Golf Pride Concept Helix grip: Innovation at the other end of the club

 The folks at Golf Pride, Winn, Super Stroke, Lamkin, and all the other grip manufacturers aren’t going to like hearing this, but golf club grips are kind of, well… boring. I mean, let’s face it, the really exciting stuff happens at the business end of the club—the club head—right? And even shafts (which only have to be stiff and light, despite all the fancy talk that goes on about them) get a lot of attention for how they (supposedly) affect ball flight.

But grips—what’s exciting about grips? As long as they’re not slippery, they’re doing their job, right? How much room for innovation is there in the design of a tapered rubber sleeve that fits over the end of a club shaft to make it easier to hold onto the golf club? Well, based on what I have seen with the new Concept Helix grip from Golf Pride, there’s plenty.

The Concept Helix grip does away with the adhesive tape and solvents that conventional grips depend on to secure the grip to the shaft, utilizing instead some sort of mechanism that mechanically tightens the grip to the shaft (about which more later).

When I first learned about these grips I read that they require a minimum inside diameter in the shaft. I thought, “Surely they must mean outside diameter”, having in mind the idea of gripping the OD of the shaft, but upon inquiring, I was informed that the mechanism at the butt-end of the grip requires a minimum .480-inch inside diameter to fit inside the shaft. So what mechanism had they come up with that fits inside the shaft yet secures the grip to the outside of the shaft? My engineer’s curiosity was piqued.

The inquiry that answered my minimum-installation-diameter question led to an offer to send me a sample kit—three Concept Helix grips and an installation tool—to try out for myself. When they arrived I had just acquired a 3000-gram-capacity (6.6 pounds) precision scale and a swing weight scale for another equipment-related project, so I was all set to try out these intriguing new grips and get some quantitative data at the same time.

Installation

Installing these grips is a mechanically simple process, but it is also a pretty good hand and forearm workout. After removing the old grip and all traces of tape and adhesive from the target club, you slip the installation tool (the “horn”) over the club shaft just above the ferrule, prongs up. The horn is then slid up the shaft to the butt end and inserted into the open end of the Concept Helix grip.

Bracing the club head against the ground with your feet, you then slide the grip down the shaft, with one hand pushing the horn down while the other guides the top end of the grip. You will hear/feel a bit of a thump when the top of the grip is seated on the end of the shaft, at which point you remove the horn, reverse it, and place the tool’s hex over the “nut” in the end of the grip.

This is where the workout begins. Gripping the club head in one hand and holding the horn in the other, you twist the horn clockwise (remember—“right-tighty, left-loosey”). The instructions tell you that about 30 full turns of the club will do the trick, but then you remove the horn, and while gripping the club head again, twist the grip itself—bottom, middle, top—and then the white end cap, repeating until you can’t twist anymore. A few final turns with the horn on the nut (eight or ten will do it), and you’re finished.

All told, the install time for the Concept Helix for the first time was comparable to installing regular grips—maybe a bit longer if you are well-practiced with the usual grip-tape and solvent drill—the big advantage being the non-messy, non-smelly process.

How do they feel?

While I wasn’t able to get out and play with the two clubs I used in my installation trial, I made quite a number of trial swings with them out in the yard, and the grips felt very secure. The good news is that if the grips do loosen a bit, a few twists will snug them up again. (Whether this constitutes an illegal adjustment during play is a question for the USGA rules people.) The diameter of the installed Concept Helix grips fell somewhere between the Golf Pride Tour Velvet Standard and Midsize grips, and felt comfortable in my Cadet-Large glove-size hands.

Other factors

In preparation for this test I had weighed the two clubs on which I was going to be installing the Concept Helix grips—a six iron and a nine iron—and checked their swing weights. Those clubs, forged cavity-back designs fitted to True Temper Dynamic Gold S300 shafts with Midsize Golf Pride Tour Velvet grips, weighed in at 430.1 grams and 449.7 grams respectively, with swing weights of D4 and D3. The grips themselves weighed in at 55.1 grams for the regular Tour Velvet grip and 65.3 grams for the Concept Helix grip.

I rechecked the swing weight of the clubs after installing the Concept Helix grips and found that they had each gone down about one point, to D3 and D2, respectively—about what you would expect for adding 10 grams or so to the grip end, but not really noticeable to a normal golfer.

