STOCKTON – The NCGA Junior Tour licked off its third season of competition with its Spring Series I championship at Brookside CC in Stockton.

While the year changed, the juniors winning titles didn’t as Casie Cathrea of Livermore took the Girls’ title, with a two-stroke win over Paige Lee of Folsom. Ashley Noda of Folsom was four back in third place. Cathrea competed in the LPGA’s CVS Pharmacy Challenge last year.

The Boys competition saw defending champion Bryson Dechambeau of Clovis post a commanding 11-stroke victory over Travis Rowney of Pleasanton. Austin Whitworth of Riverbank and Christopher Dial of Stockton tied for third. Dechambeau won three Junior Tour events in 2009 as well as the Junior Players Championship.

In the first flights, for competitors with a handicap of 7.5 or higher, Troy Maxoutopoulis of Pleasanton carded a 11-stroke win over Eashwar Thenpattinam of San Jose and Eamonn Coughlin of Fair Oaks. Keegan Dominguez of Salinas won the girls competition by four strokes over Liz Liao of San Jose and by five over Chloe Corriveau of Monterey.

Ryan Han of Hollister took first, followed by Dayton Pierce of Sutter and Justin Choi of Dublin in the Boys Net Division. In the Girls’ Net Division, Sara Scarlett of Woodland earned first place  followed by Natalie Bodnar of Pleasanton and Christine Uhalde of Modesto.

The Junior Tour heads to Sierra Meadows CC next week for the Spring Series II Championship.

• Results and Scorecards – Boys’ Championship Flight
• Results and Scorecards – Girls’ Championship Flight
• Results and Scorecards – Boys’ First Flight
• Results and Scorecards – Girls’ First Flight

Boys' Championship Flight: Christopher Dial, Austin Wentworth, Travis Rowney and champion Bryson Dechambeau

Girls' Championship Flight: Ashley Noda, Paige Lee and champion Casie Cathrea

Boys' First Flight: Eamonn Coughlin, Eashwar Thenpattinam and champion Troy Maxoutopoulis

Girls' First Flight: Liz Liao and champion Keegan Dominguez

Net Division: champions Natalie Bodnar and Ryan Han

Written in a breezy style, the various short chronological entries detail the seminal moments in golf’s history followed by what the author calls, “explications, amplifications and digressions” remarking on those events, often in hilarious fashion.

Beard, a noted humor writer who co-founded National Lampoon and served as its editor during the magazine’s heyday during the ‘70s, also penned The Official Exceptions to the Rules of Golf, a wry look at the often confounding rules.

The book was released in December. Below in an excerpt from the chapter chronicling the tumultuous era beginning in 1988, a period that would still resonate more than 20 years later with the introduction of new groove regulations.

1988

Curtis Strange wins the first of two consecutive U.S. Opens. His successful defense of the title the following year would mark the first time any player had captured the trophy twice in a row since Ben Hogan’s storied back-to back wins in 1950 and 1951. Much impressed with his own feat, Strange exuberantly exclaimed, “Move over, Ben Hogan,” to which the Hawk responded with the tart and astute riposte, “Make room, Jack Fleck.” Strange never won again on the Tour.

Ignoring the trivial threats to the integrity of the game posed by several looming innovations like the long-shafted putter, the oversized titanium-headed Big Bertha driver, and golf balls that are clearly capable of being hit well over 350 yards, the USGA decides to ban as nonconforming the grooves on the clubfaces of Ping Eye 2 Irons.

1989

Four golfers score holes in one on the par-3 6th hole at Oak Hill on the same day during the U.S. Open. The USGA toys with the idea of placing the pin in an active sprinkler head for the following round but reluctantly decides that the resultant intermittent wetting of the nearly dead bent grass on the putting surface will only serve to allow players who land their tee shots on the laughably fast green but who do not make an ace to somehow rescue par.

Having failed to realize that in Ping founder and owner Karsten Solheim they have, amazingly enough, encountered an individual as obstinate, arrogant, conceited, and boneheaded as they are, the governing board of the USGA quietly settle the lawsuit he brought against the organization, modifying the iron-groove ban to grandfather in the original clubs and apply the new regulations only to future models. Chastened, they turn their attention to more pressing issues, legalizing hollow-headed plastic bunker rakes, setting a maximum amount of cleaning fluid in ball washers as one gallon (3.78 liters), and establishing an overall standard diameter of 3 inches (76.2 mm) for golf cart cup holders.

