Langer’s charge at PURE Insurance event is narrowly derailed; K.J. Choi notches first senior win

Pebble Beach, CA – 9/26/2021

While the 2021 European Ryder Cup team were hanging on grimly and putting on brave faces back in Wisconsin at Herb Kohler’s “Monster on Lake Michigan”, Whistling Straits, on the final day of the 2021 Ryder Cup, a former European Ryder Cup stalwart was out on the West Coast making a bid for a victory at a much more hospitable venue – Pebble Beach Golf Links – in the PGA Tour Champions event, the 2021 PURE Insurance Championship (AKA The First Tee Open).

“The PURE Insurance Championship Impacting The First Tee”, to give it its full name, is a low-key event that should be on every Central California golf fan’s go-and-see list. With free admission, small crowds, and a September schedule slot that pretty much guarantees good weather, this event is the best way to watch golf at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

The last three years have seen the event butting up against the PGA Tour’s season opener in Napa in 2019, the rescheduled U.S. Open in 2020, and this year, the Ryder Cup — a PGA Tour Champions event is a hard sell against that kind of competition.

Speaking of the Ryder Cup, the 2021 PURE Insurance event saw a former European Ryder Cup stalwart, Bernhard Langer, in the thick of things, even while his former team were taking an historic drubbing at Whistling Straits, going down 19–9 in the most lopsided result in modern-day Ryder Cup history.

Following a first-round 71 with a six-under 66 on Saturday, Langer came into the final round trailing leader K.J. Choi by two strokes. Choi, who was chasing his first PGA Tour Champions win, opened with rounds of 67 and 68, ultimately posting a final round 68 to cement his first win on the senior tour. That “two stroke” number figured strongly in the final result, both as Choi’s final margin of victory over T-2 finishers Langer and fellow countryman Alex Cejka, and as the value of the biggest stumble of Langer's round.

After starting the final round with a two-stroke deficit, Langer fell further behind Choi through the opening nine, going out in three-under 33 with birdies on holes 1, 5 and 6, while Choi went out in 31 with a birdie on 2 and a string of four more on holes 5 through 8. At Hole #10, the 437-yard par-four that marks the farthest point of the course, his drive came afoul of the left-side fairway bunker complex and he could do no better than coming out to the primary rough with his second shot, from which he took two more shots to get to the green and one-putt for a double-bogey six.

After playing to a birdie on the deceptively difficult par-four eleventh hole on the strength of a beautifully placed approach to five feet below the hole, and two-putting for par on the par-three twelfth, Langer again came to grief at the 403-yard par-four thirteenth hole.

With the hole located in the new “annex” to the green in the back right that is so tempting, and testing, Langer fired his approach shot right at the flag, but couldn’t hold the green. The ball skipped off the back of the putting surface and rolled through the closely mown area before coming to rest just inside the main cut of rough. A delicate chip into the closely mown upslope still carried enough speed to roll out on the down-sloping green to about 12 feet below the hole, but his superbly paced uphill putt performed a 90º lip-out and came to rest two inches from the hole, resulting in a hard-fought bogey that dropped him further off of Choi’s pace.

Fighting back over the remaining five holes, Langer made up another stroke with a birdie on the long, tough par-five 14th hole, shooting from 130 yards out to perfect position on the dining-room-table-sized flat area on the right side of the putting surface that is a traditional Sunday hole location, rolling in a dead-straight six-foot putt for a four

Putting out for par on #15 (and though he could not have known it, just as Collin Morikawa was finishing up with a tie on the 18th hole to clinch the Ryder Cup for the United States), Langer followed up with another par on 16 after his 30+ foot uphill birdie putt drifted right to miss by a bare two inches.

A laser-like approach shot to six feet or so above the traditional back-left flag on the par-three 7th hole led to a welcome birdie for Langer, who then ran into a little bit of trouble off the tee on Pebble’s iconic par-five closing hole. Though Langer, not being a notable long-ball hitter off the tee, would not be expected to go for the 18th green in two, his tee shot’s placement took away any possibility.

Coming to rest toward the right side of the fairway and well clear of the bunker complex, Langer’s ball was nevertheless dead blocked by the remaining fairway tree about 35 yards ahead. While this second shot from that location was a conundrum that might have stumped a lesser player, Langer solved it with a stunning 180-yard stinger that went under the canopy on the right side of the tree, shaping itself along the right-hand curve of the fairway’s edge and never rising higher than perhaps a dozen feet off of the ground.

Langer’s second shot on #18 today might be the best shot seen and noted by the fewest people in the history of this golf hole.

Following his second shot with a well-placed 130-yard pop to the green, the Münchener rolled in the birdie putt from above the hole to finish with a four-under 68 and a three-round total of 205, 11 under par.

In the meantime, leader K. J. Choi was holding onto, but not extending, his lead. Choi ultimately finished his round with a back-nine 37, bookmarking a bogey on 14 with matching sets of four pars before and after to finish at 13-under and clinch his first win on the PGA Tour Champions.