How do they work?

Lacking an x-ray machine to take a non-invasive look at the inner workings of the Concept Helix grip, I did what curious reverse-engineering investigators have always done—I disassembled one. (Actually, what I did was more of a dissection, because it involved sharp instruments and a patient that wasn’t going to be getting off the table under their own power.)

What lies under the butt end of the Concept Helix grip, I found, is a threaded rod running inside a rubber sleeve, with a nut (bonded to the rubber sleeve) at the end toward the club head, and a plastic ratchet mechanism at the other end. The rubber sleeve has an at-rest diameter of about .480 inches (hence the shaft ID requirement), and expands to grip the inside of the shaft when the nut is turned.

When I first saw the ads for these grips, influenced I guess by the graphics in the ads, I envisioned a helically wound mesh of wire or fiber which necked down and squeezed the rubber body of the grip against the club shaft. What I found when I opened one up was that the main body of the grip is just rubber, so the rest of the manner of operation of the Concept Helix grip lies, I believe, within the mysteries of the properties of the rubber that makes up the grip.

The properties of polymer materials (rubber, plastics, etc.) is not my area of expertise; in my career as a mechanical engineer I have most often dealt with, and am much more comfortable with, metallic materials. I do know that some rubber materials react to physical strain in interesting ways, and the engineers at Golf Pride, who obviously know a thing or two about rubber, have figured out how to make these properties work for them.

Does the pattern on the outside of the grip, a cross-hatch of shallow grooves about 4/10 of an inch in length, pointing up and to the left at an angle of about 45º to the long axis of the grip/shaft, crossed near the midpoint by much-shorter V-shaped perpendicular notches, have anything to do with it? I’m guessing that the answer is “yes”, but I’m also guessing that the Golf Pride engineers would change the subject if one were to ask.

The bottom line

It will be interesting to see whether the Concept Helix grips catch on. They are not necessarily that much quicker to install than conventional glue-on grips or compressed-air grips—but they are much less messy, can be very easily removed, and require only one tool, albeit a very specialized one: the horn. They offer no modification options—there is no putting a few extra wraps of tape under the grip here or there to fine-tune the fit—and they come in only one size (so far), but they offer a fit and feel that is right in the sweet spot of Golf Pride’s Tour Velvet models.

Their primary attraction may lie in the clean, simple installation process, for golfers who want to, or have to, be able to re-grip their own clubs but who lack the facilities—a workshop, garage, or a spare room and an understanding spouse—which conventional grips require. Whether that is enough to sustain them in the market, only time will tell.

(Cost of the Concept Helix grips is $9.99 each, with a minimum purchase of three grips, including the horn. For more information, and to order, go to www.concepthelix.com.)

It Takes a World War or a Global Pandemic to Derail the “Crosby Clambake”

 Golf, being a wholly outdoor game, is subject to the whims of the weather, and nowhere more so than at the seaside venues which carry on the traditions of the game’s nascency in Scotland. The AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, contested on the famed oceanside venue on the Monterey Peninsula, and two neighboring courses, has had its share of weather delays over the years: a rain delay in 1996 that postponed the final round until the following August, a hailstorm in 2019 that pushed the final round to a Monday playoff finish, and even a snow delay in 1962. Arguably the biggest changes in the tournament’s history, however, have come about as a result of World War II, and a global pandemic.

The original Crosby Clambake, as it was informally known in its early years, was played at Rancho Santa Fe, in the San Diego area, from 1937 to 1942, and then halted, as many events were, by the United States’ entry into World War II. Revived in 1947 and moved to Pebble Beach, the event became a staple of the Monterey Peninsula events calendar.

Through thick and thin, fair weather and foul, PGA Tour pros and their amateur partners have flocked to the golf mecca of the Monterey Peninsula to take part in this unique event, undeterred by the unpredictable weather conditions. The weather has been so much of a factor over the years that the phrase “Crosby weather” has come into use among locals, even non-golfers, as a shorthand term for the widely variable conditions that the area is subject to in the January-February timeframe in which the tournament has been played over the years.

The 2021 event, however, is faced with a more ominous obstacle—the COVID-19 pandemic—which will give this year’s event a (hopefully) unique position in the tournament’s history: for the first time, the tournament will be played by professionals alone, with no amateur partners.

