Although the calendar on the wall states there are still three weeks left until the conclusion of the summer season, this Labor Day weekend is normally a good indicator that the really good weather is in its waning days. Perhaps it is because of my Midwestern upbringing, where summer meant time out of doors and winter meant time shut inside, but I have always correlated the 90 days of summer with outside activities such as picnics, baseball and golf.
So, to my way of thinking, another summer of my greatly extended childhood is soon coming to a swift conclusion. There will be less time spent outside and even less time hitting golf balls on the links. As I age and as my competitive skills erode, I find myself in a mode where I now collect new golf course experiences, whether it”s in a casual or a competitive golf setting.
Once again this summer, I journeyed to the San Francisco Bay Area to play in a couple of NCGA Members tournaments. The NCGA Members series is normally held twice per month. The series holds tourneys on Mondays at private country clubs. The series is very popular with people such as myself who enjoy playing traditional, old-style courses, and in most cases ones that I would otherwise never get to play.
I competed in a pair of better ball events with golf rules official Jack Lucich of Clearlake. Our first journey was to Orinda Country Club, located on the eastern slope of Grizzly Peak, just a few miles as the crow flies from Berkeley and Tilden Park. Orinda first opened in 1924. Willie Watson, a Scot who also was the architect for the Olympic Club, site of the 2012 United States Open, and its neighbor, Harding Park, designed the course.
Orinda is a very quirky course stretching throughout hilly terrain. Just think of how unique the 18th hole is at the Olympic Club. Orinda has 18 holes like that. It”s a hilly course with pristine greens. The course was in immaculate shape. Lucich and I played well enough to come in third and win $40 in pro shop merchandise.
Our other NCGA Members foray took us to the upper-class Claremont Country Club in north Oakland. Four miles west of Orinda, Claremont is hidden in a bustling neighborhood just off Highway 24 and Broadway Avenue. It is a gorgeous course with beautiful views of downtown Oakland and the San Francisco skyline. First founded in 1897, the present golf course site was designed by one of the game”s architectural godfathers, Alister Mackenzie, in 1929.
You know you”re going back in time when you tee it up at Claremont as it plays to just 5,500 yards and a par of 68. It has two par-5s and six par-3s. Nonetheless, it turned out to be a marvelous golfing experience. Like Orinda, it crosses neighborhood streets several times. The par-3 holes are downright tough although I did win $20 in golf merchandise when my tee shot on the 17th hole stopped some 20 inches from the cup for closest-to-the-pin honors. True to its time, Claremont has three crossing holes with the perpendicular fourth and fifth fairways sharing a vertical fairway with the seventh hole.
Claremont also has caddies, so we hired Tim to carry doubles for us. He has caddied at Claremont since the late 1960s and knew every nook and cranny of the place. Claremont had the best greens and although I struggle with that aspect of the game, I made everything in sight that day. I guess it”s true that you are a better putter when you play on great putting surfaces.
I also took two excursions this summer with a collection of 10-12 golfers known as the Adams Family. The group includes attorneys, investigators, psychologists, retirees and even a golf course owner.
Our first road trip was to San Francisco”s Harding Park, site of the 2010 Presidents Cup and host to the PGA Senior Tour”s season-ending Schwab Cup. Although I used to live near Harding and have played the course some 100-plus times, it was only the second occasion that I”ve been there since they poured millions into re-doing the place.
If you never get to experience the Olympic Club, then Harding Park, which sits alongside the eastern banks of Lake Merced, just across from Olympic, is a most worthwhile poor man”s alternative. Our group also stopped after our round for a cold root beer at the Ireland 32 Club on Geary Boulevard, but that”s a story within a story.
Last week the Adams Family went to Auburn Valley Country Club in the Sierra foothills. A private club that first opened in 1960, Auburn Valley is now open to the public during specific times. It is a clever Bob Baldock design that could remind one of Rancho Murieta, another foothills course. Mike Devries of Traverse City, Michigan, the leading architect/scholar of all things Alister Mackenzie, recently remodeled Auburn Valley”s greens. It”s probably just a matter of time before Auburn Valley returns to full-time private status once the economy rebounds, so it was a great course to experience while the public can still get out and about.
My other unique summer golf experience was at Greenhorn Creek Golf Club just outside the Gold Rush town of Angels Camp. The occasion was my son”s 20th birthday. Greenhorn opened in 1996 and it is a typical Robert Trent Jones II design with big greens, big bunkers and big fairways. Greenhorn Creek is a stern test of golf. It is also a cart course with some serious distances from one green to the next tee. It”s located on the site of an old Chinese railroad worker labor camp with stone walls and artifacts from that time crossing some of the fairways. For whatever reason, the course was quite crowded on the day we played, and our round easily exceeded five hours. I think there were a number of novice golfers out there that day, and perhaps Greenhorn with its many hazards was just too hard for the struggling linkster.
It is Labor Day weekend and the summer daylight hours are getting shorter and shorter. It has been a great summer of golfing day trips. Now I”ve got to get on the computer and plan that next Adams Family trip for sometime during Thanksgiving week in November. After all, there are all kinds of golf courses to collect out there.
