Looking back at another year of golf blogging and some
more looping at Stonewall …
What I was really looking forward to in 2019 was the return
of the BMW Philadelphia Amateur Championship, the marquee event on the Golf
Association of Philadelphia’s calendar each year, to Stonewall for the first
time since 2009.
Regular readers of T Mac Tees Off are aware that I had
revived a caddying career that I thought was over following the second round of
the 1981 U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club’s historic East Course at Stonewall, Tom
Doak’s twin gems in the northwest corner of
Chester County, since the newspaper business quit me early in 2016.
The spring weather was kinder than it had been in recent
years and Stonewall superintendent Dan Dale had the Old Course and the North
Course, 10 years the Old’s junior and nearly as demanding, in fairly pristine
condition for the 119th battle for the J. Wood Platt Trophy.
I had really been able to focus on the golf scene in my last
eight years or so at my final stop of a 38-year journalism career at the Delaware
County Daily Times, where the T Mac Tees Off blog had its humble origins,
designed to act as a supplement to the golf stuff that I could jam into an
increasingly tiny news hole.
Oddly enough, the first time I laid eyes on the Old Course
at Stonewall was when I took a ride up Route 401 to check out a golf course I
had heard a lot about and because two guys whose high school careers I had
chronicled in the Daily Times, Conrad Von Borsig, a District One champion
at Strath Haven, and James Kania Jr., a winner of the Bert Linton Inter-Ac
League Championship at The Haverford School, were going at it in that 2009
Philadelphia Amateur final.
Funny how life completes little circles that way. Von
Borsig, coming off his junior season at Virginia, built up a big early lead and
claimed a 6 and 4 victory over Kania, who was playing collegiately at Kentucky.
So there I was 10 years later, this time proudly wearing a
Stonewall bib and looking forward to carrying a bag in a Philly Am qualifier
for the first time in 39 years when my Merion regular, Bill Ginn Jr., had me
along on a rainy day at Whitemarsh Valley Country Club and Sunnybrook Golf Club
in 1980.
The Philly Am qualifiers were well attended last spring
because Stonewall, in a little more than 25 years, has gained that reputation
that the good courses have, the kind of courses that players, particularly good
players, want to play, want to see how their games stand up to the challenge
they know they will face.
I gave Noah Schwartz, a former Penn Charter standout who had
just completed his freshman season at Cornell, a guided tour of the North
Course in the week leading up to the Philly Am. Schwartz had a little more
accomplished adviser in his morning round at the Old Course that day in R.J.
Wren, a former Twin Valley standout and an occasional Stonewall looper who was
coming off a solid junior season at Delaware.
R.J. was already spoken for for the tournament proper, so
when Schwartz asked if I wanted to go with him, I gladly accepted.
Schwartz, a Cherry Hill, N.J. resident who was playing out
of Galloway National Golf Club, struggled in the opening round of qualifying on
the North Course, some unforced errors leading to three double bogeys and an 81.
It had been a weird weather day at the start, heavy
overnight rains giving way to bright sunshine that was ushered in by roaring
northwest winds just as we headed to the first tee.
But to his everlasting credit, Schwartz put that round
behind him in the afternoon. His 30-footer for birdie at the tough par-4 10th
hole, our first hole of the afternoon on the Old Course, found nothing but the
bottom of the cup (“double breaker, net straight,” I believe was the read).
Schwartz was on his way to a 2-over 72 that was about the
highest score he could have recorded. Schwartz made it a point to stay
aggressive and just kept hitting quality golf shot after quality golf shot.
Schwartz’s 13-over 153 total missed the playoff for the
final two spots in match play by three shots. It is so tough to make the top 32
that compete in match play at a Philly Am. There just isn’t a big margin for
error.
I left my Stonewall bib at home and brought my clipboard for
the next two days and wandered around looking for matches that appealed to me.
The Philly Am field of 32 is quickly whittled down to the two finalists in
those two days.
I caught up to one of the early afternoon matches, a
second-round meeting between Talamore Country Club’s Patrick Sheehan, who I had
seen a lot on the postseason high school trail the previous two falls, and Jack
Wall, the younger brother of defending Philly Am champ Jeremy Wall, both
playing out of Manasquan Valley Golf Club at the Jersey Shore.
Sheehan, who will join Greg Nye’s Penn State program later this summer,
had won the District One Class AAA championship as a senior at Central Bucks
East in the fall of 2018. Jack Wall, who moved into the starting lineup as a
freshman at South Carolina this fall and stayed there, and his Christian
Brothers Academy teammate Brendan Hansen had advanced to match play in the U.S.
