TPC Harding Park is filling 100 – and is celebrating in style

Time flies when you are playing golf. on Tpc harding park100 years have passed.

This Friday marks the centennial of the Marquee Muni of San Francisco, which opened on July 18, 1925. It is a big birthday, and to celebrate it, Harding has set up an indispensable exhibition on the rich history of city -owned course. Consisting of hundreds of photos, tiles and other memoranda, screens fill the club corridors, pour into the grass and restaurant and focus on the characters and races that have helped to make the hardening place that is.

“After starting to dig into history, there was always something more to learn,” said General Harding Tom Smith, who headed the study after the exhibition, in collaboration with historians from other local clubs. “It was all so fun and fascinating to me. It was hard to stop.”

Like any ever -built golf course, Harding sits on the surface with a past of its own. Formerly agricultural land, rented in the city by Spring Valley Water Water Company, a private entity holding a drowning of water rights in San Francisco in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Water policy was widespread, but for many public -minded citizens in those days, an even greater problem was the short supply of municipal golf. Lincoln Park was the only city of the city, and was full of jams, recording up 700 rounds a day (players played much faster than; and busy today records about a third of this number). Harding was conceived to accommodate San Francisco’s overflow demand.

Its architects were Sam Whiting and William Watson (whoever called Watson “Willie” was advised to duck; he disliked that name), the same duet born in Scottish who designed the lake course in Olympic clubJust beyond the Merced Lake from Harding Park. Whiting was the Olympic Club Supervisor. Watson was a fruitful craftsman who wounded by designing more than 65 and only in California.

All this is affected in the exhibition, along with other aspects of the Harding History History. Here, for example, it is a fun fact that even the long harding regulations are unlikely to know: at its birth, the course was a par 73. The 11th hole began its life as a 315-borrion that required a blind car on one ridge. This changed in 1936, when the original tee, returned again and to the 10th green left, pushed forward, turning the hole into the par-3 of the middle range it is today.

Other tweaks would still come.

Property, then and now, is shown in the exhibition of overlapping images that highlight the Harding evolution. From it, you can see that the base center was taken with six practical holes, which left in 1972, when Fleming 9 was built, the object entertainment course of the building. And how about this part of the trivia? Beyond the road from Harding in its early days, the land now occupied by the University of San Francisco was given another appearance: Ingleside Golf Course, which at various times served as the home for the San Francisco Golf Club and San Francisco Golf Club, the prestigious displaced. 100 main courses in the world.

Harding is the opposite of private. But she has a tour of the tournament with high forgiveness. A former PGA Tour’s stop (players of good quality can recall Lucky International Open, a key element of the 1960s in which Arnold Palmer played repeatedly, but never ended better than the contestant), he has also received the WGC-American Express, Cup Cup and PGA Championship championship.

Great names have won here, by Ken Venturi, Gary Player and Billy Casper to Tiger Woods and Collin Morikawa. Everyone is known on a wall of honor, a collection of 40 tiles that honor the harding tours winners, as well as other figures who have played a prominent role in the course history, including former USA Sandy Tatum chairman, who sampled a catchment renovation in the early 2000s, and the latest San Francisko leader. Even fewer prominent names get tribute. I never heard of Bruce McCormick? A firefighter from southern California, he has dedicated tiles thanks to his victory in the 1937 American amateur connections in Harding.

Public connections were returned in 1956, but Harding is best known in amateur circuit as the host of the city championship of San Francisco, a respected tour, commonly referred to as “City”, this is just as visible to those who have won it (Venturi, George Archer, Juli Inskster) as for those who fell short in Major Champion Tom. Johnny Miller and Bob Rosburg. Everyone golf, male or female player, who has ever won the city has now been honored on a large plaque in the bar that has enough space for the names to be added for decades.

When it was opened, in 1925, Harding played hosts what was believed to be the largest golf tour ever staged, with 2,400 entrances and seven divisions, opposed for seven days. The celebration of this Friday’s centenary will be more underestimated. Good cotton flags will fly in flagsticks, a Ford Model T 1925 will appear from Green Green, and all those who stake will receive a centenary print and a poker memorial chip made of a stormy Selvi tree. But in most other ways, it’s just another day in harding. The Tee Sheet is reserved rigid for everyday game with standard fee.

As for the exhibition, it will remain until the end of the year. But the hope is to keep it in eternity, with some reorganized or consolidated shows to make room for the club’s daily operations. After all, harding is a busy place, which is another way to say that new stories are being written daily.