Nowadays there are a lot of talented junior golfers from the East Bay area. A number of these talented linksters come from similar backgrounds. They took up the game early at some of the top-notch junior programs at private clubs such as Castlewood Country Club, Round Hill Country Club or Orinda Country Club. They started golf around age 6, started competing locally when they were 10-year-olds, began to focus on the game when they reached adolescence, and currently play in tournaments on the various junior tours of Northern California.
Grant Fairbairn is a classic example of an up-and-coming Bay Area junior golfer. He is currently a student at College Prep High School in Oakland. He is the No. 1 player on his high school team and is a multi-year, all-conference golfer. He is a member at Contra Costa Country Club and carries a plus-0.7 handicap. He has been competing nationally for the last few years, playing in tournaments such as the New England Junior and the American Junior Golf Association New Era Junior in Orchard Park, New York. He won a Junior Golf Association of Northern California tourney last summer, shooting a 3-under-par 69 at Diablo Creek to take home the Concord City Junior title. On the Future Collegians World Tour, he’s recorded a 10th-place finish at Sandpiper in Santa Barbara, come in fifth at PGA West in LaQuinta, had a third-place finish at Coyote Creek in San Jose, and had a breakthrough moment earlier this spring when he came in first at Half Moon Bay, shooting 75-72 to win by one stroke.
This past Monday Grant teed it up alongside 135 other competitors playing in the North Coast Section’s Division II Championship at Rooster Run Golf Course in Petaluma. The NCS was a 13-team high school golf tournament as well as week one of a four-week process to determine the individual champion of high school golf in California. To qualify for this coming Monday’s second stage Tournament of Champions at Chardonnay Golf Club in Napa, Grant would have to record one of the low 12 scores at Rooster Run. It appeared as if he would be one of the favorites at Rooster Run, but it also was an incredibly strong field of top-notch junior golfers from Fremont all the way north to Crescent City.
Grant started out his round in a routine way, making four pars. Then he hit a pretty big bump in the road. He hit the fairway with his tee shot on the fifth hole, hit his next shot on the green, walked to the green and marked his ball. It was at that moment that Grant realized that he had made a big mistake. The Titleist 1 that he had hit onto the green was the ball of one of his playing partners. The other boy realized he had made the very same infraction, having hit Grant’s Titleist 1 onto the green. Because both golfers were not only well versed in the rules of the game as well as the integrity that the game expected of them, they reported their infraction to the walking marshal that supervised their pairing.
It was at that moment that my cell phone went off as I was driving about the course. I was the tournament director for the North Coast Section and was roving throughout the back nine making sure that the pace of play was keeping up with expectations. The marshal told me what happened and I advised him to have both players return to the site of their original tee shots, replace the ball, and hit their real balls from there. By the rules of golf, they would have to add a two-stroke penalty to their scores.
For a lot of golfers, especially teenagers in the midst of their most important round of golf of the year, this could be the beginning of the end of their quest to win a state title. There is little margin for error when you’re trying to finish in the low 12 in a tournament that features 136 top-notch junior golfers. For Grant Fairbairn, it was time to not only to show how profoundly good his golf game could be, but also to show how mentally tough he was. For the next 13 holes, Grant ran off an amazing nine birdies, posted a round of 7-under-par 65, and breezed into next week’s second-tier playoff round at Chardonnay. His 65 was the low round of the day.
I don’t know Grant Fairbairn other than to say that he was gracious when he got his medal for finishing first at the NCS Tournament at Rooster Run. He also seemed to be a very good teammate with his College Prep friends who finished in third place overall in the team competition. On his team, Fairbairn is a veritable rock star. His teammate Alex Lin also qualified for Chardonnay with a 74, but the other kids on the College Prep team carded scores of 83, 100 and 133. Yet there seemed to be no animosity to those less talented teammates. All five of them seemed very excited to get third-place medals and a third-place banner. Such is life on a small school golf team where the talent level is unbalanced with a lack of depth.
Finally, I’m sure most people will be very impressed by the fact that Grant and his playing partner went public with their rules infraction when it initially occurred. However, I think I speak for Grant and for most top-notch golfers that reporting a rules issue is what is expected of all tournament golfers. Good for Grant for making others aware of his rules faux pas. Yet, it is also something that is expected among those who regularly compete in golf. I will add that I historically don’t root for golfers unless they happen to play for me on the Kelseyville High School golf team. However, this time around I will be following the exploits of Grant Fairbairn over the next few weeks, hoping that he continues to advance to the state finals at the Poppy Hills Golf Course in Pebble Beach on May 31.
On a local note, the high school golf season ended for Kelseyville’s Matt Wotherspoon on Monday at Rooster Run. Matt shot an excellent 2-over-0ar 74 to finish in a four-way tie for 10th place. However, only three of those golfers shooting 74 could advance and Matt was eliminated in a sudden-death playoff. For those of you who may think that it was a long and depressing ride home that afternoon from Petaluma, I can report that Matt handled his close call with class. There were no complaints and zero excuses. Just like talented golfers who call penalties upon themselves, Matt Wotherspoon showed a different version of what is expected of excellent tournament golfers. He lost and that’s the way it sometimes goes in golf. Say what you wish about today’s youth, but simply observe how Grant and Matt handled golf and its varied ups and downs. Both young men handled adversity on the course with total class.