We have become accustomed over the last several months to seeing golf tournaments being played without spectators, and with the continuing high rate of new cases of COVID-19 as well as deaths due to the disease, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the amateur component of the event is being cut this year.

With the field down to just 156 professionals, the usual triumvirate of courses; most recently Pebble Beach Golf Links, Spyglass Hill Golf Course, and the Monterey Peninsula Country Club’s Shore Course, will be trimmed to just the two Del Monte Company properties: Pebble Beach and Spyglass Hill. 

The tournament will still be enjoyable for television viewers—watching the pros take on these two venues is always a worthwhile way to spend a couple of weekend afternoons—and with any luck we will get to see a bit more of Spyglass Hill than we have in the past.

Spyglass is the course which prompted Jack Nicklaus to comment “Pebble and Cypress (Cypress Point Golf Club, which was in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am lineup until 1990), they make you want to play golf. Spyglass Hill—that’s different; Spyglass makes you want to go fishing.”

Acknowledged to be the most difficult of the three courses in play in the tournament, Spyglass Hill, a Robert Trent Jones design, was a controversial selection when it first entered the lineup, in 1967. Brand new, and in need of some growing in and adjusting, Spyglass drew approbation for the first couple of years that it was in the line-up; after its tournament debut an anonymous amateur contestant commented, “We played Spyglass under some unfortunate conditions—it was open.”

Not only can we hope to see more of Spyglass, but with any luck the course will be allowed to show its teeth to an extent that has been lacking in recent years. Under normal conditions all three courses are played to the same flags for the first three days so that all contestants play the same setup—which means that the hole locations at Spyglass Hill are eased up for the sake of the amateur contestants.

With a pros-only field this year, I hope to see both Spyglass Hill and Pebble played to more challenging flags than we are accustomed to seeing during this event, which will silence some of the naysayers who  decry this tournament as a fluff stop on the PGA Tour, and the courses—Pebble in particular—as beautiful, but not necessarily challenging.

In any event, what we will see, I imagine, is that this event, a cherished, long-standing tradition on the Monterey Peninsula, will carry on despite the challenges presented by the current health crisis—and come back as strong as ever in 2022.

Is Cobra’s new 3D-printed putter the real deal, or just hype?

I just read an article on an online golf outlet about Cobra Golf’s new King Supersport-35 Putter, touted as the first 3D-printed putter. Unfortunately, like so many equipment “reviews” in both print and online golf media, this article reads more like a press release from the club manufacturer than a meaningful evaluation of the product. I have met the author of the article, and played golf with him, and he’s a very nice guy – but he’s not an engineer. I, on the other hand, am—a mechanical engineer as it happens, and I have just shy of 40 years’ experience in the design and manufacture of mechanical equipment, so I have the background to call out the club manufacturer, Cobra, on some of the claims that are repeated in that article.

The first thing that struck me as wrong is that this is not the first 3D-printed golf club to hit the market. Admittedly, the others of which I am aware are from much smaller boutique brands with very little market penetration; for example, Round4 Putters, which was making some noise online a couple of year ago but which seems to have disappeared from the landscape since then.

Callaway and Ping—both major manufacturers—have experimented with 3D putters. Back in 2015 Ping marketed a soup-to-nuts custom design and fitting process for a 3D-printed putter that would result in a personalized one-off putter at a cost of something like $7,000 to $9,000, but have yet to bring one to the retail marketplace. So Cobra are the first to bring out a mass-market (but still pricey, at $399 MSRP) putter, but not the first 3D-printed putter on the market.

On the technical side, Cobra states that 3D printing allows the formation of a latticework of metal that allows mass to be relocated from the middle of the head to the perimeter resulting in, they say, “the highest MOI without the need for additional fixed weights.” Now, it is true that that fancy-looking lattice structure would be extremely difficult to produce by conventional manufacturing methods, but is it really necessary? Or effective? Why not just hog that space out by CNC milling machine, removing the same amount of material, or even more, to get the desired effect?

You see, that fancy lattice isn’t structural; it doesn’t provide support for the upper portion of the club head, or stiffen the face of the putter—it’s just there to look fancy and justify the use of 3D printing. And while fixed weights may not be as sexy as a 3D-printed lattice, they are easily installed by conventional means. For that matter, removable weights allow adjustment of the mass distribution of the putter by the use of heavier or lighter interchangeable weights, yielding a wider range of performance and fitting options in the same basic putter head with very simple manufacturing methods.

