As a golfer, Jay Sigel is a pretty good mentor

   When semi-retired Daily Times sports writer Harry Chaykun asked me if I wanted to attend the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame Delco Chapter’s fall student-athlete awards luncheon, he knew I would be intrigued by the scheduled speaker, one Jay Sigel, a fixture at Aronimink Golf Club for many years while becoming one of the great American amateur players of the last half of the 20^th century before embarking on a successful second career on the Champions Tour.

   It is also didn’t hurt that one of the honorees would be Springfield senior Brian Todaro, who showed a ton of grit in earning a share of third place with Central League rival Sam Soeth of Marple Newtown in a memorable edition of the District One Tournament last fall.

   We had to wait a week because the luncheon was postponed by the second of three winter storms that buffeted the county last week, but Sigel was worth the wait.

   He talked about mentoring and it struck home after each of the eight honorees had, without exception, given credit to their parents, to their coaches, to the administrators of their schools and school districts for any success they had achieved both on and off the field of play.

   Sigel has taken a leadership role in The First Tee of Greater Philadelphia, which at its very heart is a mentoring program. It is, as Sigel pointed out, not a program designed to develop golfers, but rather to develop responsible youngsters who happen to play golf.

   I thought back to a long-ago summer Monday when Sigel showed up at Merion Golf Club’s East Course for a practice round for the next day’s U.S. Amateur qualifier at Merion and Llanerch Country Club. It was probably 1972 or 1973 and Sigel was still a few years away from winning the British Amateur and then two U.S. Amateurs after that and putting together as good a Walker Cup record as any American player ever has.

   He was winning the Pennsylvania Amateur championship, which has traditionally been a stroke-play event, pretty regularly back in those days. I seem to recall hearing a few golf experts sniff that his game would never translate to match play. Boy, did that little theory get disproven.

   I got a chance to carry his bag that day and I didn’t pass up the opportunity to get a close-up look at a player who had a reputation for precision on the golf course.

   We were joined that day be a college player  – perhaps recently graduated, but in my memory he still had a year left – toting his University of Maryland bag. It’s always been quite a personal golf highlight for me to recall that day, Jay Sigel, Buddy Marucci and me walking the East Course at Merion, great golf talk and great golf flowing easily.

   Sigel mentioned at the Hall of Fame luncheon that, as an adult, you can mentor without even knowing you’re doing it, by the way you carry yourself, the way you act. I suspect Marucci, who capped his own stellar amateur career by captaining the U.S. side to a Walker Cup win at Merion in 2009, was seeking some mentoring that day and he most surely found it.

   As a journalist, my path crossed Sigel’s in 1998 at Hartefeld National, where the local PGA Senior Tour (as the Champions Tour was known back then) had moved after starting out at Chester Valley Golf Club. Sigel started Saturday’s second round quietly enough with a par. He eagled the par-5 second and then ripped off seven straight birdies for a front-nine 27, a record for nine holes on the Champions Tour that still stands.

   Even at 9-under through nine holes, he was the same Jay Sigel, calm and focused. He flirted with golf’s magic number, 59, that day before settling for a 62. It was a bit of an adventure, but he won the Bell Atlantic Classic the next day in a playoff.

   I was a high school kid the day I caddied for Sigel in that practice round at Merion. At some point in the round, he asked if I wanted to get carry his bag in the qualifying round the next day.

   “You can do better,” I replied, knowing that there were plenty of Merion loopers who knew the course as well, and in many cases, better than I did.

   “No, you’ll be fine,” he said.

   So I did caddy for him in the qualifying round and it was a great experience. It occurred to me as Sigel spoke to the eight student-athletes who were honored at Tuesday’s luncheon at Barnaby’s on MacDade Boulevard, that I had received a little mentoring from one of the game’s truly great players as a youngster myself.