It was just a couple of weeks ago that the weather in Lake County was ultra-hot with daily temperatures crossing the three-digit mark. I figured it would be another steamy day in our neck of the woods, so I decided to take a field trip to the much cooler climate of San Francisco. I would make it a golf field trip and enjoy a day with the weather climbing to a high of 72 degrees. San Francisco has a great golf history and I was ready to relive some of it.
I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge that morning around 10 a.m. and headed toward the Richmond District. I drove through the back nine at Lincoln Park Golf Course, turned at the Legion of Honor, and pulled into the parking lot at Lincoln. I was one of just four cars in the parking lot. During my drive through the golf course, I could only observe a couple of twosomes out on the course. It was a decidedly quiet morning on the links at Lincoln Park. I walked into the pro shop followed by a couple of golfers. They asked the pro shop counter man if it was possible to get out that morning or should they have made a reservation? He scoffed at their question and said the first tee was wide open for play. As usual …
I was surprised by their exchange. While you could never confuse the Lincoln Park Golf Course with the Olympic Club, it is a beautifully situated municipal golf course located west of the Golden Gate and featuring some of the greatest vistas of San Francisco and the Marin headlands. Its final three holes are great tests of golf and it is a most memorable walk. Yet no one was playing there on a beautiful Monday morning. It was a head-scratching moment.
I headed to the southwest corner of San Francisco and turned into the parking lot at Harding Park Golf Course. Like Lincoln, Harding is a city-owned golf course that is closing in on its 100-year anniversary. It used to host the Lucky International on the PGA Tour in the 1960s and during the past decade or so it has been the site of a Tiger Woods playoff victory over John Daly in the World Golf Championship in 2005, a Team USA win in the Presidents Cup in 2009, and a dynamic World Match Play finals victory by Rory McIlory two years ago. It will serve as the site for the upcoming PGA Championship in 2020. It also held a trio of the Senior Tour’s Schwab Cup championships. Harding Park is also part of the PGA Tour’s TPC network of courses.
Harding Park was a beehive of activity that morning. Foursomes were going off the first tee every 10 minutes. The course was packed. The driving range was packed. The pro shop was ultra-busy with check-ins as well as customers purchasing hats and shirts with the course logo. The grill overlooking the 18th hole and Lake Merced was full. It was good to see all the activity there. Harding Park was as busy as Lincoln Park was dead.
The resurgence of Harding Park was the work of Sandy Tatum, the grand old man of San Francisco golf who passed away last week. In fact, the clubhouse at Harding Park is named after Tatum. During the 1980s and 1990s, the venerable old course had fallen into disarray under the backward policies of the City of San Francisco and had been relegated to serving as a parking lot for the 1998 U.S. Open at the nearby Olympic Club. Tatum had raised the money and led the charge for a complete re-do of Harding. The course revisions were a complete success as evidenced by the fact that a municipal course was hosting some of the biggest tourneys around with a champions’ list including Tiger and Rory.
Tatum was born in 1920 in Los Angeles. His father was a successful real estate agent who introduced Sandy to the game of golf. He played his earliest golf at L.A. Country Club and Wilshire Country Club where he played through fellow members such as Howard Hughes and Katharine Hepburn. Tatum played collegiate golf at Stanford University, was a member of two winning NCAA team champions in 1941 and 1942, and was the individual titlist in 1942. A true intellectual, Sandy was a Rhodes Scholar and received his J.D. from Stanford Law School. He spent the majority of his professional career as a lawyer at the high-powered Palo Alto law firm of Cooley, Gadward, Kronish.
Sandy Tatum was active in the United States Golf Association and served as a board member during the 1970s. He was on the competition committee from 1972-1980 and was the USGA president, serving two terms from 1978 through 1980. He was best known to the public for his ultra-difficult setup of U.S. Open courses with an emphasis upon narrow fairways, super fast greens and thick rough. His set-up for the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot was extremely unpopular with the professionals of the day. Hale Irwin won that Open with an eye-blinking total of 7-over-par. When Tatum was accused of trying to embarrass the top pros of the era, he adroitly responded by stating that he was merely trying to identify the best golfer.
Tatum was also very active in golf course design. He co-designed the Links at Spanish Bay at Pebble Beach alongside Robert Trent Jones II and five-time British Open champion Tom Watson. He also had a hand in the design of Mount Shasta Resort and Lockeford Springs with Jim Summers. Speaking of Watson, he mentored Tom during his earliest days on the PGA Tour and had a great influence upon Watson’s love of links golf in the British Isles. Tatum remained an active golfer into his 90s and was known to always walk the course and carry his own bag. When he was 84 years old, he shot a 72 at the venerable San Francisco Golf Club. From my personal perspective, I always considered Sandy Tatum to be the classiest man in a game of class. Golf became a much better sport because of the efforts put forth by Tatum.
My day in San Francisco concluded with my first round of golf at the aforementioned San Francisco Golf Club, a very private club adjoining Harding Park and the Olympic Club on the southernmost end of Lake Merced. A top-50 ranked course designed by A.W. Tillinghast (Winged Foot, Baltusrol, Bethpage Black), the San Francisco Golf Club was the only great course in Northern California that I had yet to play until that day. I played that afternoon with a pair of caddies who are occasionally my guests at Adams Springs, and this time around they returned the favor. We walked the course and carried our bags just like Sandy Tatum used to, and we got around the course in two hours and 55 minutes. Sometime down the line I’ll write about my experiences playing one of the finest golf courses in the world. When all was said and done, it was a most interesting field trip day of golf in San Francisco.
