Terms and conditions

Terms and Conditions of www.http://tmacteesoff.blogspot.com/ Below are the Terms and Conditions for use of www.http://tmacteesoff.blogspot.com/. Please read these carefully. If you need to contact us regarding any aspect of the following terms of use of our website, please contact us on the following email address - tmacgolf13@gmail.com. By accessing the content of www.http://tmacteesoff.blogspot.com/ ( hereafter referred to as website ) you agree to the terms and conditions set out herein and also accept our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree to any of the terms and conditions you should not continue to use the Website and leave immediately. You agree that you shall not use the website for any illegal purposes, and that you will respect all applicable laws and regulations. You agree not to use the website in a way that may impair the performance, corrupt or manipulate the content or information available on the website or reduce the overall functionality of the website. You agree not to compromise the security of the website or attempt to gain access to secured areas of the website or attempt to access any sensitive information you may believe exist on the website or server where it is hosted. You agree to be fully responsible for any claim, expense, losses, liability, costs including legal fees incurred by us arising from any infringement of the terms and conditions in this agreement and to which you will have agreed if you continue to use the website. The reproduction, distribution in any method whether online or offline is strictly prohibited. The work on the website and the images, logos, text and other such information is the property of www.http://tmacteesoff.blogspot.com/ ( unless otherwise stated ). Disclaimer Though we strive to be completely accurate in the information that is presented on our site, and attempt to keep it as up to date as possible, in some cases, some of the information you find on the website may be slightly outdated. www.http://tmacteesoff.blogspot.com/ reserves the right to make any modifications or corrections to the information you find on the website at any time without notice. Change to the Terms and Conditions of Use We reserve the right to make changes and to revise the above mentioned Terms and Conditions of use. Last Revised: 03-17-2017

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Wall has all the answers to repeat as winner of BMW Philadelphia Amateur at Stonewall


   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.


No comments:

Post a Comment