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Rookie of the year
Playing in his first GCSAA National Championship, a Texas superintendent comes away with victory and memories to last a lifetime.
Scott Hollister
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Photo by Bob Straus |
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re Joe Anderson, and you’ve just won the 2006 GCSAA National Championship.
Just a few days earlier, the tournament was nothing more than a good excuse for you and your wife to get away for a few days of vacation in Houston. You’d play a little golf. She’d shop a little. Fun would be had by all.
But now you’ve gone out and won the darn thing — in your first time playing in the event, no less — and all hell has broken loose. As you stand on the back patio at Redstone Golf Club, overlooking a golf course that’s as green as any you’ve ever seen, your head is spinning just slightly less than it was 30 minutes earlier as you stood over that 20-inch tap-in of a putt that would win you the championship.
You’re shaking hands with well-wisher after well-wisher, only a few of whom you’ve ever met before ...
Then you’re chatting with the CEO of your national professional organization, a man you’ve only seen before in the pages of this magazine, and he’s telling you about going to Atlanta and meeting Nancy Lopez at the Opening Session and making a speech before 2,000 people in a giant convention center …
Then you’re introduced to a high-ranking official from The Toro Co., the tournament’s corporate partner for the last 12 years, and you’re making small talk, all the while thinking about how cool it would be to see some of Toro’s latest and greatest toys rolling around your little nine-hole country club back home in Center, Texas. Heck, you’d even take just seeing those latest and greatest toys at the national trade show — if you ever got a chance to go to the trade show, that is …
Then you’ve got a big, shiny trophy just a little smaller than the Stanley Cup shoved into your hands, along with a glass full of champagne, for a toast in your honor …
Then you’ve got reporters and photographers in your face, wanting interviews and pictures, something that has never happened to you before, not even in your collegiate golf days …
Then you’re on a cell phone, a terribly chipper voice on the other end, and you’re making travel plans to get you from Houston to Atlanta less than 24 hours from right now so you can meet Nancy Lopez and speak to 2,000 people and finally experience that trade show that you’ve been dying to see …
Then you’re at the trunk of your car, unloading your clubs and stripping off your golf shoes, alone with your own thoughts for the first time in an hour, and you wonder, “What just happened here?”
Imagine that. Then imagine how you’d explain all of that to your wife.
Anderson, the East Texas superintendent who did indeed win the 2006 GCSAA National Championship in his very first attempt and did indeed get to do all of those wonderful things, laughs at the memory of it all.
Especially the part about telling his wife. “I had called her earlier to give her an update, so when I called her back and told her I had won and was fixin’ to go to Atlanta the next day, she was like, ‘What are you talking about? You better explain what the heck is going on over there.’”
Brave new world
Anderson’s improbable sudden-death victory over fellow Texan Chris Webster was one of many things that were going on this year in Houston. And with all due respect to Anderson, the most notable of those was the successful unveiling of a brand new format for GCSAA’s annual golf event.
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The top level of competition — the National Championship — shelved its 36-hole format played out on two different courses for a 54-hole showdown contested at one venue, in this case, the Tournament Course (which will host the PGA Tour’s Shell Houston Open this month) at the previously mentioned Redstone Golf Club. This year, a field of 86 competitors took part in the National Championship.
The rest of the tournament — the Golf Classic — was largely unchanged from years past, as 255 players squared off in two days of flighted play using the point quota system. Those players also had the option of playing in the Four-Ball competition prior to the start of the Golf Classic, and that fun event attracted 218 players. Both the Four-Ball and Golf Classic were played on the Panther Trail and Oaks courses at the Woodlands Resort.
Also unchanged this year was the support of Toro, which has served as the event’s corporate partner for the last 12 years, and the PGA of America, which continued to assist in sending some of its top rules officials — a group with countless Masters, U.S. Opens and PGA Championships under their belts — to work the GCSAA event.
He was born in a small town
The city of Center, Texas (population 5,678), might be small and a long way from just about everywhere — two hours and change north of the Gulf of Mexico and hard along the Texas-Louisiana border, Center’s closest “big-city” neighbor is Nacogdoches, about 35 miles to the west — but to Anderson, a nine-year member of GCSAA, it’s home. He grew up in nearby Tenaha and has been working at Center Country Club, a nine-hole layout with 200 dedicated members, for the past decade.
Even when he headed off to college, he didn’t stray far from this part of the world. He did two years in the junior college ranks at Grayson County College in Denison, Texas, and then finished his undergraduate work at Oklahoma City University. He played on the golf teams at both schools, but he was never the star of the show. “I was never the best player on the team. I was never the worst player on the team,” he says modestly. “Just kind of the middle of the pack.”
Like a lot of superintendents at courses with bigger to-do lists than maintenance budgets, work at Center CC always made the prospect of taking time away from the office for a trip to the GCSAA National Championship, or even the Golf Industry Show, more fantasy than reality for Anderson. He considered trucking to San Antonio for the golf event back in 2001, but eventually talked himself out of it.
He didn’t let that happen this time around. “I got married in the last four or five years, had a baby, had work and played less golf than I ever have before,” he says. “I know it probably wasn’t the best time, but I finally decided to go ahead and play this year.”
