During the course of the next decade, Northern California will host a number of high-profile major championships and team events. The United States Open returns to Pebble Beach in June of 2019, marking the sixth time in the iconic course’s history it has hosted the National Open. Pebble Beach is also hosting the 2027 version of the U.S. Open.
The PGA Championship will be contested at San Francisco’s Harding Park in 2020. The following year, the Olympic Club, located adjacent to Harding Park on the western shore of Lake Merced, is the site of the 2021 Women’s U.S. Open. Two years later, the Women’s Open moves to Pebble Beach in July of 2023. In 2028, the Olympic Club is hosting the PGA Championship, and four years later it will be the site for golf’s greatest three days of team golf, the biennial Ryder Cup Matches.
Yet the major golfing event I am most looking forward to takes place this summer — Aug. 13-19 to be exact — as the Pebble Beach Golf Links and Spyglass Hill Golf Club serve as the site for the 118th running of the United States Amateur. I’ve already got those dates circled on my calendar and I am looking forward to taking a field trip to Monterey to observe the greats of amateur golf up close and personal. When I say up close and personal, I truly mean up close and personal.
I attended the U.S. Amateur in 1999 at Pebble Beach and Spyglass. I recall walking the fairways at Pebble Beach in the morning and then going to Spyglass in the afternoon. As soon as I pulled into the parking lot at Spyglass, I saw Matt Kuchar, the 1997 Amateur champ, hitting balls on the range. I walked over to the driving range and watched him hit balls for 10 minutes or so. When he was done, I asked him a question or two about his Amateur triumph two years prior at Chicago’s Cog Hill and we chatted amicably for the next 15 minutes. It was the sort of thing you could never do at a PGA Tour event. Later that day I sat alongside the dunes to the right of the fourth green at Spyglass. It was such a loose environment that Monday afternoon that I even recall chatting with reigning U.S. Senior Amateur champ Bill Shean and his caddie, Casey Boyns, a California State Amateur champ.
In 2007 the U.S. Amateur was contested at the Olympic Club’s Lake and Ocean courses. By then my son Nick was a 16-year-old. Nick was a pretty good local golfer and also was a camera enthusiast. I took him along and got him a photographer’s pass. We were at the Olympic Club for first-round play. Yet it was one of those early morning summer days in San Francisco with coastal fog rolling in. Visibility was a little more than 100 yards and tee times for that day were delayed until the fog lifted. All the contestants could do was practice.
Nick and I stood at the driving range as close to 100 golfers were pounding golf balls. Except for the occasion Randy Haag or George Zahringer sighting, the remainder of the contestants on the range were college kids as evidenced by their golf bags that said Florida, Oklahoma or UCLA. Suddenly we were joined by Steve Molinelli, an outstanding Bay Area golfer who owns four Olympic Club championships and is one of the driving forces behind San Francisco’s First Tee program for junior golfers. Molinelli was serving as a caddie that week for Colt Knost, who would go on to win the Amateur the following Sunday. We commented about how purely the ball sounded coming off the clubface among those golfers pounding balls that morning. Nick made the comment that he guessed that a good number of those golfers we were watching would someday make it in the world of professional golf. Steve and I told Nick that it was still a crapshoot. Regardless of how well that little guy in front of us hit the ball or how powerfully the really big kid next to him was pounding his tee shots, it was still a big jump from the U.S. Amateur and college golf to the heights of the PGA Tour. In the end Nick knew a whole lot more than we did. The little guy was Rickie Fowler and the big kid was Dustin Johnson.
The best thing about the U.S. Amateur is that the galleries can walk the fairways with the players. Up until the beginning of match play on Wednesday when the field of 312 golfers is cut to 64, there are no gallery ropes as the contestants and the spectators are spread out over 36 holes. We could stand within 30 feet of the golfers as they hit shots. We could stand on the fringe and watch them putt. As an aside, as Nick and I walked the Ocean Course and the Lake Course that day, I challenged Nick to check out the turf and see if he could find any weeds in the fairways. By the end of the day, the answer was that we observed exactly zero weeds. The two courses were in pristine condition.
Looking back over my program and tee sheet from that U.S. Amateur at the Olympic Club, I truly realized the accuracy of Nick’s statement regarding the future potential of the contestants in the field. No, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas were not in the field that day. They were just 13 years old at the time, probably looking forward to the start of their eighth-grade year in school. However, a number of amateur golfers who were at the Olympic Club that week have shown an aptitude to play professional golf at the highest levels.
Alongside Dustin Johnson, the current No. 1 golfer in the world and a past U.S. Open champ, and Rickie Fowler, a past winner of the Players Championship and a top-five golfer in the world rankings, were a number of linksters who are now household names to fans of the PGA Tour. They include Patrick Reed, Bud Cauley, Derek Ernst, Danny Green, Brian Harman, Billy Horschel, Scott Kelly, Jason Krokak, Kelly Kraft, Jamie Lovemark, Troy Merritt, Andrew Putnam, Sam Saunders, Webb Simpson, Kyle Stanley, Nick Taylor, Cameron Tringale, Michael Thompson, and Jhonny Vegas. The aforementioned golfers include a U.S. Open champ in Webb Simpson, a Fed Ex Cup champ in Billy Horschel, and tour winners such as Green, Harman, Kraft, Lee, Merritt, Stanley, Taylor, Tringale, Thompson, Vegas and Merritt.
I know its eight months away, but I find myself looking forward to this summer’s U.S. Amateur. I’ll get to walk the links alongside Carmel Bay and through the Del Monte Forest, watch some really outstanding golf and see up close and personal the future stars of the game. These are heady times for great championship golf in Northern California and the U.S. Amateur this August kicks off a decade plus of multiple U.S. Opens, PGA Championships, Women’s U.S. Opens, and the Ryder Cup coming to Pebble Beach, Spyglass, Olympic and Harding.