Amateur Four-Ball Championship at the Bandon Dunes Resort in Oregon a few weeks
before the Philly Am.
Jack Wall claimed a 4 and 2 victory, but it was really a lot
of fun to watch a couple of guys who had just walked in their high school
graduations playing some really high-level golf.
And after that, well, I just couldn’t resist checking in on
the kid I had covered in high school, the kid I had watched win a Philly Am
title 10 years earlier at Stonewall. And Conrad Von Borsig, no longer a kid at
32, was as fun to watch play the game as ever.
I ran over to the back nine just in time to see Von Borsig
pull off a masterful up-and-down for par from the left of the 13th
green, the diabolical 13th green at the Old Course, that took the
wind out of the comeback bid by Sakima Country Club’s Zachary Falone, who had
ripped a brilliant approach from 230 yards away to seven feet only to miss his
birdie try and settle for a frustrating half. Von Borsig finished off a 4 and 3
victory two holes later.
I thought Von Borsig’s comments afterwards were as good a
summarization of the challenges of the Old Course as I’ve heard.
“I’m not comfortable here,” Von Borsig said. “I hit it in
the fescue non-stop. But I think it’s because this golf course is really
complicated. You have to have some experience. It’s the kind of course where
you really have to think your way around the golf course.
“You get yourself in situations where you have to make a
decision and the outcome of the match can depend on what you decided in that
moment.”
I caught the end of Von Borsig’s tense 1-up quarterfinal
victory over Saucon Valley Country Club’s talented mid-am Matt Mattare the following
morning via GAP’s live stream on Twitter.
That earned him a semifinal showdown with Jeremy Wall, the
defending champion who had been able to detour around a Pennsylvania Turnpike
shutdown to rally for a 3 and 2 victory over the pride of Penn State Berks,
Andrew Cornish, playing out of the RiverCrest Golf Club & Preserve.
Younger brother Jack Wall had not been so lucky. He had left
Brielle, N.J. earlier for his quarterfinal match against Jeff Osberg, the 2014
Philadelphia Amateur champion who had claimed medalist honors in qualifying at
Stonewall with a pair of matching 1-under 69s. Jack Wall was hopelessly caught
in the closure caused by an overturned dump truck and was forced to forfeit his
match to Osberg.
I got to watch all of the Jeremy Wall-Von Borsig match and Jeremy
Wall’s 1-up victory was just a short-game clinic. As Von Borsig said
afterwards, “it was like I was playing against myself.”
Von Borsig was 2-down with two holes to play when he drilled
in a 40-footer straight downhill for birdie at the 17th hole to
send the match to the home hole. Jeremy
Wall had to make a testy five-footer for par at the Old Course’s scenic 18th
hole to hold on for the victory.
Von Borsig has joined what has become the most powerful
collection of talent in GAP at Philadelphia Cricket Club. His caddy, following
a first-round exit after also qualifying for match play, was Marty McGuckin, the
2015 Bert Linton Inter-Ac champion as a senior at Malvern Prep and another
recent addition to the Cricket Club roster.
There were, as you might expect, some Cricket Club guys
following the match and between all the good golf and all the Conrad stories,
and there are a ton of those, it was just a fun day.
I was looping and didn’t catch a lot of the final, but
Jeremy Wall’s short-game mastery earned him a 3 and 2 victory over Osberg and
made him the first repeat winner of the Philly Am since Overbrook Golf Club
legend Chris Lange did it 25 years earlier.
As I mentioned at the time, Jeremy Wall’s game is quite
similar to that of Lange in his heyday.
Osberg, who played his high school golf at Owen J. Roberts
(Stonewall lies within the Owen J. borders) and was a member of Guilford
College’s 2005 Division III national championship team, took the loss in
stride, knowing full well that there is no shame in falling in a Philly Am
final. You had to play great golf to get there, it’s just that somebody played
better than you that day.
Osberg rebounded by claiming his second Philadelphia Open
crown at Huntingdon Valley Country Club, which had been his home course before
he made Pine Valley Golf Club his new base. Then he won the last of GAP’s major
championships, a rain-shortened Patterson Cup at Applebrook Golf Club.
They were the fifth and sixth GAP major championships added
to Osberg’s resume and he nailed down a fourth Silver Cross Award with his
Patterson Cup victory as well. By the time GAP held its Champions Dinner in
October, Osberg’s name was added to the William Hyndman III Player of the Year
trophy for the third time.
The Philly Am, however, was not the last time I would run
into Von Borsig at Stonewall in 2019.
