30 years later, LCAGC going strong
Circuit season opens Saturday with One Person Scramble
The year was 1994. Bill Clinton was in his first term as president of the United States. China finally connected to the Internet. The movie of the year was Schlinder's List and it was directed by Steven Spielberg. The movie and the director won Oscars. Nelson Mandela was elected as the president of South Africa as apartheid came to an end. O.J. Simpson got national television exposure as he led police on a low-speed chase through the freeways of Los Angeles.
Troy Aikman and the Dallas Cowboys defeated the Buffalo Bills to win the Super Bowl. The Houston Rockets won the NBA title while Michael Jordan played the outfield for the AA Birmingham Barons. We will never know if Giants infielder Matt Williams would have broken Roger Maris' home run record because major league baseball went out on strike. Sad to say, there was no World Series that year. George Foreman recaptured the heavyweight title of the world. In the world of music, Curt Cobain, the driving force behind Nirvana, took his own life.
Meanwhile the golf scene in Lake County was moving from stagnant to active. In 1994 there were more than a dozen scratch golfers with games that traveled. Arguably the best of the bunch were short-game guru Gary Bagnani and bomber John McMillan, club champions at Adams Springs and Hidden Valley Lake, respectively. Charles Creecy was a ball striker supreme who sometimes hit 18 greens in regulation and consistently played par golf. Mike
Lemmon was a talented linkster while Dan Leiva perhaps made more birdies than anyone else in the county. Bruce Dokken was a solid competitor who had no weaknesses in his game. Ron Kenneally was a gifted southpaw golfer who had both the power game as well as finesse. Craig Kinser was a tenacious competitor who played great golf when he wasn't coaching the football team at Upper Lake High School. Lower Lake High School football coach Bill Cox was another bomber with loads of talent. Hidden Valley Lake superintendent Dana Waldor was a rock-solid striker of the golf ball. George Hoberg Jr. was the elder statesman of the group and was a true iron master with multiple club championships. This columnist was the golf coach at Kelseyville High School, could hang in there with Lake County's best, and spent summers going to tournaments from Chicago to Michigan to Ireland. A pair of Kelseyville High School freshmen, Shawn Auten and Brels Solomon, were already shaking up the Coastal Mountain Conference with subpar scores. Juan Lopez was just starting to find his game.
Yet with all that talent as well as a bevy of avid bogey golfers who liked to compete, there was no real golf scene in Lake County prior to 1994. In 1992
this columnist reinstated the Lake County Amateur. It had been on hiatus since 1985 because no one wanted to run it. Meanwhile Mark Wotherspoon became the PGA professional at Buckingham Golf and Country Club and brought with him the golf marketing skills he had perfected while serving as a golf pro in the Inland Empire. It was only a matter of time that both men heard rumblings from the area's active amateur golfers who wanted some form of an active circuit that was open to all golfers in Lake County. We both felt we could enhance the Lake County golf scene with a circuit.
At the onset of 1994, the Lake County Amateur had had two successful reincarnations with 120-man fields playing at Adams Springs and Hobergs, the two nine-hole courses on Cobb Mountain. Buckingham had introduced the Lake County Open during those same two years. Wotherspoon had initiated a two-person better ball tournament in 1993. This columnist had written what would be an incendiary column for many Lake County golfers, contending that the region's top linksters played their golf on Cobb Mountain. That led to the introduction of a countywide Tournament of Champions. The LCAGC would have a four-tourney season.
The Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit hosted its inaugural tournament in April of 1994 with the playing of the TOC at Buckingham. Bagnani came up the 18th fairway in the final pairing with a one-stroke lead over McMillan. McMillan hit the par-5 green in three shots and Bagnani had just a 50-yard wedge over the left bunker to secure the first ever win in the brand new LCAGC. A gifted wedge player, Bagnani misjudged the shot and came up two yards short and buried his ball in the lip of the bunker with a next to impossible lie. It took him two shots to get out of the sand, McMillan two-putted for a par while Bagnani twoputted for a double-bogey, and John McMillan was the Lake County Tournament of Champions titlist. RecordBee sports editor Brian Sumpter was there to take photos of the finalhole drama, wrote up the tournament in the paper in glowing terms, and the Lake County Circuit was off and running.
As fate would have it, 1994 concluded with a four-tournament circuit — the TOC, the Partners, the Open, and the Amateur. Bagnani and McMillan would end up in a virtual dead heat atop the On the Links Golfer of the Year standings. Both were duly honored. The following year this columnist was the GOY. In 1996 KHS junior Brels Soloman took home the top spot. Charles Creecy was golfer of the year in 1997 and 1998. Bagnani was the solo GOY in 1999. In 2000 Mike Lemmon won the Open, the Amateur and the TOC to get to the top spot. The Lake County Amateur Golf Circuit was a rip-roaring success with full fields of 78-plus golfers and heavy competition in not only the scratch flight, but also in newly developed categories for net, senior and senior net flights. Tournaments were being constantly added to the calendar.
This Saturday, Buckingham is the site for the Lake County One Person Scramble. It will mark the beginning of year 30 for the Lake County Circuit. Wotherspoon and this columnist are still around, yet we now seem to be into the third generation of competitive golfers on the local circuit. The One Person is a relatively new tournament.
It is followed by the Two Person Scramble, then the County Match Play, and then the longtime Lake County Open. The Three Person is contested in May, and it is followed by two June tourneys, namely the Senior Amateur and the long-running Partners. The circuit hosts two junior events in July with the playing of the Buckingham Summer Classic and the Lake County Junior at Adams Springs. Late August is when the grand-daddy of local tournaments, the Lake County Amateur, is contested. The season concludes with the playing of the Alternate Shot and the TOC in October.
I'm not so sure that Wotherspoon and I ever envisioned a local amateur circuit with an ongoing 30-year history of great golf, but here we are today. I personally don't look too far backward into 1994 except for one thing. Whatever happened to those Dallas Cowboys?