This past Monday was one of the more unpleasant versions of May 10 in recent memory. To be quite honest, I”ve spent a bunch of May 10ths in the elements on a golf course over the past three decades, and I would almost swear that the 2010 edition of May 10 with its cold, stinging rain, its heavy winds and occasional hail was about as bad as it gets.
The members of the Kelseyville High School golf team spent this past Monday on the links at the Windsor Golf Club, participating alongside 17 other teams and 35 individual qualifiers in the North Coast Section Championships. As the team”s longtime coach, I was out there in the elements too, monitoring play for six hours and then helping to run a six-man, five-hole playoff that lasted another 90 minutes. Although our team fell short, our quest was to qualify out of Windsor, advance to Arcata this Monday, then move on to Patterson the following Monday, all with the final goal of reaching Santa Maria Country Club sometime after Memorial Day in a month-long journey to become state high school golf champions.
Meanwhile, some 75 miles away in the East Bay hills of Pleasanton, United States Open sectional qualifying was being held at the Jack Nicklaus-designed Ruby Hill Golf club, a private course of 7,448 yards with a course rating of 76.0 that first opened for play in 1996. Kelseyville High School grad and Point Loma University golfer Jonathan Carlson was among those in the field at Ruby Hill. Carlson had played in the 1999 North Coast Section Championships for Kelseyville at Sunol Valley on a much sunnier and warmer day. Since then he has become Lake County”s most accomplished amateur golfer, winning four consecutive Lake County Amateur titles, capturing a handful of NCGA point tournaments, qualifying for the 2007 U.S. Mid Amateur at Oregon”s Bandon Dunes, and making his way into the elite field at the 2008 U.S. Amateur at historic and storied Pinehurst in North Carolina.
Carlson”s round last Monday was an all-encompassing golfing journey that would lead him from Ruby Hill to regional qualifying at Del Paso Country Club in Sacramento on June 7, and hopefully to Father”s Day Sunday for the fourth and final round of play in the 110th annual United States Open golf championship at Pebble Beach Golf Links situated along the Pacific Ocean and Carmel Bay.
Carlson was one of 88 qualifiers in a very talented field fighting for one of six spots into stage two. It was a strong field that included a number of PGA Tour and former PGA Tour members, including Joel Kribel, Tiger Woods” teammate at Stanford University, Jeff Rangel, Todd Fischer, Kevin Wentworth, Dana Banke, Brad Bell, the designer of Yocah De He, and Jeff Wilson. Interestingly enough, as Wilson was playing Ruby Hill, his 15-year-old son, Jack, a sophomore at Justin Siena High School in Napa, was in the five-hole NCS playoff alongside Kelseyville”s Tyler Drake and four others.
Carlson started out on Ruby Hill”s back nine and promptly parred the difficult 473-yard par-4 10th hole. He parred five other holes on the nine while making bogey on the 12th, 17th and 18th holes. He made the turn in 3-over-par 39. By now conditions were getting worse as the rain got heavier, the winds became more intense, and the temperature dropped. While Carlson felt that the 39 was about as slow as he could go, he also realized that a good 25 percent of the field had probably bested him. He still had a lot of work to do if he wanted to advance out of Ruby Hill.
Carlson promptly got on the par train, making six pars in a row, including one on the beastly par-4 fifth hole that plays to 469 yards. On the 435-yard par-4 seventh, his 16th hole of the day, he made birdie-three, and on the 529-yard par-5 eighth, he got up and down for a birdie-four. Now standing at 1-over-par for the day, Carlson passed the final hurdle by making par on the 467-yard par-4 ninth hole. He finished with a 73 for his six-hour day in the brutal weather. He had survived wind, rain and hail, had dealt with a five-group logjam on a par-3 tee, had laid up on two of the par-4 holes to avoid ballooning his ball into the gusty winds, and survived a bogey attributable to losing his balance on a putt.
In the end, it had all been very worthwhile. Kribel and Rangel had set the pace by posting even-par scores of 72. Carlson, Todd, Fisher and amateur Gregor Main of Danville turned in cards of 73. Main is a member of the UCLA golf team and won the prestigious Southern Amateur last summer. Wentworth took the sixth and final spot by shooting 74 and surviving a playoff.
So now Carlson heads to Del Paso in three weeks to play 36 holes and hopefully advance to Pebble Beach. He will be joined by exempt tour pros, perhaps Scott McCarron as well as David and Kevin Sutherland. Del Paso is a traditional old-style course that was first opened in 1916. Designed by John L. Black, it has had revisions by Sam Whiting (Olympic Club), Billy Bell (Torrey Pines), and most recently Kyle Phillips. Kribel, the medalist at Ruby Hill, holds the course record with a 5-under-par 66. Now stretched out to 7,000 yards, Del Paso is no stranger to USGA qualifiers and events, having hosted the 1982 U.S. Women”s Open won by Janet Anderson, the Orville Moody of the LPGA Tour.
I”m no stranger to Del Paso, having been to a couple of California State Amateur qualifiers there in the 1980s. The greens are the golf course”s equalizer, playing hard, fast and tough. Yet Carlson should be able to exploit the relatively short par-5s with his superior length. If the driver behaves on June 7, he has a very good chance of finding himself on the first tee in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach on June 17.
Regardless of how this whole journey plays out, Jonathan Carlson of Kelseyville can be sure of one thing. He won”t have to deal with Mother Nature and her cruelty when he tees it up at Del Paso and then at Pebble Beach in June. This past Monday was about as bad as it can get with playing competitive golf in must-win situations.
