat sports writer Grantland Rice termed “The Grand Slam.”
From the Beverly Country Club perspective, it all went downhill when Jones announced that he would be retiring from competitive golf. As a result, Jones would not be teeing it up the following August at Beverly. In those days, Jones” presence at a major amateur tournament was the equivalent of Tiger Woods entering a tour event nowadays. Without Jones, the Beverly-hosted Amateur would lack star power.
To Beverly”s rescue came a 38-year-old U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur and Western Amateur champion who hadn”t won a national title of note since the onset of World War I. The past champ was Francis Ouimet, best known for his triumph in the 1913 U.S. Open at the Country Club where he beat Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in what was later termed “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
Ouimet came to the ”31 Amateur with lots of rust on his clubs. He added to that rust by skipping a practice round to watch his Boston Braves (he was their vice president) play the Cubs. At 36-hole stroke play, Ouimet easily made the cut, four shots back of medalist Charlie Seaver, the father of Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver. Realizing that the Donald Ross-designed Beverly had treacherous greens, Ouimet felt good about his chances among the 32 match play qualifiers. “I decided it was one of those tests where putting was to be a great factor, along with accurate tee-shot making,” Ouimet stated.
Ouimet won his first two matches against young 20-somethings by 4-and-3 and 5-and-4 margin. He beat Paul Jackson 7-and-6 in the 36-hole quarterfinal and defeated 19-year-old three-time Chicago Amateur champ Jack Westland. Ouimet birdied the first two holes and never looked back, winning 6-and-5 in front of a crowd of 5,000 that included the defending champ, Bobby Jones. Beverly had its first-rate champion for the Amateur even though Jones didn”t play.
It”s an active weekend on the PGA Tour as the BMW Championship, the third leg of the Fed Ex playoff series, will be contested at Cog Hill. The U.S. Senior Amateur is commencing at Beverly, some 12 miles away. And all the while, Cog Hill is auditioning for a chance to join Bethpage as a site for a future U.S. Open championship.
