It’s the weekend of the 115th annual United States Open Golf Championship. For the first time, the National Open is being contested in the Pacific Northwest. Chambers Bay Golf Course, a municipal course run by Pierce County, is the site for this year’s event. Less than 10 miles from downtown Tacoma as the crow flies, Chambers Bay sits adjacent to Puget Sound and brings a bit of contrived links golf to our American championship. The Open is not run by the PGA Tour but instead is the product of the United States Golf Association, the keeper of the rules of the game as well as the organization that runs one dozen national championships.
When the USGA closes down shop Sunday evening, it will have little time to rest on its laurels. That’s because the U.S. Senior Open begins next Thursday at the Del Paso Country Club in Sacramento. Throughout the summer and the fall, the USGA will host a number of events, including the Senior Amateur, the Women’s Senior Amateur, the Women’s U.S. Open, the Mid-Amateur, the Women’s Mid-Amateur, the U.S. Amateur, and the Women’s U.S. Amateur, among others.
Because it occurs in our neck of the woods, I am looking forward to attending the Senior Open next week. Attending a big-time professional golf tournament in person is not always the best way to view great golf because of crowd conditions, but I do intend to show up at Del Paso during Tuesday’s practice round and I also think I’ll go watch first-round action Thursday morning. I seldom attend a tournament on the weekend because by then the field of 156 golfers has been cut to around 70 or so, more people are in attendance because they don’t work on weekends, and it’s doubly difficult to get up close and personal with the likes of Colin Montgomerie, Freddie Couples, Bernhard Langer and Vijay Singh.
Similar to the National Open, the Senior Open has a number of exempt spots that go to the big guns of senior golf while the remainder are made available through a qualifying process. Unlike the U.S. Open, which had 10,000-plus qualifiers and eliminated golfers through an 18-hole regional and then a 36-hole sectional process, the Senior Open had just more than 2,400 qualifiers this year. To get into the Senior Open, one need only have a great 18-hole round in the sectional process. Then again, it’s easier said than done.
Among those exempt into Del Paso this year are the aforementioned Monty, Freddie, Bernhard and Vijay alongside other well-known seniors such as Fred Funk, Jay Haas, Hale Irwin, Tom Kite, Tom Lehman, Hal Sutton, Loren Roberts, Mark O’Meara, Jasper Parnevik, Jerry Pate, Scott Verplank, Scott Simpson, Jeff Sluman, Tom Watson, Ian Woosnam, Bob Tway, Craig Stadler and “The Mechanic,” the always colorful Miguel Angel Jimenez.
A number of well-known pros were able to qualify into the Senior Open, including Guy Boros, Jim McGovern, Willie Wood, David Ishii, Grant Waite, Sonny Skinner, Skip Kendall and R.W. Eaks. Unknown club professionals and talented amateurs make up the remainder of the field.
For me, this will be a most interesting event in that I have been inside the ropes in the same pairing with eight golfers who just so happen to be at Del Paso next week. I grew up with Lance Ten Broeck in Chicago and probably played more than 100 rounds of golf with him in high school tourneys, Chicago District Golf Association events, caddie tournaments, and during late evening nines at Beverly Country Club where we raced around the Donald Ross-designed course. Ten Broeck played collegiately at Texas, was on tour for about 25 years, and for the past 15 years has caddied for the likes of Jasper Parnevik, Robert Allenby and Lumpy Herron. A part-time senior golfer, Lance has had a top-10 finish at the Senior Open.
I used to dabble on the Golden State Tour, a mini-tour for fledgling pros, and over time was paired with Michael Allen, Chien Soon Lu and Esteban Toledo. I have been paired in NCGA amateur events with Bob Niger, who qualified into the Senior Open at the Minnesota sectional, and a multiple Olympic Club champion, Randy Haag, who had the home field advantage when he qualified into the Senior at Olympic. The eighth golfer I have played with is Jeff Wilson of Vacaville, who qualified at Green Tree. I first ran into Wilson when I played with him in the State Fair Amateur in the early 1980s. He was an All-American at UOP. He got onto the PGA Tour for about five years, got reinstated to the amateur ranks, and is best known in Northern California circles as the low amateur at the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. In the 2008 NorCal Parent-Junior, my son Nick and I were in the final-round pairing with Wilson and his son Zach. It was a most memorable day for Nick and I at Poppy Ridge even though the Wilsons prevailed and won the Parent-Junior for the third consecutive year.
Del Paso will play to a par of 70 and has been stretched out to 6,994 yards. An old-style tree-lined course that first opened for play 99 years ago, Del Paso went through a major renovation in 2006 by Kyle Phillips and his firm, which included design consultant Robby Seed, a former Point Arena High School and U.C. Davis golfer. The greens will be lightning-fast and will run out to 13 on the Stimpmeter. In the event of a tie after 72 holes on Sunday afternoon, a three-hole playoff on the 16th through 18th holes determines the winner.
The United States Open concludes this weekend at Chambers Bay outside of Tacoma and the United States Senior Open commences next Thursday at the almost-century-old Del Paso Country Club in Sacramento. Hall of Famer Colin Montgomerie of Scotland is the defending champion. Monty is not a big fan of hot weather and we have to anticipate it will be sweltering in Sacramento next week, so that may not play to Monty’s strength. Nonetheless, in a field that includes such former major champions as Tom Watson, Mark O’Meara, Bernhard Langer, Mark Calcavecchia and Lee Janzen, we can be quite sure that it will be a most dramatic Senior Open with a leader board of note. Perhaps this will be the biggest sporting event in Sacramento since Chris Webber, Mike Bibby and the Kings came oh so close to the Shaq and Kobe Lakers some 14 years ago. It should make for a fun week of golf in Sacramento, a very golf friendly town.
