Merion is the place to be when U.S. battles Great Britain & Ireland in 42nd Curtis Cup Match

   While much of the golf world obsesses over which players are turning their back on the PGA Tour in the Saudi money grab known as LIV, we in the Philadelphia area are going to get golf in one of its purest forms at one of the game’s cathedrals when the 42^nd Curtis Cup Match tees off Friday at Merion Golf Club’s iconic East Course.

   Many of the brightest stars in amateur women’s golf will be putting their considerable talent on display in match play as the United States battles a team from Great Britain & Ireland. If you were around for the men’s version of these matches, the Walker Cup, in 2009 at Merion, you remember it as one of the most special golf experiences you can have.

   This will be a unique Curtis Cup Match for a number of reasons. It is normally a biennial event, but the schedule was scrambled by, what else, the coronavirus pandemic. GB&I was scheduled to host the 41^st Curtis Cup Match in 2020 at Conwy Golf Club in Caernarvonshire, Wales.

   It was postponed until 2021 and with last year’s golf schedule jammed with other events rescheduled from 2020, the Curtis Cup Match was pushed back from its normal June time frame to the end of August.

   What is usually a two-year cycle between Curtis Cup matches has been compressed into just nine months. GB&I captain Elaine Ratcliffe has six returning players and United States captain Sarah Ingram has five players back from the teams that competed against each other not all that long ago in Wales.

   The star of the show will undoubtedly be Rose Zhang, the No. 1 player in the Women’s World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR) from Irvine, Calif.

   Zhang has been playing a lot of high-stakes golf in the last six weeks. She was the runnerup to Curtis Cup teammate, Amari Avery, in the NCAA’s Stanford Regional. Zhang was in her first NCAA postseason as a freshman at Stanford while Avery of Riverside, Calif. and No. 15 in the Women’s WAGR, burst onto the scene after joining the program at Zhang’s Pac-12 rival Southern California in January.

   Zhang then turned it up a notch in the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk Golf Club’s Raptor Course as she captured the NCAA individual title and led the Cardinal to a national championship, going 2-1 in match play.

   Of the players who are at Merion who teed it up in last week’s U.S. Women’s Open at the Pine Needles Lodge & Golf Club in Southern Pines, N.C. only Zhang survived the 36-hole cut, finishing in a tie for 40^th place with a 7-over 291 total.

   You might be worried that Zhang could be burned out, but once the Stars & Stripes go up in Thursday’s 6 p.m. flag-raising ceremony, the competitive juices figure to be flowing again.

   Zhang was an automatic selection to the U.S. team as the winner of the Mark H. McCormack Award, which goes to the No. 1 player in the Women’s WAGR at the end of each amateur season. Zhang has finished each of the last two seasons as the best amateur woman on the planet.

   She won the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2020 at Woodmont Country Club in Rockville, Md. and the U.S. Girls’ Junior Amateur last summer at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md.

   There is talent up and down both lineups and most of the players on both sides are coming off busy college seasons.

   For the second straight Curtis Cup Match, Wake Forest teammates Rachel Kuehn of Asheville, N.C. and No. 11 in the Women’s WAGR and Lauren Walsh of Ireland and No. 46 in the Women’s WAGR will be on opposing sides.

   For the second straight Curtis Cup Match, Zhang will be joined on the American side by her Stanford teammate Rachel Heck of Memphis, Tenn. and No. 4 in the Women’s WAGR. Heck, the 2021 NCAA individual champion as a freshman with the Cardinal, was slowed a little this spring by a bout with mononucleosis following the Augusta National Women’s Amateur Championship, but got a huge match win in Stanford’s 3-2 victory over Georgia in the quarterfinals at Grayhawk.

   Zhang and Heck salvaged a half-point in the morning matches last summer at Conwy as the U.S. found itself in a 4.5-1.5 hole at the end of the first day.

   The final 12.5-7.5 margin of victory was a little deceiving as the U.S. battled back on Day 2 to draw even at 6-6 heading into the singles matches. The Stars and Stripes carried that Day 2 momentum into the singles matches as the U.S. swept to victories in six of the eight matches and halved another.

   A once and future Wake Forest standout, Emilia Migliaccio of Cary, N.C. and No. 19 in the Women’s WAGR, returns to the U.S. team. You may have seen Migliaccio doing post-round interviews at the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk as part of her internship with The Golf Channel.

   Migliaccio plans to return to Wake Forest for the 2022-2023 season for the extra year of eligibility offered by the NCAA to players who lost the spring of 2020 to the pandemic.

   Megha Ganne of Holmdel, N.J. and No. 17 in the Women’s WAGR will be joining Zhang and Heck at Stanford at the end the summer. You remember Ganne as the amateur who played in the final group in last year’s U.S. Women’s Open at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.