To their credit, Cobra is utilizing a new, advanced 3D-printing method developed by Hewlett-Packard that delivers the precision and complexity of high-resolution 3D metal printing at higher production rates, and thus at lower cost, than the powder-bed fusion methods that have been used previously.

Rather than use a laser to sinter metallic powder layer by layer, HP’s 3D Metal Jet process “prints” a binding agent into a matrix of metallic powder, building up the desired shape a layer at a time. The binder is cured by a heat source, producing a high-strength “green” part which is then sintered (essentially, baked at high temperature to fuse the metallic powder matrix) to create the final part. After some cosmetic finishing and CNC milling of the most precise finished dimensions, as necessary, the part is complete. This process is faster than powder-bed fusion, and has been shown to produce more uniform material properties in the final part.

That’s all well and good, and there are any number of applications for which this process would be a manufacturing godsend—but does it really bring any performance advantages to the world of golf?

As I mentioned previously, the one real justification for the 3D printing process which is touted by Cobra’s ad copy, the internal lattice, is advertised as a means to increase MOI (it’s y- or vertical-axis MOI they’re talking about, which they don’t specify, but when considering the dynamic properties of a shape, it is important to know, and specify, which axis—X, Y, or Z— is being considered). Looked at realistically, however, the same mass distribution could quite easily be achieved by more conventional methods, so why bother with the whiz-bang 3D-printing method?

It all comes down to one word: hype (also “marketing”, which is far too often the same thing.)

Let’s face it—golf clubs, especially putters, being sturdy metal objects which don’t wear out quickly, and whose one wear-prone component, the grip, can be easily renewed, don’t support model turnover. Not, at least, unless the consumer can be convinced that the latest model will take strokes off your game by allowing you to hit the ball farther, straighter, with more precision (or some combination of the three).

Real, meaningful advances in golf club design are rare—the last one which really struck me as innovative and with real performance advantages was Callaway’s “Jailbreak” technology, which is kind of a hokey name for their use of a pair of vertical reinforcing rods which connect the crown and base of the head of a driver, fairway wood, or hybrid,  isolating the face so that it can do its job more efficiently by allowing the face of the club to flex and rebound without distorting the body of the club head.

So, to my rather cynical (but knowledgeable, if I say so myself) eye, Cobra’s new 3D-printed putter, while sexy and cool, and produced using a very interesting new manufacturing method, is just another hyped-up golf product that is being sold to the golfing public on the strength of some whiz-bang new technology, when it is really just a lot of smoke-and-mirrors marketing designed to generate another product cycle. It is another example of a golf club manufacturer selling golfers more new clubs they don’t need, when said golfers would benefit more from practice and instruction than they will from dropping a load of cash on the latest fancy new club design.

Read greens like a pro with the help of a GolfLogix Green Book

If you have watched much, or any, golf on television in the last couple of years, you have probably seen the pros reach for their back pocket when they get to the green. What they are reaching for is a green book, the logical follow-on to the ubiquitous yardage books that pros and their caddies have consulted during their rounds for many years. Made possible by the development of laser mapping technology that has been used to read the putting surfaces of golf courses all over the world, these books depict the contours of the green with contour lines like a topographical map, and the slopes as colors, or with arrows indicating direction and relative speed, or sometimes both.

Until recently these handy references weren’t widely available, but now, thanks to companies like GolfLogix, the makers of a smartphone golf scoring app, every recreational golfer with a few bucks to spare can have green books for many of their favorite courses.

The GolfLogix folks have mapped the greens of 528 golf courses in California at last count, and as near as I can tell from a rough count of the list on their website (https://store.golflogix.com), they have produced books for about 85% of the courses in the Bay Area/Monterey Peninsula region, so the chances are good that they will have a book for whatever course you want to play.

I have always contended that the putting stroke is the least difficult skill to master in the game of golf; the problem is, determining the proper line to hit the ball on, and how hard to hit it, are the two most difficult skills to master in golf—which is why putting befuddles so many golfers.

Here is where, if I were a pitchman for this product, I would start the spiel about how the GolfLogix green book will transform your game, drop strokes off your score, and turn you into the golfing god you always knew that you could be—but I’m not, and I won’t. What I will say is that these books are a handy on-course guide, as well as a great teaching tool.

