The 2013 Trans-Mississippi Championship, a prestigious amateur championship which is now 110 years old, was contested July 9-11 at
the Meadow Club in
Fairfax, a 1927 Alister Mackenzie-designed golf course in the Marin County uplands north of Mt Tamalpais. The tournament turned into a rematch of sorts for Cory McElyea of Santa Cruz and
Bryson DeChambeau of Clovis, the pair that battled it out for the Cal State
Amateur title last month on the Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country
Club, but the tables were turned this time around as Bryson DeChambeau came out
on top.
McElyea and DeChambeau played in adjacent
groupings over the last two rounds of the prestigious amateur championship.
McElyea was grouped with two stalwarts from this past season’s strong
Cal-Berkeley squad, the just-graduated Max Homa and long-hitting senior-to-be
Brandon Hagy; the 36-hole leader DeChambeau was right behind them in a grouping with former
University of Arkansas golfer Austin Cook, and UT’s Johnathan Schnitzer.
DeChambeau, a rising sophomore at SMU, was in
a strong position at the start of third-round play Thursday morning after
putting up back-to-back 65s in the opening rounds. A 5-stroke lead is no
guarantee of a win when there are another 36 holes of golf to play, though, and
it took solid, mostly error-free play to keep him ahead of his pursuers.
McElyea challenged with a hot start in the
morning round, improving his overall score to 10-under by the 14th hole, mostly
on the strength of an unfailing putter – he had seven one-putt greens in
the first fourteen holes. DeChambeau, in the meantime, had traded birdies and
bogeys and improved to -11 by the same point in his round. Though DeChambeau
never rekindled the fire he had displayed on the first two days, one stroke
back was as close as McElyea would get as his putter cooled off through the
final holes.
Recent Cal grad Max Homa, playing one hole
ahead of DeChambeau, started slowly in Round 3, and dropped as far as 10
strokes off of the Mustang sophomore’s pace at the start of the first round’s
back nine. Homa ran off a string of birdies on the back side of the course and pulled back to within five strokes of DeChambeau, and he continued to gain ground as the players went back out onto the course,
after a short lunch break, for the final round.
Three unanswered bogeys in
the final nine reversed Homa’s momentum, however, and he finished the
tournament six strokes off the lead, tied with McElyea and with Tulsa, Oklahoma’s
Charlie Saxon for fourth place. Saxon had a strong final day, putting up a pair
of 66’s for the lowest final-day total in the field, but the 10-stroke deficit
he had carried into the closing rounds was more than he could overcome.
The two players who tied for second place,
Jeremy Sanders, of Chatsworth, CA, and Austin Cook, each had a solid couple of
rounds on the final day, but neither came any closer to DeChambeau than three
strokes back.
The win over such a strong field is a
confidence booster for DeChambeau, who hasn’t won a tournament since high
school competition. He joins former SMU Mustang Golf star Kelly Kraft, who won
this tournament in 2011 at Kansas City Country Club, on the roster of
Trans-Mississippi champions.
“I don’t know what to say. It’s been a long
time coming, but this one feels so sweet,” he said after closing out his final
round, and the tournament, with a short par putt.
The standard of play displayed by the field of
top amateur players in the 2013 Trans-Mississippi Championship was superb. The
handsome Meadow Club course, a 1927 Alister Mackenzie design – his first in
America – showcases the terrain of the shallow upland valley where it is set.
Though shortish – just over 6700 yards – compared to many modern courses, or
older tracks that have been lengthened to hold their own against modern
equipment, the course maintains its relevance by virtue of Mackenzie’s classic
design principles, and provided a worthy test of the shotmaking skills of the
highly-skilled amateur players contesting this championship.
With contoured fairways, holes favoring both
the draw and the fade, and well-bunkered greens which offer a selection of pin
placements ranging from inviting to downright daunting, this is a typical
Mackenziean thinking-man’s golf course. The length off the tee that is the
hallmark of the modern game can still overpower even Dr Mackenzie’s
strategically-placed fairway bunkers, but once within scoring distance the
players still had to have their best short game on hand if they were to walk
away from the hole with par or better.
McElyea’s cooldown just as he was putting the
heat on DeChambeau is a good example. The USF senior-to-be took only 30 putts
to get through the first 18 holes on Thursday; his total of 36 putts in the
second round was the difference between possibly overtaking DeChambeau for the
win and the eventual outcome – settling for T-4. It wasn’t just the putts that
were confounding McElyea, though – he was seeing the same flag locations
as he had in the morning round – a dropoff in his accuracy on approach, leading
to longer, multiple-breaking putts on the complex greens, had much to do with
it. McElyea appeared to be opting to play safe as the day wore on, often
hitting one or two clubs shorter off the tee than his companions in the group,
Max Homa and Brandon Hagy, but that strategy failed him in the end.
As for Homa and Hagy, between Homa’s hot hand
late in the morning round, and Hagy’s spectacular length off the tee, the
gallery for the group, which was heavy with Cal alumni, (despite being some miles away from the Berkeley campus, Cal plays the
Meadow Club as their home course) were enjoying every minute. Hagy wowed
onlookers with “bomb-and-gouge” golf which, when he was accurate off the tee,
was extremely effective. Case in point – the way he played the 18th hole.
