PURE Insurance / First Tee event deserves some love—even up against the U.S. Open

It has been a tough couple of years for the PURE Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach, the PGA Tour Champions event that benefits the First Tee. In 2019 the tournament was scheduled against the Safeway Open, the PGA Tour’s opener that is held 2-1/2 hours north of Pebble Beach, at Napa Valley’s Silverado Resort and Spa. The two events effectively bracketed the Bay Area, and despite the obvious attraction of Pebble Beach, the big names/big hitters of the main tour are perhaps a little bit sexier for the mainstream golf fan. Then came 2020—the year when everything changed.

The panorama that greets you as you walk from the Lodge at Pebble Beach down to the 18th green is one of the finest views in golf. (photo by author)

As shelter-in-place kicked in and sports, along with everything else, shut down, the whole schedule was up in the air. The possibility of events being cancelled, even events that were months in the future, loomed large. Eventually golf came back—the first pro sport to do so, with extensive, comprehensive safety measures in place—though with big changes in the schedule, and the biggest change was the rescheduling or cancellation of the majors.

The grandaddy of them all, the Open Championship, was cancelled outright for 2020, as the British Isles struggled to get a handle on the pandemic and lagged behind the United States in reopening golf courses for recreational play. The PGA Championship was pushed back from March to August—a gloomy time of year for its venue, TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, but the change produced a thrilling, much-watched tournament. The Masters—that odd championship of nothing which is pretty much a major just on the strength of the memory of Bobby Jones, and because the green jackets of Augusta National want it to be—was delayed to November, and the United States Open, which is a championship, was pushed back to September.

Therein lay the rub, at least as far as the PURE Insurance Championship was concerned, because the USGA settled on a week in mid-September, the same week in which the PURE Insurance/First Tee event was scheduled, to put on their national championship. In a week that could have belonged to the PGA Tour Champions on the basis of the tournament venue alone, the spotlight was stolen by the national championship.

No offense to the rest of the PGA Tour Champions schedule, but the PURE Insurance event is pretty much the class tournament of the tour. I mean, come on—the venue, the charity… the venue (pardon my bias, but I am a Central California local, born and raised in Steinbeck Country.)

In a normal year play in this event is split between Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills, the home course of the Northern California Golf Association, and the pros play with junior playing partners from First Tee chapters all across the country; but even scaled back in this pandemic era, playing as a pro-am, no juniors, and only at Pebble Beach, the event is worthy of the golf world’s attention.

Except for a two-year period (2011 and 2012) when the event was held in early June under the generally overcast “June gloom” skies that locals know so well, this event has reveled in the glorious late summer/early autumn weather that the Monterey Peninsula and the Central Coast basks in after enduring the chilly gloom of summer. There’s pretty much no finer place to be than the Monterey Peninsula at this time of year, and that might have something to do with the star-studded field that the tournament has drawn this year.

Els, Furyk, Couples, Love, Montgomerie, Langer, Singh, Jiménez, Cabrera—these are just some of the names that appear on the leaderboard this year. Major champions during their PGA and European Tour careers, most of them, along with other players who hit their stride later in life and have enjoyed great success in the post-50 era of their careers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our national championship—but even setting aside my local bias, this is a tournament that deserves some love. Like every professional golf tournament on every tour, this event provides a great boost to local charities—even without the income from ticket sales besides benefitting the First Tee, the Monterey Peninsula Foundation distributes profits from this event and the AT&T Pro-Am to a wide variety of worthy causes in the Monterey Peninsula area.

It’s a tremendous shame that this event isn’t able to have spectators on site this year, but with any luck this tournament, and all the others on the schedule will be back to something like normal next year. It’s a great venue, with a great charitable footprint, and a slew of recognizable championship-level names on the scoreboard—with all that going for it, if the PURE Insurance Championship doesn’t deserve some of your viewing time, this week, even when the U.S. Open is on your TV and/or computer screens, I don’t know what does.

Book review: “The First Major –The Inside Story of the 2016 Ryder Cup”, by John Feinstein ☆☆☆☆ ½☆

A new book from New York Times bestselling author John Feinstein is always a treat. He is a sports journalist non pareil, as erudite and knowledgeable – across a wide spectrum of sports, not just golf – as he is prolific, and his latest “The First Major: The Inside Story of the 2016 Ryder Cup” is his 28th non-fiction sports book.

Feinstein has written about all the major sports that define America’s sporting life, from pro tennis to NFL football. Even if you don’t read sports books, you may know his work from his time at Sports Illustrated, or his current stints at the Washington Post and Golf Digest – or you may hear him on the radio on Sirius XM, or see him on television on the Golf Channel. In fact, if you are an American sports fan, of any stripe, this introductory paragraph is probably a waste of my time, because you already know his work.

The upshot of this recitation of Feinstein’s bona fides is that he is a sports journalist that professional athletes know and trust, and getting the best stories, the inside dope, requires the ability to get athletes to talk to you. John has that ability, and it certainly shows in his latest effort.

