This past Monday I spent my daylight hours in the hills high above Berkeley. I was at the Tilden Park Golf Course. The occasion was the North Coast Section Girls” Golf Championships. I was there because my daughter, Liz, a junior at Kelseyville High School, qualified for the tournament alongside Lisa Copeland of Middletown. They were joined by 12 other teams of six girls as well as 34 golfers who qualified as individuals.
I was there as Liz”s coach and I also served as one of the two roving rules officials along with Oakmont”s PGA golf professional, Mike Jonas, who doubles as the golf coach for Santa Rosa”s Ursuline High School. I”ve taken on this role a handful of times and I find it to be a fun assignment. The last few times I”ve done this rules thing, I”ve worked under the direction of Mike Armstrong, the golf coach and the athletic director at the Convent of Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco. He was serving as the NCS tournament director.
In my opinion, Arm-strong is the perfect tournament director for a high school golf tournament. He is very thorough and organized. An affable character, he is also very good with kids and is very positive. I always know that things will run smoothly when he is in charge. He”s one of those people I”m always willing to go the extra mile for.
The 108 female high school golfers took to the course in an 8 a.m. shotgun start. It was a Chamber of Commerce day in the Berkeley Hills. Tilden Park is an old-style course that was built as a Depression-era WPA project to put people to work and recharge the economy. It is a clever William Bell design that relies on the topography of the area as well as a number of streams and creeks to make it a difficult test of golf (Bell was the father of Billy Belly Jr., the designer of Torrey Pines and Hidden Valley Lake). You”re constantly hitting from uphill, downhill and sidehill lies and most of the relatively small greens are elevated. It is a beautiful golf course in a gorgeous setting, but it is a tough test and it is a tough walk.
We didn”t have a lot of rules issue, but the ones we did have centered more so on the side of “one-of-a-kind” issues. On the par-4 12th hole, a stream sits directly in front of the green. One of the girls had her approach shot stop exactly on the bridge that spanned the creek. It was considered part of the water hazard, meaning that the girl could play the ball as is, or she could take a one-stroke penalty and drop her ball back on the fairway behind the stream. She wisely took the penalty and hit her next shot from real grass.
A girl teed her ball up on the ninth hole, took a practice swing, and by accident hit her ball 20 yards dead right near the eighth green. She told the coach walking with her group that she hadn”t intended to hit the ball and that it had all been a mistake. I was one fairway over at the time, so I was called over to figure out what happens next. Believe it or not, it wasn”t a penalty. She was allowed to re-tee the ball without penalty, according to the Rules of Golf. Had she done that any time after her tee shot, she would have had to replace the ball and add one penalty stroke, but because she hadn”t yet begun the hole and because she had not intended to hit the ball with her practice swing, it was no harm, no foul.
Parents played a minor role in rules issues. One parent parked his cart too close to the action. A girl hit her ball over a creek, only to have it hit the cart and kick backward into the water. Sad to say, she had to play the ball from where it ended up in the creek bed. I had to caution a dad who others thought was giving advice to his daughter. He was pretty clever about it, telling me that if his daughter foolishly took advice from him, then she was making a big mistake because he was a hacker. I secretly think he was guilty as charged, but his promise to stay 30 yards away and not communicate with his daughter was good enough to get him off the hook with me.
The saddest rules story involved a girl who shot a 101. She knew she did so because she kept her own scorecard. It added up to 101, and the official card kept by one of her playing partners had a 101 in the column for total score. She signed the card and turned it in. Yet when the tournament committee added up her card, it totaled up to 98. Bad arithmetic is forgiven by the Rules of Golf, and so her 98 went up on the scoreboard.
The girl, being honorable, was surprised by the posting and went to the committee. It turned out she had mistakenly signed for a score of four on the 10th hole when she had really made a seven. Her total score on the card was all she looked at and she never checked the hole-by-hole numbers for accuracy. She was disqualified because she signed for a lower number than she made on the 10th hole.
The girl”s coach was upset and thought the disqualification was too harsh. He even blamed the coach who was supervising the group for shoddy marshaling. The girl who wrote down the incorrect score was upset and apologetic. However, the girl who was disqualified handled it like a pro, telling the other girl it wasn”t her fault. She said it was her responsibility. That”s pretty mature stuff for a 15-year-old.
Another NCS girls” tourney was in the record books. Lisa Copeland came in third and advances to the Tournament of Champions in Arcata on Monday. Liz Berry came in 15th and missed the qualifying for the TOC by four shots. Liz will be putting away the sticks for a while and start thinking about her up and coming basketball season. And in retrospect, more girls are playing golf and more schools are fielding golf teams. All in all, it was a very good day on the links.
A quick review of our PGA bubble boy watch shows that Bill Lunde has gotten himself off the proverbial bubble. His fourth-place finish last week in Scottsdale has moved him to a safe 102nd on the money list. Ricky Barnes tied for 39th and is still barely safe in 121st place. The three former major winners, Rich Beem, David Duval and Todd Hamilton, all missed the cut. Beem is now 124th, Duval is 125th, and Hamilton is sinking fast at 133rd with just two tourneys left.
left.