The final hole at the Meadow Club is a
363-yard, dogleg-right par four with a cluster of pines guarding the corner.
Homa and McElyea each hit irons off the tee in both rounds on Thursday, opting
for a good position in the fairway at the corner of the dogleg from which to
hit a wedge to the slightly elevated green. Hagy, on the other hand, stepped up
with driver in hand each time, firing a high draw that started right of the
trees and curled back toward the green. A daring shot, and doubly so because it
goes against both the shape of the hole and the angle of the green. The way
Hagy played this hole was a gamble, but one that paid off – he was 2-under on
the hole for the tournament, playing it par-birdie-birdie-par over the four
rounds.
The long-hitting Cal Bear elicited admiring
applause from the gallery on a couple of other holes, too. On the 400-yard
par-4 fourth hole, in the final round, he drove his tee shot a good 335 yards
from the elevated tee, outdriving his playing companions to the tune of 40+
yards to leave himself a flip wedge to the tucked-right flag. On the ninth
hole, a straight-away 464-yard par-4 to another slightly-elevated green, Hagy punched
a 365-yard drive to the right-hand side of the fairway no more than 95 yards
below the flag, then flipped a high, soft-landing wedge to kick-in birdie
distance. The Cal alumni in the gallery were thrilled by the displays of power
this young man put on, and even the less-partisan onlookers were mightily
impressed.
Not to be entirely outdone by his younger
teammate, Max Homa pulled off a shot at the par-4 seventh hole in the final
round that club members among the gallery – who have all played that hole
hundreds of time – will be talking about for a long time. The seventh hole is
hard dogleg left of 436 yards that turns the corner at about 288 yards out from the
championship tees. A curious ditch, just a foot or two wide, a foot or so deep,
and stepping up six to eight inches from front to back, interrupts the fairway
at the inside of the dogleg. There is a generous landing area to the right, at
the outside of the turn in the fairway, but the ditch is there waiting to snag
a shot that fails in an attempt to cut the inside of the dogleg.
 |
| The view to the seventh green standing over Max Homa’s shot from the curious hazard in the middle of the seventh fairway. |
Homa’s tee ball ended up in this ditch, and to
a recreational player this would have been a sure “unplayable lie” situation.
With about 145 yards to the flag, which was tucked hard left behind a
formidable Mackenziean bunker, Homa stood over a ball that was in a narrow
ditch, eight to 10 inches below his feet – and positively rifled a shot right at the flag.
The evidence of the quality of the shot could
be seen in the grass at the bottom of the ditch – a shallow, perfectly-shaped
rectangular divot that pointed straight at the flag. Getting out of that lie at
all cleanly was a 1,000-to-1 shot, but the result, a perfectly-placed birdie
opportunity no more than eight feet past a tucked-left flag behind a yawning
bunker, was a million-to-one. If Max
Homa takes nothing else away from the 2013 Trans-Mississippi Championship, the
memory of that shot will be enough to make this tournament live on in his
memory.
 |
| The textbook divot – in a ditch – left by Max Homa’s approach shot to the seventh green in the final round. He stiffed this shot to less than eight feet, and made the birdie putt. |
The day I spent walking this handsome course,
watching a talented field of amateur players play their hearts out for a crystal goblet and
bragging rights, was a singular pleasure. The setting is superb – a shallow
upland valley called Bon Tempe Meadow that is overlooked, but not overshadowed, by rugged hills. The course lies lightly on the
contours of the land, as if embroidered on fine fabric and draped over the landscape. Fine
views abound, but for my money the 6th hole, the second-longest of the par-4s
on the course, offers the finest vista on the course.
The fairway falls away from the teeing grounds, just slightly, before rising gently to an elevated
green back-dropped by a huge outcropping of native rock that is a central
visual feature of the course. A small, reedy creek crosses in front of the
beginning of the fairway and runs along the right side, separating the sixth
from the sixteenth fairway. Trees frame the fairway – willows on the right, in
the waterway, and pines on the left – and with the boulder-topped hillock
rising behind the green, the sixth hole is like a little valley in its own
right, a pastoral setting right out of a William Constable landscape.
 |
| The pastoral sweep of the sixth hole at the Alister Mackenzie-designed Meadow Club in the Marin County uplands north of Mt Tamalpais calms the eye, but the green is deceptively challenging. |
The bowl-like setting of the green, with a
grassy slope behind the putting surface rising up to meet the natural landscape
below the rocky outcrop, is tempting, and deceptive. While the backdrop appears
to offer security for a shot that is hit long, the green slopes distinctly back
to front, making a chip back to the flag from above the green a difficult
proposition. A pair of bunkers sit behind the green, to the left and the right
– and only a masterful stroke will keep a recovery shot out of the sand from
rolling to the bottom of the putting surface. Another pair of bunkers frame the front of
the green, narrowing the entrance and challenging the golfer’s accuracy on the
approach.
From the handsome shake-sided clubhouse to
the water-fronted 13th green at the farthest reach of the course, the Meadow
Golf Club provided an ideal setting for the tournament, and it was most
generous of the members and staff of the club to share this beautiful property
with the competitors and spectators at the 110th Trans-Mississippi
Championship.
No comments:
Post a Comment