1990

Following a controversy during the PGA Championship at Shoal Creek Golf Club in Birmingham, Alabama, the PGA announces that it will no longer hold tournaments at golf clubs that do not have at least one African-American and one woman member. Seeking to close a pair of potential loopholes, the PGA further stipulates that the African-American member must not have been deceased at the time of his election, no matter how recent his demise, and the woman member must not be inflatable.

Belatedly bowing to the inevitable, the R & A agrees to adopt as a worldwide standard the USGA’s specification of 1.68” for the diameter of the golf ball but retains the British guideline of no more than 3 ½ hours for the time allotted for the completion by a four-ball match of a competitive 18-hole round of golf, as opposed to the American norm of 5 ¼ hours, and preserves the local custom of expressing disdain to a fellow players by pumping the right arm in a vigorous upward motion of the fist with the left hand held in the crook of the right elbow, rather than simply extending the middle finger of the right hand.

Fresh from his costly Pyrrhic victory over the USGA in the groove wars, Karsten Solheim and his wife, Louise, establish the Solheim Cup, a Ryder Cup-style competition designed to contribute to the cause of gender equity in golf by providing an equal opportunity for leading American and European lady professionals to engage in the kind of rotten, ugly, boorish, shabby, and unsportsmanlike behavior in an international match play event that had up until now been the sole prerogative of the premier male golfers. The Ben Hogan Tour is created as a minor-league feeder system for the PGA Tour. It will later be known as the Nike Tour, the Buy.com Tour, the Nationwide Tour, and the United States Treasury Troubled Asset Relief Program Multibillion-dollar Bailout Tour.

1991

Added to the field at the last moment when Nick Price unexpectedly withdraws, the ninth alternate, an unheralded rookie named John Daly, wins the PGA Championship at Crooked Stick with an unparalleled display of ball-striking power and putting magic that makes him an instant and lasting crowd favorite. A true, original who breaks the mold of the lean, bland, clean-living clones who dominate the modern Tour, Daly not only drives the ball farther and putts better than they do, he also smokes, drinks, gambles, and has marital troubles, which makes his enormous appeal to regular duffers no mystery, since although none of them has his prodigious length off the tee or his deft short game touch, many of them have mastered most, if not all, of the other four key elements of his distinctive golfing persona.

Ian Woosnam, the bantam golf sensation from Wales, wins the Masters. Caught off guard by Woosie’s out-of-nowhere victory, Augusta Chairman Jack Stephens toys with the idea of Welshproofing the course by planting plump and tasty-looking leeks in the rough and filling the bunkers with a savory melted cheese concoction, but after consulting an atlas in the club’s vast, five-volume library and discovering that Wales is not, as he thought, a populous state in the golfing powerhouse nation of Australia, but rather a tiny principality in the west coast of England, he concludes that the odds of future conquest by hordes of Cumbrian golfers are slim.

Phil Mickelson wins the Northern Telecom Tucson Open at age twenty, becoming the last amateur player thus far to achieve a victory in a regular PGA Tour event. A natural right-hander playing against his dominant side, Mickelson would appear to have created for himself an unnecessary obstacle to mastery of an already challenging game by adopting the seemingly unnatural southpaw setup, but this counterintuitive approach proves to be both an effective ball-striking method and a shrewd career strategy for the agreeable but streaky and often headstrong player who, in spite of a somewhat spotty record, will nevertheless manage, with relatively little effort, to instantly vault to the top of the list of greatest left-handed players of all time.

On the 18th hole of the final match of the Ryder Cup at Kiawah Island, Bernhard Langer misses a 7-foot putt to hand a narrow victory to the U.S. side in the aptly names “War on the Shore.” Langer is devastated by the defeat, but, really, he should have remembered that Germans tend lose these war things, and anyway, on the bright side, his yipped knee-knocker was nowhere near as mortifying as Hitler’s two shots on the bunker in Berlin in 1945.

Buy the book now

The final members-only outing in March will be held at Orinda Country Club  on the Monday March, 29. This spectacular course will provide members the opportunity to play golf and give back.

Part of each $145 registration fee will be donated to the NCGA Foundation’s Youth on Course program and the NCPGA Foundation’s Jerry Montgomery Memorial Scholarship Fund. Your fees will also include golf, cart, lunch, a tee prize and awards after the round. The noon shotgun will feature a Four-Ball format (two person best-ball) so grab a family member, co-worker or friend and register before March 19. Like no other event held this year, we are sure you’ll enjoy this one.