Quiet start, big finish
Now, imagine once again that you’re Anderson. You go out and shoot the third-best score of round one, a 1-over-par 73, but you might as well have played the round under cover of darkness with as much attention as you’re getting afterward. All anyone wants to talk about at that night’s Super Bowl party is tournament veteran Richard Stuntz, CGCS at Alvamar Golf and Country Club in Lawrence, Kan. Just one day after joking with GCSAA staffers that no one in the championship field would go under par at Redstone, the 1993 champion turned back the clock with what would be the only under-par round of the tournament, a 71.
And now it’s the second round of play, and you’re one of only a handful of players not to blink when Mother Nature decides to make her presence known with a gusty north wind that sends scores into the stratosphere. You’re one of just 10 players to finish the day under 80, sharing daily honors with Mike Stieler, CGCS at Riverbend Golf Club in Madera, Calif., with your 74. When the dust settles, you find yourself in the lead going into the final round. Suddenly, you’re not so anonymous anymore.
“I knew I had a one-shot lead, and that’s something that was in the back of my mind, no doubt,” Anderson says later. “I was nervous (heading into the final round). It’d been a long time since I’d been in a position like that in a competitive tournament, and it did affect me.”
Did it ever. Imagine it: You’re now in the final group in the final round of a national golf championship, and you stumble badly out of the gate, double bogeying the first hole. Then you bogey the sixth hole. Then the seventh. Then you three-putt for another bogey on No. 9.
The only thing keeping your head above water at this point is an eagle on the par-5 eighth hole, which leaves you tied for the lead with Webster, another first-time tournament participant playing in his home state, heading to the back nine.
Things don’t start much better on the back, as you bogey both the 11th and 12th holes to fall two back of Webster, the assistant superintendent at Houston’s Lakeside Country Club. You give yourself your best pep talk and keep your head up, though. “I wasn’t feeling great at that point, obviously. But I also felt like there was still enough time to catch (Webster).”
And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what you do over the course of the next four holes.
You gain one shot back on the par-3 14th, when Webster can’t get up and down from a greenside bunker for his par. You pick up another and the tie when the exact same scenario plays out on the par-3 16th hole.
But then comes No. 17, and you begin to think your luck may be running out. Your tee shot drifts right into a water hazard, and you have to take a drop and the dreaded penalty stroke that comes with it. You put your approach in a bunker to the right of the green. You escape that OK, but can’t make the putt coming back and walk off the green with another double bogey. You’re now two shots behind Webster, who pars the hole, with just one 442-yard par 4 to go.
“I really thought I was beat,” Anderson admits.
Reversal of fortunes
On most days, in most tournaments, you would be beat. But not on this day, and not in this tournament.
You think, “Well, maybe,” when Webster, a seven-year GCSAA member, sends his tee shot on 18 well right and into a thick rough at the base of a tree. When he can only advance his second shot a few dozen yards from that spot and his third shot zooms into the bunker at the front right of the green, your head picks up even more, considering you hit a near-perfect drive and an even better second shot that has you pin high, 20 feet from the hole.
“After he hit his third shot in the bunker and I’m on the green, I’m thinking I definitely had a shot,” is how Anderson puts it, marveling at the reversal in fortunes that had taken place in the last 10 minutes.
But you haven’t seen anything yet. Webster comes out of the bunker hot, and faces a downhill putt so long that it might have to stop and ask for directions on the way to the hole. It misses, but not by much. He’s got just under two feet for his bogey, meaning if you can two-putt from where you sit, you can force a playoff.
The first part of that two-putt comes off without a hitch, as you leave a nearly picture-perfect lag putt just inside Webster. He steps up to his ball to finish off a truly forgettable 18th hole, when the hole gets just a little more forgettable.
He misses the putt. For a triple-bogey 7.
Now, your mind is racing. “I was thinking, ‘Holy cow! I can actually win this thing,’” Anderson says later. You step up to your putt, try to calm your frayed nerves just long enough to finish this thing up, take aim at the hole and then …
You miss too. Apparently misery does indeed love company. Playoff, here we come.
“The putt didn’t feel that bad,” Anderson says. “It just lipped out. Truthfully, I can’t believe that either of us missed those putts.”
Finishing it off
So now you’re back to where your day began — the 366-yard par-4 first hole. That time through didn’t end well — a double bogey — so after putting your drive in the first cut of rough on the right side of the fairway, you think back to where things went wrong earlier.
“I knew I had to hit it past the bunkers on the right,” Anderson explains. “That’s where I went earlier in the day. I knew the green sloped away from me, so I felt like if I could just get the ball up there, it would trickle down to where I could, at the very least, make par, if not birdie.”
And since Webster was in a greenside bunker, needing to once again get up and down for his par, you like your strategy. Now, if only the execution can match.
It does, and then some. From the moment the ball leaves the club face, it’s drawing an almost perfect arc toward the flag stick. For the briefest of moments, you think it might go in. It doesn’t, but it stops just a few inches from the hole. Tap-in range. Game-over range.
“I don’t know how I made that putt because I was shaking pretty good,” Anderson recalls. “I just kind of hoped I could shake it in there.”
You do. And now you’re the winner of the GCSAA National Championship. In your first try.
Imagine that.
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