EAST NANTMEAL – A couple of pretty interesting – and pretty
hot – days of practice rounds for the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship at
Stonewall’s Old Course and North Course have been completed.
The first round of qualifying for match play gets under way
first thing Saturday morning. But first there were two rounds of practice, a
chance to get acquainted with the golf courses and your caddy, if you have one.
It’s sort of like those necessary evils that are NFL preseason games. They
don’t count, but they are very valuable.
I met my guy, Michael Mitani of Irvine, Calif., for the
first time about an hour before our scheduled tee time a little before 1 p.m.
Thursday at the North Course, the “udder course,” as the Stonewall members like
to call it, playing off the club’s cow logo, a salute to the property’s
previous life as a dairy farm.
Mitani would tell me later he was a junior golf contemporary
of Tiger Woods in Southern California 25 or so years ago. “He beat our brains
in,” was the way he put it. He had survived a five-for-four playoff after
carding a 1-under 70 at his qualifying site, Hillcrest Country Club in Los
Angeles.
Mitani was still adjusting to the time change and there is
nothing in SoCal quite like the heat and humidity we were experiencing
Thursday. We were joined for both practice rounds by two other SoCal types,
Cameron Tennant, a former San Diego State player, and Satch Hermann, both of
whom came through the qualifier at North Ranch Country Club’s Valley/Oaks
Courses in Westlake Village, Calif.
The North Course is more of a “cart course” for the
membership, so I haven’t seen nearly as much of it as I have the Old Course.
And this was a whole different ballgame.
The par-5 eighth hole, for instance, is 524 yards from the
blue tees, but stretches out to a monstrous 602 yards from the black tees,
which are actually set up on the back of the teeing ground for No. 5.
And these guys can really hit it. Mitani, who often favors a
baby fade, is a relatively short hitter compared to the rest of the field.
Tennant, a drawer of the ball, just kills it, high and long. So, as much as
these guys were learning about the golf course, I was getting an education in
how the North would play at its absolute maximum length by guys to whom length
isn’t much of an issue.
And there is no right or wrong approach to a practice round. Hermann
had his caddy, but no golf bag as they had several wedges and Hermann’s putter.
He watched with great interest where the tee shots of Mitani and Tennant would
go and what club they would use on approach shots and off the tee at the
par-3s.
The fun would really start at the greens where everybody
would throw two or three or four golf balls around, checking slopes and looking
around for places where other cups had been cut and chipping and putting to any
and all of them, even sometimes to where the hole was cut.
Either I or Tennant’s caddy, Sean, who is based at
Philadelphia Cricket Club, but is often on call when there’s a big outing at
Stonewall, would be off on the side with the flagstick as golf balls rolled
around in every direction.
It’s difficult to figure out exactly what Mitani shot, but
he had a couple of birdies and a couple of bogeys and a whole bunch of pars. If
he was in the fairway – and he usually was – and got the yardage to the pin
right, he hit it exactly that far most of the two practice rounds. It is that
kind of distance control, not just pure distance, that really separates the
good golfer from the kind of high-level amateur that shows up at an event like
the U.S. Mid-Am.
We teed off a lot earlier Friday, just before 8:30 a.m. and,
for a little while, were blessed with some cloud cover that made things a
little less uncomfortable.
We had an added starter in Adam Condello, who made the field
as an alternate out of the qualifier at Irondequoit Country Club in Rochester,
N.Y. His ball flight was much like that of Tennant, right to left and high. And
he provided the highlight of the day when his approach at the par-4 13th
hole, kicked left, caught the slope and rolled into the hole for an eagle.
The Old Course was one of the first big splashes in the
career of architect Tom Doak. He returned a decade later, a much bigger name in
the golf course architecture hierarchy, to do the North. The green complexes at
the North are undulating in the extreme in places with multiple levels and
swales in the middle. The Old Course green complexes seem less complicated, but
are often trickier with subtle slopes and putts that seem to go the opposite of
the way they look.
Mitani probably scored a little higher at the Old Course
than he did at the North Course – a pattern that will likely be repeated by
much of the field in qualifying – but he did a good job of avoiding some of the
pitfalls that can lead to a big number on any number of the Old Course’s more
challenging holes, the kind of train wreck that can short-circuit a stroke-play
round.
When Major League Baseball announced it would use the
outcome of the All-Start Game to decide home-field advantage for the World
Series, they ran that hokey deal all summer, you know the “This Time It Counts,”
campaign. Well, the practice rounds are over at the U.S. Mid-Am at Stonewall.
Qualifying gets under way Saturday morning and yes, this time it counts.
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