Register for the outing

Bookrenotahoe.com is presenting two and three-night packages at the Peppermill in Reno and Harvey’s Lake Tahoe that include skiing at Northstar and Sierra at Tahoe. Packages begin at $149 which includes two nights at the Peppermill and two lift tickets to Northstar Ski resort as well as an Adventures in Tuscany coupon book with more than $600 in special offers and discounts. A regular lift ticket at Northstar is $79, so the package is more than attractively-priced.

Harvey’s Lake Tahoe is offering three nights lodging and four ski-lift tickets at the Sierra at Tahoe resort, and a coupon book worth $125 for only $335 (two nights and two tickets are $209). The packages are valid from 2/15 through 3/31.

Reserve a room and ski tickets and enter a contest to win a dream ski vacation valued at more than $2,000.

Under the rules, a junior golfer is defined as an amateur who has not reached (i) September 1 following graduation from secondary school or (ii) his 19th birthday, whichever comes first. So unless a golfer is 19 and in high school or 18 and in college, he or she should become familiar with the Rules that apply to junior golfers receiving expenses. It should be noted that while these age limits are used when applying the Rules of Amateur Status, committees which conduct junior competitions may use different age limits for determining who is eligible to participate in competitions.

The rules allow a junior golfer to receive any amount of financial support directly from a family member or legal guardian. If a junior golfer is asked by his grandparents what he would like for his birthday, he may suggest help with expenses to compete in golf tournaments.

A junior golfer may also receive funds directly from sources other than family members when the funds will be used to cover expenses in competitions limited to juniors (e.g., the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship).

If a junior wishes to receive funds to participate in a competition that is not limited (e.g., the U.S. Amateur Championship), he or she may still receive financial support from sources other than family members, but the funds must be approved by and paid through the golfer’s state or local golf association. The forms to be completed by the sponsor and junior golfer when the expenses are to be paid through the state or local golf association can be found on the USGA’s website at: http://www.usga.org/Rule-Books/Rules-of-Amateur-Status/Amateur-Status/ under Individual Tournament Expenses.

A player’s expenses associated with a competition normally include transportation, lodging, meals, entry fees and caddie/cart and practice fees. He or she should ensure that any expenses to befundedare reasonable. The junior may not receive funds for general living costs that are not associated with a competition.

Although a young golfer may receive financial support from sources other than family members, he or she  must not promote or advertise the source of any expenses received. Therefore, a junior golfer may not publicallyrecognize the donor of the expenses or wear or carry anything that has the donor’s logo. The junior golfer could issue a generic statement thanking supporters such as “Tom Smith thanks those who have supported him in golf competitions.” Also, a junior golfer must not accept expenses, directly or indirectly, from a professional agent or any similar source under any circumstances.

As it is recognized that some parents may be concerned about their son or daughter traveling to a competition, the Rules allow one parent or legal guardian to accept expenses from an outside source to accompany the junior golfer to the competition.

While the USGA Rules of Amateur Status allow junior golfers to receive and use funds from sources other than family members as described above, in some cases state high school athletic associations and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) may prohibit or limit the receipt and use of such funds. Therefore, before accepting or using funds from a source other than a family member, the junior golfer should check with his high school athletic association and the NCAA to determine if receipt and use of such funds could affect his high school or collegiate eligibility. He may contact the NCAA at:

National Collegiate Athletic Association
700 W. Washington Street
P.O. Box 6222
Indianapolis, IN 46206-6222
Phone: 317-917-6222
Website: www.ncaa.org

A junior golfer should also maintain detailed records of any funds received from sources other than family members and how those funds were used in case the USGA, NCAA or local high school athletic association wishes to review the sources and uses of the funds.

If you have additional questions concerning junior golfers receiving expenses, contact Bernie Loehr, Director, Amateur Status and Rules of Golf at the USGA at: 908-234-2300 (x1238).

Today’s gimme: Discounted San Jose Sharks tickets!

As a new member benefit, NCGA members will enjoy savings on Thursday, March 11 when the San Jose Sharks take on the  Nashville Predators at 7:30 p.m.

Tickets in the upper bowl are discounted to $46.00 (normally $55). Tickets in the lower bowl are discounted to $69.00 (normally $78).
 
Click here to buy tickets, password is: NCGA

If you do not have a Ticketmaster account, you will be asked to create one.

Look for additional special discounts to Sharks’ games in the future.