One of my favorite events at Stonewall is the Fall Scramble,
an open tournament that brings together really good two-man teams. I have been
fortunate to draw some good pairs and that was again the case when I was
assigned to the Philadelphia Country Club duo of Trip McCulloch and Peter
Sharkey Jr.
McCulloch wasn’t a total stranger to Stonewall as his father
was one of the original members, so he had played it as a younger man, but not
so much in recent years. He also possessed a silky putting stroke, which was a
big reason why the McCulloch-Sharkey pairing finished the first day at the Old
Course atop the leaderboard with a sparkling 6-under 64.
With Sharkey putting first in the scramble format, McCulloch
usually had a pretty good idea of the line and he was deadly, although Sharkey
might have made the toughest birdie putt of the day when he rolled in a tough,
left-to-right breaker to a front left pin location on the aforementioned
diabolical 13th green.
For Round 2 on the North Course, we were paired with our
closest pursuer. Guess who? None other than Von Borsig and yet another talented
Cricket Club guy, Brendan Mahoney.
Von Borsig put on a show that he capped by making an
impossible seven-footer for birdie on the second hole – the next-to-last of our
round – on a line that only he could see as his ball took the side door into
the cup. Von Borsig and Mahoney shot a 61. Pretty sure my guys ended up with a
respectable top-five finish. But the weather was spectacular and boy, was it a fun
two days.
Pretty sure the runnerup team included Will Davenport, the
winner of GAP’s Middle-Amateur Championship at Rolling Green Golf Club last
spring who earned a spot in match play in the U.S. Mid-Amateur Championship at
Colorado Golf Club. After getting ousted from match play, Davenport grabbed the
bag of Aussie Lukas Michel and helped the 25-year-old capture the title.
I dedicated my 2018 year-in-review post this time a year ago
to some of the spectacular junior players who had made such a big splash in the
Philadelphia area. And that encouraging trend continued in 2019.
A week after the Philly Am, two of the players who had
qualified for the match-play bracket at Stonewall, Sheehan and Austin Barbin of
the golfing Barbin family of Elkton, Md. hooked up with GAP’s Junior Boys’
Championship on the line at Coatesville Country Club.
Coatesville is way too close to my home base for me to pass
up catching some of this match. Barbin had surged into match play at Stonewall
with a brilliant 5-under 65 in his afternoon round at the North Course. It
would mark the beginning of a sizzling stretch of golf for the talented kid who
worked his way into the Maryland lineup as a freshman this fall.
Sheehan was the qualifying medalist at Coatesville and he
and Barbin were on a collision course. Barbin broke open a close match by going
6-under in a stretch from the eighth to the 13th holes on his way to
a 5 and 4 victory. They both just crush it off the tee.
Barbin would go on to add another of GAP’s major junior
championships, the Christman Cup at The 1912 Club, qualified for trips to both
the U.S. Junior Amateur at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio and the U.S.
Amateur at the Pinehurst Resort & Country Club – coming up just short of
match-play berths in both USGA championships – finished in a tie for ninth in
the Boys Junior PGA Championship at the Keney Park Golf Course in Windsor,
Conn. and wrapped up his junior career with a stunning 11-shot victory in a
debut American Junior Golf Association event,
the Imperial Headwear Junior Classic at DuPont Country Club.
Barbin was GAP’s Junior Player of the Year. But with Barbin
out of town for the U.S. Junior Amateur, Sheehan grabbed a victory in GAP’s
Jock Mackenzie Memorial at Sandy Run Country Club and earned the Harry Hammond
Award, which goes to the GAP Junior stroke-play champion.
I was hoping that both Sydney Yermish and Elizabeth Beek,
two of the rising junior stars of the last couple of summers, would show up on
the high school postseason scene in the fall and I got my wish.
Yermish, a freshman at Lower Merion, opened the District One
Class AAA Championship with a sizzling 6-under 65 at Raven’s Claw Golf Club,
home of the Symetra Tour’s Valley Forge Invitational, and added a 1-under 71
the next day at Turtle Creek Golf Club in a runaway victory.
Beek, a freshman at Wissahickon, finished third at
districts, but turned the tables on Yermish the following week by capturing the
title with a scorching 6-under 66 in the Class AAA East Regional at Golden Oaks
Golf Club. Yermish matched par with a 72, but settled for runnerup honors.
I spent Day 2 of the PIAA Championship at the Heritage Hills
Golf Resort following the two talented freshmen along with another freshman,
Unionville’s Mary Dunigan, and West Chester East sophomore Victoria Kim as they
battled it out for a state championship.