In terms of Bernhard Langer’s round, the difference between him racking up his 42nd senior-tour win (to equal his 42 European Tour wins) and K. J. Choi notching his first came down to the double-bogey on 10, and the bogey on 13 – a fairway bunker and a lipped-out putt. This shows that, even on the 50-plus circuit, the talent pool is deep and the competition is still fierce.

“Young Guns” lead the way at Champions Tour ’s Pebble Beach stop

The PGA Tour Champions Northern California stop, the PURE Insurance Championship, usually finds the fairways and greens of Pebble Beach Golf Links and Poppy Hills Golf Course inhabited by pairings of youth players from First Tee chapters around the country playing with Champions Tour pros, but like everything else in this pandemic year, things have changed. This year the event is playing as a pro-am, with First Tee teens replaced by well-heeled amateurs, and all three rounds are at Pebble Beach. There is still a “youth movement” of sorts underway at the 2020 event, though, as Champions Tour rookies are dominating the leaderboard.

Of course, “rookie” is a relative term in this case, as every player in the field has a wealth of experience behind them, and some are very familiar names, but the first-round leader and two of the three players who were tied for second after 18 holes are 50-year-old rookies on the tour, and the three players who rounded out the rest of the top-five spots are aged 51.

First-round leader Jim Furyk, one of those 50-year-old “rookies”, is a former FedEx Cup champion (2010) and the 2003 U.S. Open champion, and has an additional 16 PGA tour wins on his CV. Another familiar name near the top of the leaderboard is Ernie Els. Probably the second name, after Gary Player, that comes to mind when South African golf is mentioned, Els has two U.S. Open victories to his credit (1994, 1997), two Open Championship titles (2002, 2012), and 15 additional PGA Tour wins—not to mention his 47 international victories.

Less well-known, except perhaps to the deep-knowledge pro golf cognoscenti, is the remaining 50-year-old who was sitting T2 after 18 holes—Cameron Beckman. A three-time winner on the PGA Tour, Beckman turned pro in 1993, played on the Nike Tour (now the Korn Ferry Tour) developmental circuit, Beckman went to the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament 10 times before locking up his card for the 2008 season with a T20 finish at the Children’s Miracle Network Classic.

After 18 holes Furyk, Els, and Beckman were sitting just ahead of another 50-year-old, Stephen Leaney of New Zealand, and a couple of 51-year-olds, Dicky Pride and Gene Sauers. By the end of the second round they had been joined by another 50-year-old, Canadian lefty and 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir; and 60-year-old Fred Couples had snuck into the mix.

In the second round Weir, who has battled elbow problems for many years after an ill-advised change to the “stack-and-tilt” swing method, found a gear that he might not have known he had, and after a 1-over 73 in the first round, ascended the leaderboard at nose-bleed speed, picking up 38 spots on the strength of a clean-card 7-under 65 that included a string of three birdies in a row on holes 14 – 16.

Fred Couples, the only player over 51 years of age to crack the top seven after 36 holes, woke up from something of a trance, it seems, after Friday’s desultory four-birdies, two-bogeys, two-under 70, and knocked together a bogey-free five-under 67 to vault 15 spots up the leaderboard into a five-way tie for third.

The field, including the twelve amateurs who made the pro-am cut, will assemble Sunday starting at 7:35 to decide the issue.

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.

Bay Area golf fans face a decision next September

2019 holds the promise of being a very good year for Bay Area golf fans. The 119th U.S. Open will be played at Pebble Beach Golf Links, in the storied seaside course’s centennial year; a new PGA Tour event sponsored by the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry will appear on the schedule, played at Lake Merced Golf Club in Daly City†; and the LPGA will return with the second year of the reboot of their Bay Area tournament of recent years, also at Lake Merced.

However, a week before the Steph Curry event, in the last week of September, Bay Area golf fans will have a decision to make. In late September, as the 2019-2020 PGA Tour season is starting up, and the 2019 PGA Champions season is winding down, both tours will be playing in Northern California, at the same time, 160 miles apart. The PGA Tour will be kicking things off with the Safeway Open, at Silverado Resort and Spa in Napa, and the PGA Champions will be bringing along the next generation of golfers in the PURE Insurance Championship Impacting the First Tee, at Pebble Beach and Poppy Hills in the Del Monte Forest.

How did this happen? Aren’t the PGA Tour and the PGA Champions part of the same organization? Do their scheduling people talk to each other? Do they own a calendar—and a map?

Call it a first-world problem for Bay Area golf fans: Which world-class destination do we head to that week to watch golf—the Silverado Resort & Spa in America’s most venerated wine region, the Napa Valley; or Pebble Beach, the ne plus ultra of American public golf, on the picturesque Monterey Peninsula? Do we want to see the young guns of the PGA Tour (but probably few, if any, big stars), or the old-pro PGA Champions, playing alongside youngsters the same age as their grandkids?

