The postponements and cancellations have been coming fast
and furious in the three weeks – is that really all it’s been, it seems like
three years – since the world changed with the realization that social
distancing was going to be big part of our lives for a while.
It looks like the fall is going to be one big golf event
after another. There’s talk of a November Masters. And the U.S. Women’s Open
will be contested a couple of weeks before Christmas at Houston’s Champions
Golf Club.
Maybe the Curtis Cup Match, the biennial battle between top
female amateur players from the United States and Great Britain & Ireland,
isn’t high on your list of big golf events, but it is on mine. If you’re a
regular reader of this blog, you’re aware that it tilts pretty heavily toward
amateur golf and as I mentioned in one of my recent posts, I’ve gotten hooked
on the college scene.
But I’ve been particularly drawn to the two Cups contested
between teams chosen by the USGA’s International Team Selection Committee and
the Royal & Ancient, the Walker Cup for men and the Curtis Cup for women.
As a golf fan, I was always at least casually interested in
the Walker Cup, in particular. Maybe it was all those years the pride of Lower
Merion High School, Wake Forest and Aronimink Golf Club, Jay Sigel, was a
player and a captain and quite memorably the playing captain in a 13-11 U.S.
victory in 1985 at the best golf course in the world, Pine Valley Golf Club in
the South Jersey pine barrens, over a GB&I team that featured a young Colin
Montgomerie.
My fascination with the Walker Cup was really solidified in
2009 when it was staged at my favorite golf course in the world, the historic
East Course at Merion Golf Club in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township.
As the golf writer for the Delaware County Daily Times,
I was able to cover Rickie Fowler and the boys putting a pretty forceful
beatdown on a GB&I team that included Tommy Fleetwood, 16.5-9.5.
Fowler didn’t really have to be there. His could just as
easily have launched his pro career earlier that summer after helping Oklahoma
State earn its second straight runnerup finish in the NCAA Championship.
I was always under the impression that Fowler delayed the
start of his pro career because the U.S. Walker Cup captain, the pride of
Haverford High, the University of Maryland and yes, Merion Golf Club, George
“Buddy” Marucci asked him to.
Fowler was on the team two years earlier, the first of the
two consecutive teams captained by Marucci. The 2007 U.S. team pulled out a
dramatic 12.5-11.5 victory at Royal County Down.
Fowler made the commitment to his captain, whom he knew was returning
to captain the U.S. team on his home course, that Fowler would be there.
Probably didn’t hurt that even a casual glance at the history of golf in this
country reveals how many great moments have happened on the Hugh Wilson
classic. Jones, Hogan, Nicklaus, Trevino. It goes on and on.
Maybe it was the captain, maybe it was the golf course,
maybe it was the fact that two of his Oklahoma State teammates, Peter Uihlein
and Morgan Hoffman, were also on the team. But Fowler was there.
I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping tabs once a year on some
of those 2009 Walker Cuppers in this blog. It was a good group. The sum of its
parts might have been better than all the individual pieces. It was a team and
it was really a fun couple of days following them around on a golf course I had
grown up looping on.
When it was decided that my journalism career should come to
an end in 2016, I took the blog I had started as a supplement to my coverage in
the Daily Times and quite literally ran with it.
As I quickly latched on to the college scene, I slowly came
to the realization that some of the biggest names in women’s college golf would
not be on a really young U.S. team, but on a very talented GB&I team for
the 2016 Curtis Cup Match, which was being staged at Dun Laoghaire Golf Club in
suburban Dublin.
The GB&I team included England’s Bronte Law, fresh off
an Annika Award-winning season at UCLA, and Charlotte Thomas, who had just led
the Washington Huskies to a surprising victory in the NCAA Championship, and
Leona Maguire, an Irish home girl who was in the middle of one of the greatest
careers in college history at Duke.
The U.S. kids did a pretty good job of keeping the final
score to just 11.8-9-8.5 in favor of GB&I in front of, by all reports, a
raucous gathering of golf-mad Irish fans.
One of those U.S. kids was Mariel Galdiano, who had just
graduated high school in Pearl City, Hawaii and was headed to UCLA to begin her
college career.
