For the first time in nearly a decade, the state of Washington is a player on the national golf scene.
This week, the world’s best golfers over the age of 50, a group that includes past major winners Tom Watson, Mark O’Meara and Seattle’s Fred Couples, plays in the U.S. Senior Open at Sahalee Country Club. Next month, the U.S. Amateur comes to Chambers Bay in University Place, showcasing some of the country’s best young talent — Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer are all former winners. Add in the regular Champions Tour stop, the Boeing Classic at TPC Snoqualmie Ridge, and that’s a lot of big-time golf being played in an area not known for hosting national tournaments.
The question now is whether this summer is simply an anomaly or a sign of things to come.
The U.S. Open, as big a tournament as there is in golf, will be at Chambers Bay in 2015. But the hope of golf fans around the Northwest is that the Puget Sound region can get back to be a regular destination for professional and top amateur tournaments.
In the 1960s, the PGA Tour’s stars were regulars in the Puget Sound region, coming here every year from 1961-1966 for various forms of the Seattle Open, which was played at Everett Golf and Country Club, Broadmoor Country Club and Inglewood Golf Club. The LPGA also played at Meridian Valley Country Club in Kent from 1982-1996, but when sponsorship money dried up, the tournament left. The Senior Tour also abandoned a regular stop at Inglewood in 1995, but returned 10 years later in the form of the Boeing Classic.
And since Sahalee hosted the PGA Championship in 1998 and the NEC Invitational World Golf Championship in 2002, the Northwest has turned into the corner of the country that golf seemed to forget.
After receiving mostly rave reviews in 1998, Sahalee was promised another PGA Championship to be held in 2010, but the PGA later withdrew, fearing a lack of corporate money available with the 2010 Winter Olympics happening so close in Vancouver, B.C.
The USGA filled that opening by awarding the Senior Open to Sahalee, and with the opening of Chambers Bay in 2007, a massive links course with the size and infrastructure to host big tournaments, the USGA also decided to bring the Amateur and 2015 U.S. Open to the Puget Sound region.
“The Chambers Bay thing kind of came out of the blue,” said Tim Flaherty, the USGA director of the U.S. Senior Open and U.S. Amateur. “To have an Amateur and (Senior) Open coming here in the same year is pretty unique, but that’s a special situation.”
And not only do these tournaments give fans a chance to see good golf, the Amateur being so close is also motivation for some of the area’s top young golfers to qualify. The entire University of Washington golf team, a group that includes Kamiak High School grad Dylan Goodwin, is attempting to qualify. Among other locals who hope to qualify is Kamiak grad and former state champion Reid Martin, a sophomore at Central Florida.
By holding the U.S. Amateur at Chambers Bay five years ahead of the U.S. Open, the USGA hopes to get a preview of what it has to work with when one of the world’s biggest tournaments arrives in 2015.
“If you look at where we’ve had the Open in the last 10 years and where the Amateur has been, you’d see a pretty similar list,” Flaherty said. “Operationally, outside the ropes, there’s no preparing for the Open, the Amateur can’t do that. But … for Mike Davis, (USGA senior director of rules and competitions) who sets up both tournaments, it gives him a great perspective of how the course will be played. It’s a great opportunity for us to get a great look at it.”
And how these tournaments play out this summer could help determine what kind of future big-time golf has in the region. Strong attendance and corporate sponsorships are two of key ingredients for hosting top tournaments, and for a region often neglected by golf’s governing bodies, this summer is a chance to show that Western Washington can be more than a once-every-five-years destination.
As for the local impact, tournaments such as the U.S. Amateur and Senior Open won’t affect Snohomish County as much as a major like the U.S. Open. When the PGA Championship came to Sahalee in 1998, it brought with it enough golf fans from around the country that local courses felt the impact.
“When the PGA Championship was here in 1998, it was huge,” said Mark Rashell, the head professional and general manager at Harbour Pointe Golf Club in Mukilteo. “Huge. Our July and August that year were as good as we have ever had. We did 1,000 extra rounds those two months.”
Rashell hasn’t seen the bookings or gotten the phone calls to indicate a similar effect this summer. In fact, he speculates the course may even lose a few rounds of golf to fans who opt to watch the sport instead of play it. Even so, more big-time tournaments is only a positive for the area, even if the short-term gain isn’t evident.
“It’s fantastic, and it’s huge for this region to get some national exposure,” Rashell said. “Hopefully that will mean PGA Tour events down the road. I don’t know if it will directly impact how much golf people will play around here, but what it will do is help put us on the map as far as a destination for national events like the Amateur and PGA Tour events. And in the long run that’s huge for the community. Tour events roll in and donate tons to local charities, they create volunteer positions and jobs. It would just be a big boost to the community.”
The summer of golf is upon us. The question now is what kind of impact it will have down the road.
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