What’s a golf fan to do?

Actually, there’s no wrong answer here—either choice results in a great time at a beautiful venue. Late September is prime time for visiting either the California coast or the Napa Valley; the weather is ideal: neither too hot nor too cold, generally sunny and clear, and there’s rarely any fog at the coast. It’s a shame that this scheduling conflict prevents local golf fans from possibly enjoying two weeks of great golf, but we’re still lucky that we have the choice of these two great events at beautiful destination venues.

† (Correction: In early January it was announced that talks with the potential title sponsor of the Steph Curry-sponsored event, Workday, had fallen through, and that the event would not be held in 2019. There is hope that the event will appear in the schedule in 2020, potentially at TPC Harding Park, in San Francisco.)

Bernhard Langer extends Schwab Cup lead with PURE Championship win

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that to win at Pebble Beach one must make a move in the first seven holes, then hang on for dear life for the rest of the round (my apologies to Jane Austen.)  Jerry Kelly, the goateed Everyman of the senior circuit, came out of the blocks in just that fashion in the final round of the 2017 PURE Insurance Championship, opening his round birdie-birdie, and adding an eagle three on the par five 6th hole to pull into a tie with Saturday’s leader, Bernhard Langer, at the turn.

Tour points leader Langer, who started the day at 12-under and leading by one over Kenny Perry, found himself locked into a head-to-head struggle with Kelly, while Saturday’s pursuer, Perry, faded out of contention.

Annika Borrelli, 17, of Alamo, California, holds her finish after her second shot on hole #18 in the third round of the 2017 PURE Insurance Championship at Pebble Beach Golf Links. Paired with six-time major winner Sir Nick Faldo, and representing The First Tee of the Tri-Valley, Borrelli, a senior at Carondelet High School in Concord, finished fifth in the pro/junior competition at the tournament. (Photo by author)

The rest of the field were playing for third as Langer and Kelly separated themselves from the pack over the opening nine, putting a three-to-four-stroke gap between themselves and the 51 players behind them.

Playing one group ahead of Langer, Kelly, who started the round three strokes out of the lead, made up the gap with his fast start, but Langer clung to his lead through the front nine despite a choppy run that saw two of his three birdies negated by a pair of bogeys.

Kelly’s play went a little flat after the turn, with pars and a lone birdie through fourteen, while Langer appeared to hit his stride (and put the lie to the aphorism I hauled out in the first paragraph) by putting up three more birdies, including back-to-back birdies at 13 and 14, to go two-up on Kelly with four holes left to play.

A lawn dart approach to two feet at #15 made Langer’s birdie run a triple, further opening the gap between himself and Kelly, who was playing solid golf but couldn’t buy a birdie putt.

Knowing that Kelly was hot on his heels through the turn, Langer said, “…it made me keep the pedal down and keep trying to make birdies and not just protect par, because that might not have been good enough.”

Langer coasted to victory with routine pars at 16, 17, and the spectacularly beautiful—but difficult—par-five 18th hole, to notch his thirty-fourth Champions Tour win with rounds of 64-67-67–198. The three-shot win is Langer’s fifth of the year, and his all-time best finish at Pebble Beach Golf Links.

Langer last played Pebble Beach in 2001, for the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, where he missed the cut. Previous to that, he played the Bing Crosby/AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am for a six-year stretch from 1985 to 1990, missing the cut in 1990, with best finishes of T3 and T4 in 1987 and 1988.

Despite falling short of the win, Jerry Kelly established a Champions Tour record this week. His rounds of 68, 66, and 67 put him at 14 consecutive rounds in the 60s, breaking the record of 13 set by Hale Irwin in 1999—and almost certainly locking up the PGA Tour Champions Rookie of the Year award (not an oxymoron…) for the 50-year-old from Madison, Wisconsin.

In junior results, two Junior Tour of Northern California players—Annika Borrelli of Alamo, representing The First Tee of the Tri-Valley; and Katie Harris, representing The First Tee of Greater Sacramento, finished 5th and T-6, respectively.

Borrelli, a 17-year-old senior at Carondelet High School in Concord, was paired with six-time major winner and World Golf Hall of Fame member Sir Nick Faldo. Asked about that experience she said, “It was awesome to be in the presence of a legend. When I was first paired with him I was in shock. My dad had always talked about him or I had watched him on TV, so to see his swing in person and right next to him—it was an incredible experience.”

Playing with pro tournament winner Bernhard Langer, Justin Potwora, representing The First Tee of Greater Portland, carded rounds of (net) 62, 67, and 65 to claim the Junior tournament victory.

The Langer/Potwora win marks only the third time in the tournament’s 13-year history that the pro winner was part of the winning pro/junior team; previous pro/pro-junior doubles were recorded by Craig Stadler in 2004, and Kirk Triplett, in 2014.