The Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit kicks off its 29th season of activity Saturday, Feb. 19 at Buckingham Golf and Country Club with the playing of the Lake County One Person Scramble. The One Person format is exactly what it sounds like. An ultimate mulligan-fest, you get to follow up each and every shot with a second one and then choose the better of the two.
Golfers who are really up on their One Person strategies often go from playing safe to playing super aggressive. For instance, on a tight par-4 such as Buckingham’s 12th hole, it might make sense to hit an iron or a hybrid off the tee, and once your shot is safely in the fairway, then pull out the driver and swing away at the green. Of course, the nerves get a little bit jangled when that iron off the tee is sliced out of bounds and now you have to come through with a second shot of note. It can make for an interesting day on the links.
I had a slight hand in the formation of the Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit just about 30 years ago. I penned a column on these very same pages in which I contended that the best amateur golfers in Lake County played their golf on the two nine-hole courses on Cobb Mountain, namely Adams Springs and Hobergs. I felt I had good journalistic evidence for my opinion. Cobb Mountain golfers at that time included George Hoberg Jr., Gary Bagnani, Charles Creecy, Bill Cox, Dan Dimmit, John McMillan, Ron Kenneally and a handful of other talented amateur linksters. Even a beginning golfer with an 18-handicap by the name of Juan Lopez started out by golfing at Hobergs.
As one can imagine, my column was not a big hit with the golfers who regularly teed it up at Buckingham, Clear Lake Riviera and Hidden Valley Lake. Although the Buckingham golfers of 1993 were a collection of bogey golfers who had a decidedly hard time playing by the rules, they seemed to be the loudest of complainers. With that background, Buckingham’s relatively new PGA professional Mark Wotherspoon met with me to talk about the Lake County golf scene. Wotherspoon had introduced the Lake County Open in November of 1992 while I had resurrected the Lake County Amateur that same autumn.
The rest of the time, Lake County amateur golfers of note ventured beyond county lines to compete in nearby tourneys such as the Mendocino Amateur, the Santa Rosa City, and the Colusa County Amateur. The more competitive of the lot used to wander far and wide to tee it up at everything from the Susanville Amateur and the Siskiyou County Open to the State Fair Amateur, the Alameda Commuters, the San Francisco City Amateur, and USGA qualifiers for the U.S. Amateur and the U.S. Mid Amateur. Kenneally, McMillan and I even entered events on the Golden State Tour to attempt to match young mini-tour pros such as Scott McCarron, Kevin Sutherland, Esteban Toledo and 40-somethings such as Bob Wynn, all of whom were getting ready for the PGA Senior Tour.
Wotherspoon and I decided to put together a four-tournament circuit and see what it would bring. We combined the Lake County Open and the Lake County Amateur with a County Two Person along with a Tournament of Champions for those golfers who won local club events. The inaugural year of the newly named Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit was a big hit way back in 1994. The Open, the Two Person and the TOC had full fields of 64 contestants while the Amateur had 120 golfers at two sites on Cobb. The other added wrinkle was a points system to determine a golfer of the year.
With just four tournaments, it wasn’t surprising that the final standings would end up in a tie with McMillan and Bagnani sharing golfer of the year honors. Within a year McMillan would turn professional while some eight years later Bagnani would capture the Northern California Senior Amateur. Bagnani always contended that his experiences on the local circuit attributed to his success at the NorCal Senior Am. There also was a year-long race for net golfer of the year.
In 1996 the Partners Scramble and the County Match Play were added to make it six tourneys on the LCAGC calendar. The following year the Lake County Three Person was added. I recall being adamantly opposed to the Three Person because I thought it might be more about a circus atmosphere and less about golf. I was wrong. It remains one of the more popular formats on the circuit with birdies, eagles and under-par scores being the norm.
In 1998 the Senior Amateur for golfers ages 50 and older was added along with a season-long race for the senior and senior net golfers of the year. The circuit remained virtually unchanged for the next decade or so until 2010 when the Alternate Shot Two Person was added, and again in 2012 when the season-opening One Person found a place on the calendar.
The LCAGC starts kindly with the One Person and the Partners Scramble to kick off the season in February and March. The season ramps up in April with the Match Play and the Lake County Open. The Three Person is held in May. The Senior Amateur is contested in early June while the Partners Better Ball is held later in the month.
For approximately 20 years, most circuit events were two-day, 36-hole affairs. Several years ago the vast majority of tourneys were changed to one-day, 18-hole events. The lone holdout is the long-running (since 1975) Lake County Amateur. It is a 36-hole tournament held over two days during the last week of August. The Alternate Shot and the TOC are held in October and conclude the season with nine amateur tourneys and 10 senior tourneys. It all begins again for the 29th season a week from Saturday.
AB 672
Last month I wrote a column about AB 672, which would have allowed for publicly owned golf courses to be changed into low-income housing sites. That bill failed to get out of the Appropriations Committee and at this time is dead. However, anticipate that it will once again rear its ugly head during another session of the California State Legislature in the future.
According to the National Golf Foundation, publicly owned golf courses are up over 4 percent nationally in the last decade. Very few new municipal golf courses have been built. Most of the “new” public courses are the result of privately owned courses being purchased by cities.
Greedy golfers
Finally, Phil Mickelson made headlines last week about the “obnoxious greed” of the PGA Tour. Phil has made $95 million on tour and estimates are that he annually earns $40-$60 million in endorsements while having totaled somewhere around $750 million during the course of his 30-year-plus golf career. Phil didn’t play at Pebble Beach last week. Instead he went to Saudi Arabia for a seven-figure appearance fee. So much for “obnoxious greed.”
