EAST NANTMEAL – It had been 25 years since anyone had
repeated as the winner of the BMW Philadelphia Amateur Championship.
There’s a reason for that. It’s hard to do. There are just
so many good amateur players in GAP’s territory, which these days runs from
Harrisburg to the Jersey Shore, that it is hard enough to navigate a match-play
bracket filled with talent young, old and in between, one time, let alone two
years in a row.
The last one to do it was Overbrook Golf Club’s Chris Lange.
He wasn’t a bomber. He was a match-play magician, a guy who could get it
up-and-down from anywhere, a guy who could summon a big shot when he absolutely
had to have it, a guy seemingly impervious to pressure.
Jeremy Wall, a 23-year-old resident of Brielle, N.J., is
very much in the mold of Chris Lange. And Saturday on a spectacular late spring
day at Stonewall’s Old Course, Wall succeeded Lange as the next player to go
back-to-back in one of the toughest tests in amateur golf – 36 holes of
qualifying on a Tuesday, two rounds of matches on a Wednesday, two more rounds
of matches on a Thursday with a little hair-raising end run around a traffic nightmare
and some rain thrown in there and a scheduled 36-hole final on a Saturday.
It only took 34 holes for Wall, playing out of
Manasquan River Golf Club, to finish off one of GAP’s most decorated
mid-amateurs, Pine Valley Golf Club’s Jeff Osberg, who was playing in the final
for the third time in six years.
Wall did what he does best, dropping an eight-footer for par
on the trickiest green at the Old Course, the 16th, to clinch a 3
and 2 victory over Osberg and once again put his name on the J. Wood Platt
Trophy.
“(The Amateur) is a total marathon and to get through it and
be the last guy standing, all those emotions of winning and repeating were a
little much to handle,” Wall, a year removed from concluding a solid college
career at Loyola of Maryland, told the GAP website. “And the way it ended,
making a putt, that’s what I’ve been doing the whole week. For whatever reason,
everything was going in.”
Although I was at Stonewall Saturday, I didn’t get to watch
much of the match. There were loops to be had and I got one, although I did
catch one of the crucial turning points in the match while waiting for my group
to tee off.
I saw Wall miss one of the very few putts of importance he
didn’t convert all week, a four-footer for par on the eighth green, the 26th
of the match, that allowed Osberg to creep within 3-up after trailing the whole
match. It was the second straight win for the veteran Osberg. Maybe he was launching
one last bid to get back in the match.
But the 2014 champion’s tee shot on the par-3 ninth hole,
which was playing all of the 236 yards it’s listed on the card, found the water
left of the green. Wall ditched the hybrid he was planning to use, dropped down
to an iron and smashed it as far right as he dared.
Wall found the fescue to the right of the hole, but he was
dry. Osberg’s third shot from the drop area found the green, but somehow didn’t
come down the shelf right of the pin. Wall’s pitch from the fescue rolled right
through the green and nearly into the water, but it stayed out. He was safely
able to get it down in two more shots for bogey to get his lead back to 4-up.
Osberg had one more two-hole burst left in him as the took
the 31st and 32nd holes with birdies to creep within
2-down.
But Osberg’s tee shot at the tough par-3 15th,
the 33rd of the match, settled in the rough left of the green. His
first chip was short and his second went skittering across the fastest green on
the course. A conceded par gave Wall a 3-up lead with three holes to play.
It was fitting that Wall would miss the 16th
green to the left, chip it up to eight feet and drop the par-saving putt that
clinched the match. The GAP recap of the match counted 14 times that Wall faced
a putt inside 10 feet and 11 times that he
made the putt.
I did get a look at the pin placements for the final during
my afternoon loop around the Old Course and, as you would expect, there were
some tough ones. They pulled out the final day of the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur
Championship placement on the Old Course’s No.-1 handicap hole, the devilish 397-yard,
par-4 fourth hole.
And that provided the backdrop for an early turning point in
the match. Wall had won the first hole with a par. Wall faced a downhill
15-footer for par to the back pin, one of the toughest reads on the Old Course.
And he got it to fall for a par that gave him a 2-up advantage. Osberg would
never get closer than a two-hole deficit the rest of the way.
And Wall kept the pressure on, finally increasing his lead
to 5-up at the break by getting it up and down from the ribbon of fairway that
wraps around the left side of the green at the picturesque 18th
hole.
It was an interesting week at Stonewall. I got a chance to
caddy in a Philly Am qualifying day for the first time since 1980 when I looped
for Merion Golf Club’s Bill Ginn in the rain at Whitemarsh Valley Country Club
and Sunnybrook Golf Club. That was a victory for Benjamin D. Goldman over Bob
Levy in an all-Philmont Country Club final at Sunnybrook.
It was one of those years when GAP’s best came out in force
in the qualifiers in hopes of earning one of the coveted tickets to Tom Doak’s
twin gems, the Old Course and the North Course at Stonewall. They are golf
courses good players want to test their games against.
And as it did in 2000 when Michael Hyland defeated Michael
McDermott in an epic 38-hole final and again a decade ago when Conrad Von
Borsig beat James Kania Jr., 6 and 4, Stonewall identified a deserving
champion.
In the end, it was Jeremy Wall, carrying his own clubs the
whole way, who conquered the many hurdles the Old Course throws your way better
than anybody else did.
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