FLOURTOWN, Pa. — The last par-3, here at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, is gnarly. Bunker left, bunker right, creek in front, sloping green, unmown graveyard over it. The hole played as No. 16 for the Truist Championship, it’s the 5th for regular member-and-guest play and it used to be the 8th hole, before a renovation a dozen years ago. Things change.
The hole, all stretched out in its Sunday best, was 222 yards for the finale, with the pin on a shelf in the back-left corner. Xander Schauffele, who next week will try to become the first player since Brooks Koepka (2018-19) to win back-to-back PGA Championships, hit a drawing mid-iron, beautiful in the air, that finished about 20 feet below the hole. I’ve had this putt a hundred times. (Cricket, as we call the place locally, is my home club.) I positioned myself next to the CBS camera operator and on the (distant) throughline of Xander’s putt. I read it for him.
Hit it firmly enough to get it hole-high, about a foot right of the hole. It will move left and downhill as it dies.
Xander hit a firm putt straight up the hill and into the green’s little kitchen, almost dead straight, maybe about an inch or two right of the hole. It almost fell in at the hole’s 3 o’clock mark and went maybe 20 inches past the hole. It was beautiful. He marked and made 3. I asked him about the putt after he signed for his Mother’s Day 66, six under par.
“It was a kinda funny putt,” he said. “It was holding its line, then got in the air a little bit and wiggled right at the end.”
I didn’t see any of that.
Think about how much brain capacity that takes, to process and put in your memory bank thousands and thousands of shots over the course of a year, and over a career. Along the way, at last year’s PGA Championship, Schauffele put a title on ice: best (active) player never to have won a major. Two months later, he won another, the British Open. Who’s the BPNTHWAM now? Patrick Cantlay? Hmmm, maybe. Tommy Fleetwood? Tony Finau? Sam Burns? Joaquin Niemann? A week from now, that fivesome might become a foursome. Things change. Onward.
The creek in front of 5 (the old 8th, the 16th on TV) is called the Wissahickon, and Wissahickon is the official name of this lovely old Tillinghast course. The younger members call it Wiss. That nickname grates on me. Tillinghast’s ashes, or some of them, were distributed in the Wissahickon, in the vicinity of the 18th green. I think that biographical fact alone qualifies it for four-syllable treatment. But if the kids want to call it Wiss, it’s no skin off my back. Thirty or 35 years ago, my wife, Christine, and I tried to introduce our mutt-pooch to the joys of swimming in the Wissahickon. It was a failure (beagle-lap mix), but Slippers led a long and fruitful life. We buried her in a pillowcase on our side yard on a cold winter day. The life and times of a dog. Slippers liked chasing tennis balls but was never took to golf. It is any wonder?
In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the Cricket Club was almost sleepy. We were happy with what he had, a classic old course with trees everywhere and few all-clear recovery shots. There was a Thanksgiving outing where winners got turkeys. A three-piece band played on Friday nights, for coat-and-tie dinners. The last days of the country-club life that John Updike had so much fun with. Nobody imagined a PGA of America event for the Cricket Club then, or a USGA event or a PGA Tour event. The club’s sense of itself changed over the past 30 or more years. My father used to say this often to my brother and me: Broaden your horizons! The club did.
So now we have hosted a PGA Tour event, our first. Patrick Rodgers, in my locker for the week, finished south of the middle of the pack. Corey Conners from Canada finished T11 — I note that because his caddie, Danny Sahl, was kind enough to give me a lift to the course one morning. In Friday’s cold and pelting rain, with three groups waiting to play on the 16th tee, Danny and I chatted about the City Championship he won, decades ago, in Edmonton, in Alberta, despite being 1 down on the 18th tee. Golf. Golf!
Amanda Balionis of CBS interviewed Sepp Straka, the Truist winner, after a two-putt par on 18, our 4th, formerly the 7th. He hadn’t signed his card yet, but that’s how it always goes; they do the network interviews before the players sign. Straka has won twice on Tour this year. Should he be on the short list of the BPNTHWAM? No, but he’s moving in the right direction. Nothing is static in this game.
In my opinion, the most important event the Cricket Club has hosted was the 2015 PGA Professional National Championship, a 72-hole stroke-play event by which club pros and teaching pros can qualify for the PGA Championship. Brian Gaffney, then the head pro at Quaker Ridge, earned a spot in the field at Whistling Straits in a playoff at the Cricket Club, then was the low club pro at the PGA Championship. Jason Day won that year.
Day was in the field, here at the Cricket Club, but withdrew. Patrick Rodgers took his place. Golf loves concentric circles. The game loves next, too.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