A couple of months later I set out to follow Jackie
Rogowicz, the pride of Pennsbury High and Penn State, in the second round of
qualifying for the U.S. Women’s Amateur at Rolling Green Golf Club, the William
Flynn gem in Springfield, Delaware County, all of about six miles from Merion.
Galdiano was Rogowicz’s playing partner that day and fired a
brilliant 6-under-par 65 to overtake precocious 13-year-old Lucy Li for
medalist honors in qualifying.
I got a chance to briefly chat with Galdiano after that
round about her Curtis Cup experience. It was obvious that she had been forced
to grow up a lot as a golfer, physically, mentally and emotionally, that weekend at Dun
Laoghaire.
When a list of 12 players who would join captain Sarah
Ingram, a three-time U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship winner (1991, ’93
and ’94) and a three-time U.S. Curtis Cup team member (1992, ’94 and ’96), for
a practice session at Loblolly in Hobe Sound, Fla. in December for the 2020
Curtis Cup Match, I mentioned that it was a tough commitment to make for the
four college seniors on the list, Galdiano among them.
Galdiano had been chosen to represent her country in the
2018 Curtis Cup Match at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y. The tables
were turned this time as a supremely talented U.S. team whipped a young
GB&I squad, 17-3.
Playing in a Curtis Cup Match as a senior means delaying the
start of your pro career. But even after two Curtis Cup appearances, Galdiano
wanted another shot at GB&I on its home turf at the Conwy Golf Club in
Caernarvonshire, Wales. Clearly, the Curtis Cup experience means a lot of
Galdiano.
Galdiano was not a lock to make the eight-woman team,
although you’d think her experience would have made her a valuable addition to
Ingram’s side.
Of course, would haves and could haves are prevalent in a
lot of sports discussions these days.
The 2020 Curtis Cup Match has been postponed until 2021,
still at Conwy. But it seems unlikely that Galdiano and the three other college
seniors who were under consideration for the team, Southern California’s
Allisen Corpuz of Honolulu, Hawaii, Louisville’s Lauren Hartlage of
Elizabethtown, Ky. and Furman’s Natalie Srinivasan of Spartanburg, S.C., can
put their golf futures on hold for another year.
The top three Americans in the World Amateur Golf Ranking as
of Wednesday were going to be automatic qualifiers for the team. When the
college season was suddenly halted three weeks ago, Srinivasan had risen to No.
14 in the Women’s WAGR and had overtaken Texas junior Kaitlyn Papp, a home girl
from Austin Texas, for the third automatic spot. Papp is No 15 in
the Women’s WAGR.
Wake Forest junior Emilia Migliaccio of Cary, N.C. and No. 5
in the Women’s WAGR and Stanford recruit Rose Zhang of Irvine, Calif. and No. 8
in the Women’s WAGR would have been the other two automatic qualifiers.
Migliaccio and the Demon Deacons, who lost in the NCAA Championship’s Final
Match to Atlantic Coast Conference rival Duke a year ago, were ranked No. 1 by Golfstat
when the 2019-2020 college golf season came to a sudden end.
I don’t have any inside information on the future plans of
the seniors, whom the NCAA will allow an extra year of eligibility after their
final springs fell victim to a global pandemic of all things, although I’m sure
professional golf is certainly one of their options.
By the time the Curtis Cup is contested next year,
Migliaccio and Papp might be professional golfers. The timing can be tricky,
but their talent is undeniable.
It might not be as tough a decision for some of the younger
players who were invited to participate in December’s practice session at
Loblolly to include a trip to Wales on their 2021 dance card.
Duke sophomore Gina Kim of Chapel Hill, N.C., who contended
for a long time before settling for low-amateur honors in last spring’s U.S.
Women’s Open at the Country Club of Charleston, Vanderbilt sophomore Auston Kim
of St. Augustine, Fla. and Ohio State sophomore Aneka Seumanutafa of
Emmitsburg, Md. may get called to another practice session by Ingram somewhere
in December.
