The eighth edition of the Presidents Cup Matches opens Friday at the venerable Harding Park Golf Course located in the far southwest corner of San Francisco, adjacent to Lake Merced and the Olympic Club on one side and San Francisco State University on the other side.
These team matches feature 12 International professionals against 12 American professionals. There are two days of fourball (better ball) and foursomes (alternate shot) matches. The event concludes on Oct. 11 with 12 individual matches.
A beautiful tree-lined course less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean, Harding Park first opened in 1925. It is the longtime home of the San Francisco City Amateur, it hosted the Lucky International, a PGA Tour even in the 1960s that featured such champions as Gary Player, Gene Littler, Jackie Burke Jr., George Archer, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Ken Venturi and Billy Casper, and most recently it hosted the 2005 World Golf Championship with Tiger Woods defeating John Daly in a playoff.
Harding Park”s heyday was in the 1950s and 1960s. Amateur golf was big back then and crowds estimated at 15,000 would show up for an S.F. City finals match between such luminaries as Ken Venturi and Harvey Ward. However, following the 1968 Lucky, the course started to fall into disarray, a process that lasted close to 30 years.
Designed by Scottish professional Willie Watson (Olympic Club, Ukiah), the course underwent a handful of revisions by Jack Fleming (Sharon Heights, Santa Rosa, Adams Springs), a one-time prot?g? of Alister Mackenzie. In the late 1990s the course underwent a multi-million dollar upgrade orchestrated by powerful San Francisco attorney Sandy Tatum, a past president of the USGA and the co-designer of Spanish Bay.
The Harding Park design should make for dramatic match situations when the Presidents Cup commences next Friday morning. The course has been re-routed especially for the Presidents Cup so that the three finishing holes, the short and potentially drivable par-4 16th, the classic old-style par-3 17th, and the 475-yard dogleft left finishing hole, will be a part of the matches and won”t require a full 18-hole completion.
The PGA Tour officials wanted the matches to reach Harding”s colorful closing stretch, so the Presidents Cup re-route means a very different sequencing of the holes. Considering Harding Park”s unusual configuration, the front nine for the matches will play as follows: 10-11-12-13-4-5-6-2-3. The back nine rotation is 14-8-15-16-17-18-1-7-9. The PGA Tour used statistics from past Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup matches and found that on the average, most matches concluded after the 16th hole. With Harding”s closing holes playing as the 13th, 14th and 15th holes, cup officials have ensured that those notable holes will be very much a part of the matches.
Another item of interest is that Harding Park has five stressed-out greens. When my son Nick and I played the course in early April, we were surprised by the inconsistencies of the greens. They might have played anywhere from 4 to 9 on the Stimpmeter. Added to that dilemma was a greenskeeping error in late July, resulting from over-fertilization. The result is damaged greens with browned-out lines. The Tour will obviously paint the greens if need be, but while the pros will be putting on visually nice-looking surfaces, they could be erratically bumpy. Only six days will tell whether the greens have a negative impact upon the Presidents Cup Matches and whether they will pigeon hole the City of San Francisco with the viewpoint that they can”t maintain the course following its seven-figure revision.
The American team is formidable and experienced. It features Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Kenny Perry, Steve Stricker, British Open champ Stewart Cink, Sean O”Hair, Jim Furyk, Zach Johnson, Anthony Kim, Justin Leonard and captain Freddie Couples” two picks, U.S. Open winner Lucas Glover and Hunter Mahan. The International team captained by Greg Norman includes South Africans Ernie Els, Tim Clark and Retief Goosen; Australians Robert Allenby, Geoff Ogilvy and Adam Scott; PGA champ Y.E. Yang from Korea; South Americans Camilo Villegas and Masters champ Angel Cabrera; Vijay Singh of Fiji; Canadian Mike Weir; and 17-year-old phenom Ryo Ishikawa of Japan.
Harding Park will play to the strength of power players and the American team is filled with bombers. On top of that, putting always seems to play an important role in match play, and putting is the forte of Mickelson, Woods, Stricker, Furyk, Leonard and Johnson. The American team has a handful of players atop the World Rankings, including Woods, Stricker, Mickelson, Perry and Furyk. They”re all ranked within the top nine. Ogilvy, at No. 10, is the highest-ranked golfer among the International contingent.
While Americans such as Anthony Kim and Justin Leonard haven”t played to past form during the 2009 season, there are more International golfers who are struggling, most notably Adam Scott, Vijay Singhm, Ernie Els and Robert Allenby. Nonetheless, we”re dealing with the magic of match play. While the USA team has the homefield advantage and is coming off an emotional Ryder Cup win over the Europeans one year ago, when all is said and done we”re dealing with an American team led by seven major championship winners facing an International team that features six winners of grand slam events.
The Presidents Cup comes to Harding Park next week. Harding is a historical municipal golf course that many of us fondly recall from our past. While I do believe that the American team will prevail, I do know for certain that the Presidents Cup will feature much more exciting and dramatic golf than what I got to watch over four weekends during the recently completed Fed Ex Cup playoffs. If only the greens will behave ?