As I suspected, Mary Dunigan’s father is John Dunigan, a Golf
Digest top instructor in America a couple of years ago. He was out watching
his daughter, of course, but he is also the swing coach for Beek and Kim, so he
had plenty of rooting interests.
Yermish, a student of Mark Sheftic, the head of instruction
at Merion Golf Club, stiffed her approach at the par-4 ninth hole, the group’s
final hole of the round, for a birdie that got her into a playoff with Beek and
Kim, the trio all landing on 2-over 146.
It looked for a second that Yermish might take the title on
the first playoff hole, but her eagle try at the 18th hole just slid
by. She was knocked out with a three-putt on the second hole of the playoff and
Beek finally nailed down the title when Kim found the water, again at the 18th
hole, twice on the third hole of the playoff.
The Beek-Yermish rivalry should be fascinating to watch over
the next few years and they are just the tip of a talented group of youngsters
on the girls side in District One.
It was a solid year for District One on the boys side, too,
as Norristown junior Josh Ryan was an impressive winner of the Class AAA
district crown at Turtle Creek and Conestoga junior Morgan Lofland earned the
East regional title a week later at Golden Oaks with a sparkling 5-under 67.
Ryan would reach the PIAA Championship for third time in his high school career
and Lofland punched his ticket to Heritage Hills for the second time in three
years.
Nobody was going to deny probably Pennsylvania’s most
talented scholastic golfer, Central York’s Carson Bacha, who closed out his
high school career with a victory in the PIAA Class AAA Championship at
Heritage Hills. You can look for Bacha teeing it up at Auburn at the end of
next summer.
I made it out to the Central League Championship at Turtle Creek,
both days of districts at Raven’s Claw and the Turtle, the second day of
individual competition in the state championship at Heritage Hills and the Bert
Linton Inter-Ac League Championship at Gulph Mills Golf Club in a busy October.
I don’t get to live blog much, but I like to make it count.
If you want to relive any of those days, just click the October tab for 2019
and my posts are there for the reading. I like to think of this blog as sort of
a journal of a golf geek and there’s nothing like the high school postseason to
get a look at the stars of the future.
Back at Stonewall, I finally managed to grab a loop in The
Bull, Stonewall’s annual member-guest in the fall, for the first time. Teams
play five nine-hole matches, three at the North Course on a Friday and two more
at the Old Course the following day with rolling point totals determining
flight winners followed by a playoff to determine the overall winner.
I drew Joe Noll and his guest Phil Romano, a resident of the
Hershey area who officiates in USGA matches. Pretty interesting guy for a golf
geek like me to chat up.
No, we didn’t get out of our flight. But in a year when I
saw a lot of golf shots, the best one I saw was struck by Noll. He had 139
yards into the par-4 second hole in our first match of Day 2 at the Old Course.
The shot took one hop toward the tough back-right pin position and went right
in the hole. The foursome ahead of us on the third tee had the best view and
their reaction made it clear that Noll had holed out for eagle.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sudden passing of
my favorite colleague in the Stonewall caddyshack.
Darryl Grumling and I went way back to the days when he was
a fledgling sports writer at the Reading Eagle and I was the
sports editor at The Mercury in Pottstown, our paths first crossing
while covering a spectacular decade of American Legion baseball by those
Boyertown Bears in the 1980s.
It’s funny how you have those people who come into and out
of your life at different times and, after not hearing from Darryl in a while,
he reached out to me in 2017 and wondered if they needed any caddies at
Stonewall. So there we were, a couple of former scribes looping at the ’Wall,
trying to figure out those tricky greens at both courses and some complicated
caddyshack politics and generally enjoying it, although there are easier ways
to make a buck.
We had both become pretty close followers of the horse
racing scene and it will never be lost on me that the last time I saw Darryl
was on Derby Day. We had spent a couple of slow days that week discussing
handicapping strategies for the big day.
And then he was gone. It can be a tough crowd, that
caddyshack group. But Darryl, trust me when I tell you, you are missed.
Hopefully, I’ve found a little niche with this blog,
covering the kids, the Philly Section PGA pros, checking out the USGA
qualifiers and then trying to follow up on how the survivors of those local
qualifiers do (like Brynn Walker finally making match play at the U.S. Women’s
Amateur in 2019 at Old Waverly Golf Club in West Point, Miss. and then winning
a match), and my favorite guilty pleasure, the college golf scene.
And the plan is to keep those blog posts – and hopefully a
loop at Stonewall here and there -- coming
in 2020.
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