Over the course of the last two weeks, the world of golf has experienced two of the game’s more important championships. Two weeks ago the PGA Championship was contested at San Francisco’s Harding Park Golf Course. The PGA is one of golf’s four major championships and this year’s version was a tightly contested and highly dramatic affair with Cal-Berkeley grad Collin Morikawa prevailing in the end. Last week the oldest American golf tournament, the United States Amateur, was held on the Oregon coast at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort. The U.S. Amateur has often been a proving ground for the greats of the game and its past titlists, including such high-profile names as Jones, Palmer, Nicklaus, Mickelson and Woods.
For this columnist, it was a televised two weeks of visual home games. For a period of time I lived in San Francisco’s Sunset District, mere miles away from Harding Park. During the course of some 40 years, I have probably teed it up at Harding Park some 100 times and perhaps 60 of those rounds were played in competitive events such as the San Francisco City Amateur and U.S. Public Links Qualifying. The Publinks was an especially appealing tournament for me because it was held during the third week of June.
I have seen all three versions of Harding Park. In the 1980s it was a well-designed municipal golf course that was a little more than a decade removed from its heyday as the site of the PGA Tour’s Lucky Invitational. During the 1990s, Harding Park was the victim of the City of San Francisco and its draconian funding policies. The golf course was bringing in revenue but less than half of it went back to the facility. City Hall kept the rest and Harding went into a period of serious disrepair. After the course’s revision in 2002, Harding Park returned to its era of glory, hosting a World Golf Championship won by Tiger Woods, a Presidents Cup with Team USA as victors, a trio of Schwab Cup Finals for the senior set on the Champions Tour, and a World Golf Match Play with Irishman Rory McIlory as the victor over a stellar field.
During the course of the four rounds of the PGA Championship, I found myself in the midst of a quiet commentary with the help of Shot Tracer. For instance, a golfer would tee off on the 12th hole and Shot Tracer would show it drifting to the right. Because the hole is alongside the campus of San Francisco State University, I knew the optimal play was a draw to the left. I would immediately think that the shot was going to be in the trees some 20 yards off the fairway. Moments later the television cameras would show one of the marshals in the deep rough alongside the misguided tee shot. I’d been there. I knew the course.
My final comment about the PGA Championship revolves around Harding Park’s 16th hole and the shot of the tournament, if not the shot of the year that was executed by Collin Morikawa on Sunday evening. Morikawa’s brilliant drive on 16 came to a halt on the green, and he ended up making an eagle-two on the par-4, which propelled him to the winner’s circle. If indeed I am accurate about playing Harding some 60 times in competition, I need to publicly acknowledge that during those 60 rounds of golf I always took out a 4-iron, aimed down the left side of the fairway, and then wedged into the green from there. I never contemplated going for the green with the enormous trees just to the right of the putting surface. Make par. Avoid double.
As for Bandon Dunes, I first made a trek to the Oregon coastline during its second season of operation in November of 2000. At that time the facility had two 18-hole courses, the original Bandon Dunes where the U.S. Amateur was contested, and the Pacific Dunes course. I was part of an eight-person contingent from Buckingham playing in a pro-am. I played a practice round there on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon with Juan Lopez and Brels Solomon. The sun was out, the temperatures were in the high 60s, and I was really looking forward to the upcoming two days of pro-am competition. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been. The next two days featured lots of rain, heavy winds and decidedly miserable conditions. I played decently, but I suffered.
Some 11 years later, just after Christmas, I went to Bandon on a two-day excursion with my son, Nick. School was on break, Nick too was on break from UC Davis, and while the weather was in the high 40s, we had a great time playing links golf. That trip morphed into a handful of five-day excursions with members of Adams Springs. We’d play all four courses, go to the punch bowl putting green, and play the 13-hole par-3 course. We stayed on the premises. Some years the weather was a sweltering 70 degrees in January, other years the rain was going sideways. In June, the Bandon folks opened their fifth course, a Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore design called the Sheep Ranch.
During the six days of U.S. Amateur competition, television viewers got to see all sorts of conditions at Bandon. Some days were cool, cloudy and brisk. On Friday, the wind howled. On Saturday, the course was benign. It was match play at its finest coupled with links golf at its finest. Bandon Dunes is a natural for match play because each hole is won, lost or tied. Competitors don’t have to suffer through a few bad shots in the gorse leading to an 11 on the hole. You simply pick up and move on to the next hole.
Tyler Strafaci ended up surviving the gauntlet that is the U.S. Amateur. He was one of the low 64 qualifiers (No. 41) after two days of stroke play and then survived six rounds of match play with the finals match contested over 36 holes. Strafaci is a fifth-year senior returning to Georgia Tech. He won the North and South Amateur at Pinehurst earlier this summer. He is from a golfing family. His grandfather, Frank Strafaci, won a pair of North and Souths as well as the 1935 U.S. Public Links. His dad, Frank Jr., was his caddie throughout the week. Tyler survived two matches that ended on the 18th holes under very unique circumstances. He won his round of 16 match when his opponent’s caddie got his golfer penalized for a sand trap infraction. He won his semifinal match when his opponent left two shots in a fairway bunker on 18. He came into the 36th hole all tied in the finals and made a dramatic birdie to win the Amateur title.
The last two weeks of televised golf have been intense, colorful, dramatic and well worth the entertainment dollar. Both of the West Coast venues are accessible to the public and many viewers have a history with Harding and Bandon. It was a most memorable two weeks of televised tournament golf. It was high-level competitive golf at its best on courses we can play.
