June 15, 2017
Starting Monday, the 106th California Amateur Championship will get underway at the historic Olympic Club in San Francisco. In the Spring edition of NCGA Golf, esteemed San Francisco Chronicle golf writer Ron Kroichick explained why the Olympic Club’s gates are so golden, especially when it comes to amateur golf.
Long before he cradled the sparkling silver U.S. Open trophy five years ago, Webb Simpson heard all about the Olympic Club. Its tilted fairways and tiny greens. Its curious tradition of crowning The Other Guy as champion.
So as Simpson walked those fairways and read those greens during the 2012 Open, the past lingered in San Francisco’s familiar, foggy air. Jack Fleck-Ben Hogan. Billy Casper-Arnold Palmer. Scott Simpson-
Tom Watson. Lee Janzen-Payne Stewart.
History lurks at nearly every turn on Olympic’s Lake Course.
“I felt it,” Webb Simpson said in February, when he returned to Northern California for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. “I love golf history, so I kind of knew what was going on. I had always heard
about Olympic, and then I got a chance to play there in the U.S. Amateur in 2007. “That was my first taste of Olympic. I love everything about it.”
The Olympic Club’s rich history usually begins with the five U.S. Opens it has hosted, and rightly so. But the history stretches deeper. Olympic, the oldest athletic club in the United States, owns a long
association with amateur sports, as evident in its upcoming role as host of the 106th California Amateur Championship.
Fittingly, this is one of the nation’s oldest state amateur golf events, dating to 1912. READ MORE