Wouldn’t be shocked if the two junior standouts who joined
the group at Loblolly late last year, Zhang of Irvine,
Calif. and Lake Worth, Fla. phenom Alexa Pano might be hoping to still be in
the mix for the postponed Curtis Cup Match.
Zhang teamed with Migliaccio, Stewart Hagestad, winner of
the 2016 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship at Stonewall, and Brandon Wu, who led Stanford
to a national championship a year ago, to give the United States a gold medal
in the mixed-team event in last summer’s Pan-American Games in Lima, Peru.
Pano finished fourth in qualifying for match play in last
summer’s U.S. Women’s Amateur Championship at the Old Waverly Golf Club in West
Point, Miss. days before turning 15. She displayed her match-play
chops by capturing the title in the Iona D. Jones/Doherty Women’s Amateur
Championship, a match-play event on South Florida’s unofficial Orange Blossom
Tour, for the third time in four years in January.
Hopefully mid-amateur standout Lauren Greenlief of Ashburn,
Va., winner of the 2015 U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship, will get another chance
to impress Ingram when a practice session is convened for the 2021 U.S. Curtis
Cup team.
“It is certainly disappointing any time you have to postpone
something you are so actively looking forward to, but when we take our team to
the Match, we want to be able to focus on competition and camaraderie, rather
than have to worry about health and safety,” Ingram told the USGA website last
week. “I feel for the players who have worked so hard these last two years and
share in the disappointment they surely feel that the Curtis Cup will not be
contested this June. Despite the delay, we will be ready and eager to have the
experience of a lifetime.”
I haven’t paid real close attention to the team GB&I was
putting together for the Curtis Cup at Conwy, but I’m guessing England’s Annabell
Fuller was going to be in the mix.
Fuller was one of several teen stars who took their lumps in
2018 in the Curtis Cup at Quaker Ridge. She had been honing her game while
attending the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. the last couple of winters.
Fuller popped up on the Florida roster in January and made
an immediate impact for the Gators. She finished in a tie for third in the
individual standings and helped the hosts capture the team crown in the Florida
Gators Invitational not long before the coronavirus shut things down. It will
be interesting to see if she remains an amateur long enough to tee it up in the
postponed Curtis Cup Match in 2021.
It’s going to be a fascinating spring/early summer on the
amateur scene in 2021. The Walker Cup, which has been played mostly in the late
summer in recent years, will be contested May 8 and 9 in 2021 at one of
America’s iconic courses, Seminole Golf Club, a Donald Ross masterpiece in Juno
Beach, Fla., home course of captain Nathaniel Crosby, the 1981 U.S. Amateur
champion and son of the late, great Bing Crosby.
Crosby’s U.S. team rallied for a 15.5-10.5 victory to retain
the Walker Cup last summer at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake, England.
Crosby played on the winning U.S. Walker Cup team in 1983 at Royal Liverpool.
Much like Marucci more than a decade ago, Crosby will get a
chance to be the U.S. captain on his home course. Not sure why the May dates
were chosen as the Walker Cup will be staged in the midst of college golf’s
postseason. I think it’s the week between a lot of the major conference
championships and the NCAA regionals and most of the college coaches I’ve seen
address the issue feel that representing the Stars & Stripes in a Walker
Cup Match is an experience of a golf lifetime. So, they’ll make it work.
Too much golf? Given a choice between too much golf and no
golf, a situation we are currently saddled with, I’ll choose too much golf
every time.
Finally, my Curtis Cup antenna have been especially up ever
since it was announced in May of 2017 that the 2022 Curtis Cup Match will be
staged at the aforementioned East Course at Merion Golf Club, the first time
the old gal on the Main Line will play host to the event since 19 and 54.
I’ve been on the record as hoping that Pano remains an
amateur long enough to tee it up for the United States. Pretty sure she turns
18 later that summer. But she’s so good, the lure of the professional game
might be tough to ignore.
So here’s hoping Pano is part of the U.S. team next year in
Wales and enjoys the experience so much, she’d be willing to delay the start of
her professional career a little longer to wear the Red, White & Blue
one more time as an amateur in 2022 at a place where golf history just oozes
out of the Kentucky Bluegrass.
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