O'Connell, Johnson capture respective men's, women's Mid-Am crowns

   Kevin O’Connell’s 2019 golf dance card just had some big dates added to it.

   The 30-year-old former North Carolina standout from Cary, N.C. got ahead by winning the first five holes on the back nine of the morning round and never let hometown favorite Brett Boner get back in the match as O’Connell claimed a 4 and 3 victory in the U.S. Mid-Amateur final Thursday at Charlotte Country Club.

   O’Connell, reinstated as an amateur in 2015 after briefly giving professional golf a shot, is likely to receive an invitation to the Masters next April and he will get another shot at the Pebble Beach Golf Links, where he failed to make match play at this summer’s U.S. Amateur, for the U.S. Open next summer.

   O’Connell will be back in North Carolina for next summer’s U.S. Amateur, which will be held at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club. And, of course, O’Connell will defend his U.S. Mid-Amateur crown a year from now at the Colorado Golf Club.

   “You will be hard-pressed to find a bigger fan of the game than me and I certainly understand the importance of the USGA and how great their championships are,” O’Connell told the USGA website. “To be the champion right now is probably what I am most proud of and focused on.

   “Just simply being a champion. All the stuff that comes along with it, I think that will hit me a little bit later on.”

   Boner, a 44-year-old financial adviser from Charlotte, was the Cinderella story of this U.S. Mid-Am. He reached the final with a dramatic 1-up victory over Stewart Hagestad, the 2016 champion at Stonewall, in Wednesday afternoon’s semifinals. But Boner, who qualified for his hometown U.S. Mid-Am as the medalist in a Golf Association of Philadelphia-administered qualifier at Cedarbrook Country Club, couldn’t sustain any momentum he might have had from that victory.

   It’s a physical test to win a USGA match-play event. O’Connell and Boner won two matches each Tuesday and Wednesday before teeing off for the scheduled 36-hole final. Boner admitted he just did not play as well as he had in reaching the final.

   Most of the several hundred golf fans who came out to watch the final were in Boner’s corner. But O’Connell took control of the match with one devastating five-hole run in the morning round of the scheduled 36-hole final.

   The run began when O’Connell took advantage of a Boner double bogey on the 10^th hole to take a 1-up lead. O’Connell then won the 11^th with a birdie, the 12^th with a par, the 13^th with a par and the 14^th with a birdie.

   There was still a lot of golf to be played and Boner did cut his deficit to 3-down by taking the 18^th hole just before the lunch break. But he would never get closer than that and the Robert T. Jones Jr. Memorial Trophy belonged to O’Connell.

   In the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur Championship at Norwood Hills Country Club in St. Louis, Shannon Johnson of Norton, Mass. was the best player all week and she had to be Thursday to edge defending champion Kelsey Chugg of Salt Lake City, Utah, 1-up, to capture the title that eluded her when she lost in the final two years ago at The Kahkwa Club in Erie.

   The 35-year-old Johnson, a sales representative for PING golf, was the qualifying medalist and cruised through the match-play bracket largely unchallenged, until she ran into Chugg.

   The 26-year-old membership director for the Utah Golf Association displayed the same grit and determination she showed in winning the U.S. Women’s Mid-Am in her first appearance at Champions Golf Club’s Cypress Creek last November.

    Twice Johnson grabbed 2-up leads and twice Chugg responded by winning three straight holes to take a 1-up lead.

   Chugg capped her second burst of three straight wins with a birdie at the 15^th that gave her a 1-up advantage.

   Johnson responded by draining a 25-foot birdie putt on the 16^th hole to get the match back to even.

   Johnson then reached the par-5 18^th green in two by bombing a 7-wood from 220 yards away. Chugg wasn’t done yet, though, and after stopping a wedge from 60 yards away 10 feet from the cup, her birdie try just slid by. Johnson completed her two-putt birdie by tapping in from a foot-and-a-half and the Mildred Prunaret Trophy was hers.

   “I was surprisingly really calm, even on the 18^th tee,” Johnson told the USGA website. “I hit a great drive on 18. I didn’t think I could get on in two as we were walking up, but then the yardage that we had, we just had to cover 200 to the front. I couldn’t have hit it any better. It was unbelievable.”

   Johnson is a member of Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton, Mass., the same club that produced the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur champion Matt Parziale, the Brockton firefighter.

   In 2019, much as was the case with Parziale this year, Johnson is exempt into the U.S. Women’s Open at the Country Club of Charleston and into the U.S. Women’s Amateur at the Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss.

   And she’ll defend her U.S. Women’s Mid-Am title a year from now at Forest Highlands Country Club in Flagstaff, Ariz.