The GolfLogix green books include standard yardage book features—diagrams of each hole with yardages and features depicted—with two diagrams of each green: a heat map which depicts the area and severity of the slope of the green with colors ranging from white (dead flat) to red (steepest), and a slope map with arrows which show the direction, and by their length the severity, of the slope of the different areas of the green. A handy YouTube video on their website will get you up to speed on how to use all the features of the book.

Of course, reading the extent and severity of the slope is just the start. Grain, surface dampness, and the type of turf you’re rolling on are also significant factors—but knowing the slopes is a good start.

It may take you a few rounds to get the hang of correlating the slope markings on the heat maps and slope maps to the contours of the green that you see with the naked eye; but honestly, after you do you may find that you are reading the greens better than you were before you started using the book—and may just leave it in your pocket when you pull the putter from the bag. Whichever way you go—using the green book as a teaching tool to boost your green-reading skills, or as a regular on-course guide, your game is sure to benefit from the addition of this arrow to your golf-skills quiver.

“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.

Mixed results for NorCal golfers on opening day of 2020 U.S. Open

There are half a dozen NorCal-associated golfers in the field at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club, and at the end of the first round the results they posted range from a respectable 1-under to a worrisome 8-over.

Collin Morikawa plays a shot from the greenside rough on the third hole during the first round at the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club (West Course) in Mamaroneck, N.Y. on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020. (Darren Carroll/USGA)

Happily for we natives of NCGA territory, the two top scorers among the group are Northern California-born—Clovis’ Bryson DeChambeau, and Sacramento native Cameron Champ.  This pair of long-ball hitters from the Central Valley carded rounds of 1-over (DeChambeau) and 3-over (Champ) on the venerable Winged Foot GC layout.

The group of four remaining players of special interest to NorCal golfers comprises two SoCal golfers and two out-of-staters, all with college golf connections to the Bay Area.

Cal Men’s Golf is represented by Southern California natives Collin Morikawa and Max Homa; former Stanford golfer Brando Wu, of Scarsdale, NY, and Colorado-born 2011 San Jose State grad Mark Hubbard are also in the field.

Wu, a 2019 Stanford grad, is playing in his second U.S. Open—his first as a professional—after topping the points list of the developmental-level Korn Ferry Tour series in 2019. He claimed the “best of the rest” title among NorCal affiliated players with a 4-over 74. Opening with a 2-under 33 on the front nine, Wu fell prey to the Winged Foot rough on the homeward nine after hitting only four of eight fairways.

Wu may be remembered for receiving his Stanford diploma on the 18th green of Pebble Beach Golf Links at last year’s U.S. Open—nice compensation for having to miss his graduation ceremony at the Palo Alto campus.

Cal Men’s golf standout and 2020 PGA Championship winner Collin Morikawa found the venerable Westchester County golf course heavier sledding than TPC Harding Park, where he hoisted the PGA’s Wanamaker Trophy six weeks ago after taking the 2020 PGA Chmpionship. The SoCal native seemed never to entirely get his feet underneath him on Winged Foot’s turf, going 36-40–76 largely due to a fall-off in his usual masterful iron work (-1.08 SG:Approach), around the greens (-2.37 SG) and weak putting (-0.83 SG:Putting). 

Mark Hubbard, a former San Jose State golfer, found himself in a similar position to Morikawa at the conclusion of his first round, with a 6-over 76 on one birdie and seven bogeys. Hubbard had his own 18th-green moment at Pebble Beach Golf Links in 2015, when he proposed to his girlfriend, Meghan, after completing the first round of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

Of course someone has to be last, and in this accounting of NorCal-affiliated golfers, that dubious honor falls to former Cal Men’s Golf stalwart Max Homa. A decently strong performance off the tee (+1.12 SG – 9 of 14 fairways) wasn’t enough to carry his round in the face of numbers like -2.17 SG:Approach, -2.38 SG:Around the Green, and -2.03 SG:Putting. 

Homa can take heart (I suppose) from the fact that he closed out his first round one stroke better than fellow SoCal native Phil Mickelson, and saw a lot more of Winged Foot’s fairways than the veteran southpaw, who only found two of 14 in the first round.