We are just 12 days removed from the start of the start of the 102nd annual PGA Championship. One of golf’s four major championships, the PGA will be visiting San Francisco’s Harding Park Golf Course for the first time. It also will be the first West Coast PGA Championship since Vijay Singh took home the hardware in 1998 at Sahalee Country Club in the Seattle area.
In this year of the pandemic, the PGA Championship will be the one and only major title contested during the 2019-2020 wraparound season. The British Open has been canceled, the U.S. Open at Winged Foot has been moved to September, and the Masters will tee it up at Augusta National in November. Dare we say that whoever wins the PGA at Harding Park will have a big leg up on the rest of his fellow competitors for PGA Tour Golfer of the Year honors. Brooks Koepka is the two-time defending champ.
It’s been 95 years since Harding Park opened to great acclaim in July of 1925. The golf course sits alongside Lake Merced and is adjacent to San Francisco State University. The course was named after American president Warren G. Harding. Harding was a very avid golfer who greatly enjoyed the game. He was on a series of speaking engagements on the West Coast in 1923 and started feeling poorly when he was in San Francisco. Harding thought he was suffering from a gastrointestinal attack, but instead he was suffering from a heart attack. He died of cardiac arrest in his room at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel.
The City and County of San Francisco was in the midst of developing a piece of property on the southwest corner of the city just beyond the Sunset District for recreational purposes. The city paid $300 for a golf course routing plan put together by the architectural team of Willie Watson and Sam Whiting. atson and Whiting were in the process of building a new private golf course on the other side of Lake Merced, one that would end up being the 45-hole Olympic Club complex. Watson is known for building such gem courses as former U.S. Open site Interlachen as well as Bay Area courses Diablo, Orinda and Mira Vista. Whiting stayed local and is the architect of note for courses such as the Sonoma Golf Club and Ukiah Muni.
Harding Park opened in the summer of 1925 and was the working-class golfer’s alternative to private clubs in the area such as the San Francisco Golf Club and the Meadow Club in Marin. During the Depression, programs to put men back to work included a massive tree planting project at Harding Park. Over time the wind-swept dunes of Harding Park became a parkland-style golf course with the fairways lined by eucalyptus, Monterey pine, and cypress trees. The winds were no longer a big factor, but keeping the ball in the fairways suddenly became a much more important aspect for success.
Harding Park was highly regarded in golf circles from its opening through the 1960s. It hosted the United States Public Links Championship in 1937, won by Bruce McCormick, as well as the 1956 Publinks won by James Bixbaum. In 1960, golf course architect and former Alister Mackenzie protégé Jack Fleming (Santa Rosa CC, Turlock CC, Adams Springs) performed a full scale re-do of Harding Park, He took some of the leftover acreage to design a nine-hole course for beginning level golfers. Nowadays that nine-hole course is called the Fleming Nine.
The PGA Tour came to Harding Park throughout the decade of the 1960s. The course was well-liked by the pros and the Lucky Invitational was usually on the tour’s schedule during the week after the Bing Crosby Pro-Am in Monterey. Harding Park had a way of rewarding solid shot-making and the listing of past champions of the Lucky is a golfing who’s who that includes Gary Player, Billy Casper, Ken Venturi, George Archer, Chi Chi Rodriguez, Jackie Burke Jr. and Gene Littler. Of the aforementioned, only Chi Chi doesn’t own one of golf’s grand slam titles.
Starting in the 1970s, Harding Park began to fall into disarray. During the next 30 years, the powers that be put less and less money into the golf course operation. Maintenance staff was constantly in flux. The guy who was cutting the greens one week might end up being reassigned to the flower gardens at Golden Gate Park the next, and a completely new person on the city’s staff might end up at Harding the following week “learning” to cut the fairways and greens. It was during that period of time I played competitive golf at Harding Park. I played one, and only one, time in the San Francisco City Amateur. It was the El Nino year of 1983 and the City Am was contested at Harding Park. Because of the March rains, 14 out of the 18 greens were temporary. I spent my weekend constantly chipping to the cup, guessing whether my ball would hydroplane or come to an immediate stop.
After that, I resigned myself to the fact that February and March were not good months to tee it up at Harding. Yet I really liked the layout, so I used to enter USGA Publinks Qualifying at Harding during the third week in June. The weather was fine, but the course was often in less-than-ideal shape. I recall one time when I was paired with the Reverend Corbin Cherry, a scratch golfer who was the chaplain at Fort Miley. He was in the rough on the fifth hole when suddenly a gigantic tree branch from a dying eucalyptus crashed about 10 yards behind him. Thankfully he wasn’t injured but it was a close call. Just another day at the old Harding Park.
Of course, the rest of the Harding Park story is well known. San Francisco attorney and former USGA president Sandy Tatum led the charge to reclaim Harding’s past glory. The city poured millions of dollars into refurbishing the course. The PGA Tour was a partner in this endeavor and the result was not only a newly polished hidden gem, but the opportunity for professional golf to return to the shores of Lake Merced. Harding Park hosted the 2005 World Golf Championship that featured an overtime win for Tiger Woods over John Daly. In 2010, Team USA won the Presidents Cup at Harding. The senior tour’s finale, the Schwab Cup, was played three times at Harding Park where John Cook, Jay Don Blake and Freddie Couples held up the winner’s trophy. Rory McIlory won the World Match Play there in 2015.
Five years after the Match Play, Harding Park gets to host its first major championship. All the top players of the game will be there for what will be the first grand slam event contested since last July’s British Open. It will be the only major championship contested in the 2019-2020 wraparound season. Next week we’ll talk about the players and their chances of winning.
