It was just three weeks ago that Rory McIlroy made a birdie putt in overtime to defeat Ryan Moore in the PGA Tour Championship. When McIlroy’s putt dropped that evening in Atlanta, it marked the culmination of the Fed Ex Cup playoffs as well as the last event on the 2015-16 wraparound calendar. Two weeks ago the Ryder Cup was contested. Everyone on tour had last week off, including those Web.com Tour regulars who had their event canceled in Jacksonville because of Hurricane Matthew.
So, now we find ourselves in mid-October and the new 2016-17 version of the PGA Tour is starting up some 100 miles south of us at Silverado Country Club in Napa. They’re playing the Safeway Open there. It’s the kickoff to the new campaign and a number of golf’s notables are in the field at Silverado’s North Course, including five-time major champion Phil Mickelson, past major champions such as Keegan Bradley, Webb Simpson, David Toms, Geoff Ogilvy, Retief Goosen, Lucas Glover and Stewart Cink, and a bunch of up-and-comers, including Bryson DeChambeau, Ollie Schniederjans and Max Homa. Olympic bronze medalist Matt Kuchar is teeing it up at Silverado, two-time tour winner and former Alameda High School golfer James Hahn is there as well, and Windsor Golf Club head professional Jason Schmuhl is playing in his 10th PGA Tour event this week at Silverado. Emiliano Grillo is the defending champ.
This is the third consecutive year that Silverado and its principal owner, two-time major champion Johnny Miller, have hosted this event. Safeway is in its inaugural year as sponsor. Prior to this year, the tournament was called the Frys.com and sponsored by the electronic firm of the same name. Earlier editions of the Frys were contested at Grayhawk in Scottsdale from 2007-09, and upon relocating to California, the 2010-13 versions of the tournament were played at CordeValle, just south of San Jose.
Yet this is not the first time the big boys of the PGA Tour have walked the fairways of the North Course at Silverado (the Senior Tour’s Transamerica Championship was played at Silverado’s South Course from 1989-2002). During the height of golf’s golden era, the PGA Tour came to Silverado, initially in January, then in November, and during one very unique year, the tourney was played twice in the same season.
E. Harvie Ward was the public relations director for the Silverado Resort in the mid-1960s. Ward was a major player in the world of golf, having won the British Amateur in 1952, the U.S. Amateur in back-to-back years in 1955-56, and a much-talked-about local-area victory against Ken Venturi in the finals of the San Francisco City Amateur in 1955 at Harding Park. Venturi and Ward were partners in a high-profile match at Cypress Point versus Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson that was profiled in the book The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed by Mark Frost. Ward was a golf insider who wanted to promote Silverado by having the pros play there.
Ward convinced the PGA Tour to schedule a tournament at Silverado in late January, the week following the Bing Crosby Pro-Am at Pebble Beach. It made sense schedule-wise, the course was getting rave reviews for its redesign by Robert Trent Jones II, and Kaiser Steel and Aluminum was willing to financially sponsor the event with a total purse of $125,000 and a winner’s share of $25,000.
The inaugural Kaiser International was contested in January of 1968 and was won by Kermit Zarley. It was Zarley’s first PGA Tour victory. Things got a little twisted at the Kaiser in 1969 as the tournament experienced heavy rains throughout the week. The pros were only able to get in 36 holes and Miller Barber was declared the winner. The PGA Tour decided that January in Napa wasn’t as appealing as San Diego, Los Angeles, Palm Desert, Tucson and Phoenix for its season-opening West Coast swing and decided to have the tournament moved to early November. So that Silverado and area golf fans wouldn’t have to wait 22 months for the November 1970 edition of the Kaiser, the tour decided to allow Silverado to host the tournament once again in November of 1969. That meant the Kaiser was played two different times, 10 months apart, during the same season. The second Kaiser of 1969 was worth the repeat effort as Jack Nicklaus won a playoff against a trio of past major champions, including George Archer, Billy Casper and Don January.
For the next decade the Kaiser was contested in late September or early October at Silverado. Ken Still won the 1970 Kaiser International while Billy Casper made up for his 1969 playoff loss by winning the tournament in 1971. The following year it was smooth-swinging Canadian George Knudson winning at Silverado. Ed Sneed took home the trophy in 1973.
The 1974 version of the Kaiser was most memorable as San Francisco’s Johnny Miller won his eighth tourney of the year and did so in dynamic style, defeating Billy Casper and Lee Trevino by a jaw-dropping eight strokes. To prove it was no fluke, Miller repeated the feat the following year and won the ’75 Kaiser by three strokes over Redding’s Rod Curl.
J.C. Snead, the nephew of Sam Snead, won the 1976 Kaiser, beating runner-ups Gibby Gilbert and Johnny Miller by two strokes. At that point, Kaiser dropped its financial support and Anheuser-Busch took on the sponsorship at Silverado for the next four years. Miller Barber won his second title at Silverado in 1977, Tom Watson took home the hardware in 1978, John Fought was the victor in 1979, and putting wizard Ben Crenshaw was the champion in 1980. While Fought is not a household name compared to Watson and Crenshaw, his story is a most interesting one. His win at Silverado in 1979 piggybacked upon his victory at the Buick Open in Michigan the previous week. Those back-to-back tour triumphs were his only career wins on tour. He later became a highly regarded golf course architect with designs including Pumpkin Ridge and the Gallery Club as well as a great re-do of Pine Needles. The tournament relocated to Virginia in 1981 and remained there through its final playing in 2002.
It’s the weekend of the Safeway Open at Silverado. Hopefully the rains will stay away long enough for the pros to get in the full 72 holes. After all, we don’t want a repeat of 1969 when the Kaiser was just a 36-hole tourney during a rainy week and they decided to do it again.