The 2016 Ryder Cup, which was played at the self-styled Hazeltine National Golf Club, near Chaska, Minnesota – a suburb of Minneapolis, was a watershed moment in the history of that storied event. It was the year that the United States stopped a European squad that had dominated the event with three wins in a row, from 2010 through 2014 – the third time in recent decades that the U.S. team had stopped a European run of victories at three. The first time was in 1991, after European victories in 1985, 1987, and 1989; then again in 2008, after the Euro squad took top honors in 2002, 2004, and 2006.

The 2016 event was notable for the wild swirl of events in the world of golf that led up to it, not the least of which was the rancorous atmosphere of the previous Ryder Cup, the 2014 event in which the venerable elder statesman Tom Watson was brought back to try and repeat his 1993 success as Ryder Cup skipper.

A clash of styles and a lack of communication – not to mention something of an uprising in the ranks, led by another respected figure in U.S. Ryder cup history, Phil Mickelson, doomed Watson’s leadership in 2014. The U.S. golf establishment – meaning the PGA of America, which runs the event for the red, white, and blue – wanted to wash away the bad taste that was left by the 2014 loss, and to that end they formed a Ryder Cup “task force” – a committee, widely derided by the European players and media – which was supposed to solve the Americans’ Ryder Cup problems.

Feinstein lays out the background, both recent and historical, that underpins the 2016 Ryder Cup, then digs into the personalities and near-term events which defined that contest, including the task force, and the selection of Davis Love III as U.S. captain, for a repeat performance after his stint as U.S. skipper in the agonizing 2012 loss at Medinah, which was controversial.

One headline-grabber was the social media clash between then-PGA President Ted Bishop and Euro Ryder Cup stalwart Ian Poulter, a schoolyard-worthy spat that resulted in Bishop’s unceremonious ouster for a series of childish remarks leveled at Poulter; another, coming much closer to the event, was the heated, and totally spontaneous, on-air spat between Golf Channel analysts Brandel Chamblee and David Duval over the relative importance of leadership and individual play.

During the event, one of the big stories was the play of Patrick Reed, both as a partner with his temperamentally polar opposite Jordan Spieth, and solo, as the man who took down the boisterous, and boastful, Rory McIlroy of the Euro squad in Sunday singles.

Another social-media-based dust-up occurring before and during  play was the attention-seeking U.S.-bashing promulgated by PJ Willett, the schoolteacher older brother of then-reigning Master champion Danny Willett. The elder Willett brother teed off on American fans in an article for a British sports publication, and in a series of posts on Twitter, guaranteeing a raucous reception by the bottom 10% of American fans.

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The strength of Feinstein’s work, and this book is no exception, is the time and effort he puts into interviews, and the wealth of material he obtains by doing so. No sound bites or quickly tossed-off aphorisms are to be found here – everyone involved in the event talked to him, some at length (with one exception – U.S. vice captain Tiger Woods. No surprise there.)

I will admit that I am not a huge fan of the Ryder Cup. It has become, in my opinion, an overblown, over-amped biennial hype-fest, owing its notoriety more to rancor than to great golf – but Feinstein’s writing drew me in. His research is so thorough and his insights so telling and precise that even though he was writing about an event which I have come to dislike over the last few years, I couldn’t put the book down.

Reading closely with a critical eye will turn up errors and shortcomings in almost any book, especially one on a subject in which I have an interest, and a certain store of knowledge (if I say so myself…)

I could have done without quite so much background on the head pro and superintendent of Hazeltine. They deserve to be mentioned, of course, but the pages of background on these two men started to wear thin – and to feel, frankly, like word-count padding.

More seriously, it was a little bit disappointing to see some pretty shocking errors in the text. First and foremost was a rather egregious misquoting of Ben Crenshaw’s iconic, well-known, and oft-quoted conclusion to his Saturday-night press conference at the 1999 Ryder Cup at The Country Club, Brookline, Massachusetts: “I’m gonna leave y’all with one thought, them I’m gonna leave. I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling about this. That’s all I’m gonna tell ya.” – which Feinstein styled as “I’m gonna leave y’all with this: I’m a big believer in fate. I have a feeling about this.”

In a section about Davis Love II, the well-liked father of 2012/2016 Ryder Cup skipper Davis Love III, Feinstein casually mentions that the elder Love had played with Harvey Penick, then dismissed Penick as the cowriter of what is considered one of the game’s holy texts, Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, a rather glaring mischaracterization of one of American golf’s most revered figures. 

These two errors, along with a host of lesser faux pas that should have been caught by a good copy editor, left a bit of tarnish on the otherwise gleaming aspect of the book, and took a half-star off of my assessment.

Regardless, if you love golf, and good golf writing, this book deserves a spot in your bookshelf. Buy it for yourself, or since the holidays are upon us as of this writing, put it on your Christmas list, golf lovers, and keep your fingers crossed.