   Another U.S. player returning for captain Ingram from the winning side at Conwy is Jensen Castle of West Columbia, S.C. and No. 55 in the Women’s WAGR. Castle, who plays at Kentucky, got a two-fer out of her surprising victory in last summer’s U.S. Women’s Amateur at Westchester Country Club in Rye, N.Y. as it made her an automatic qualifier for the U.S. last year in Wales and again this year at Merion as a result of the odd pandemic scheduling.

   Rounding out the U.S. lineup is LSU’s Latanna Stone of Riverview, Fla. and No. 42 in the Women’s WAGR. Stone shared second place in this spring’s Augusta National Women’s Amateur with LSU teammate Ingrid Lindblad.

   It was a pair of Scots, Hannah Darling and Louise Duncan, Nos. 14 and 48 in the Women’s WAGR, respectively, who battled Zhang and Heck to a draw in the opening match at Conwy last summer and they’re back.

   Darling is coming off a solid freshman season at South Carolina as she helped the Gamecocks reach the final day of stroke play in the NCAA Championship at Grayhawk. Duncan was certainly a popular winner of The Women’s Amateur Championship last summer at Kilmarnock Barassie Golf Club in Scotland.

   The highest-ranked member of the GB&I team is Caley McGinty, an English woman who is No. 10 in the Women’s WAGR. McGinty had followed Greg Robertson, the coach who recruited her to Kent State, when he moved to Oklahoma State, but when McGinty entered the transfer portal during college golf’s midseason pause, Robertson parted ways with her for the remainder of the 2021-2022 season.

   At 20, Annabell Fuller, who has been a stalwart of a Florida team that reached the match-play final of   the Southeastern Conference Championship this spring, is a grizzled Curtis Cup veteran.

   Fuller, No. 44 in the Women’s WAGR, was 16 when she squared off against two-time U.S. Women’s Amateur champion Kristen Gillman in the Curtis Cup Match at Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale, N.Y. in 2018. This will be Fuller’s third Curtis Cup Match.

   The GB&I team also has a couple of college teammates in Florida State’s Amelia Williamson, No. 47 in the Women’s WAGR, and Charlotte Heath, No. 59 in the Women’s WAGR, both English women. They helped the Seminoles claim the team title in the NCAA’s Tallahassee Regional at the Seminole Legacy Golf Club, Florida State’s home course, this spring. Heath is another veteran of last summer’s Curtis Cup Match at Conwy.

   Rounding out the GB&I roster is Emily Price, an English woman who is No. 76 in the Women’s WAGR. Price has been a standout at Kent State.

   The other star of the show, of course, is Merion.

   I will be right at home in the Ardmore section of Haverford Township. It was 51 Junes ago that my 16-year-old self trudged to his post as the fore-caddie on No. 6 for the 1971 U.S. Open. It’s been 41 Junes since I caddied for Jay Cudd, an assistant pro at Scioto Country Club, in the 1981 U.S. Open.

   I had a chance to chat with Lindsay Forgash, the chairperson for Merion’s Curtis Cup effort, and one of her vice-chairs, Nancy Porter, as winter was slowly giving way to spring in March, for an article that never quite saw the light of day.

   Porter’s mother, Dottie Porter, was a little bit pregnant with Nancy’s brother when mom won the 1949 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Merion about 10 miles up the road from where Dottie went to high school at Upper Darby.

   The following summer, Ben Hogan completed his remarkable comeback from a near fatal collision with a bus on a Texas highway to win the 1950 U.S. Open. It was at Merion, of course, where Bobby Jones completed a calendar Grand Slam of golf (in those days that consisted of the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur and the Royal & Ancient’s Open and Amateur championships) with a victory in the 1930 U.S. Amateur.

   Nancy Porter has played countless matches on the East Course as a member of Merion’s Women’s Golf Association of Philadelphia Inter-Club Team Match team. Consider her an expert when she says that the East Course is a perfect venue for match-play golf.

   Forgash was anxious to have golfers, particularly young players, come out to Merion to see some of the future stars of the women’s game battle on a golf course that oozes history.

   If it’s the golf that you really care about, then Merion will be an immensely cool place to be in the next few days.

   You should be coming out to support the U.S. ladies. With some of the travel shackles of the last couple of years finally loosened, I suspect there be some Brits and some Scots and some Irish, oh yeah, the Irish, coming across the pond for the Curtis Cup Match. Trust me, they will be loud and proud in support of the GB&I ladies.

   The first of three four-ball match tees off at 7 a.m. Friday. Three afternoon alternate-shot foursome matches, always a bit of an Achilles’ heel for the American side, will go at 1:10 p.m. The first four-ball match Saturday will begin at 8 a.m. with the first afternoon foursome match starting at 3:10 p.m. The first of eight Sunday singles matches will tee off at 2 p.m.

   The beauty of Merion, which is playing host to a USGA event for the 19^th time, is that you’ll be watching the stars of the future playing on a golf course with all that history. Merion is so timeless that you will sense the spirits of Jones and Hogan and Dottie Porter all around you while yet another chapter of golf history is being written on the East Course.