The Ryder Cup-style event combines three generations of amateur golf talent from across the U.S.
CARROLTON, Texas — The second playing of the East West Matches concluded Sunday afternoon with the East completing a wire-to-wire win.
The Ryder Cup-style event is the brainchild of mid-am Scott Harvey and Maridoe Golf Club owner and oil tycoon Albert Hudleston. Combining three generations of amateur golf talent from across the U.S., the East West Matches is one of the most talent-laden events in all of amateur golf.
Looking to avenge a painful loss in the first playing of the Matches, the East through two days was replicating what it did in 2020.
Friday saw the East jump out to a 6-3 lead in four-ball before the skies burst open and drenched the course with more than an inch and a half of rain. With the course softened up and true rolling greens, the East picked up another 11 ½ points during Saturday’s marathon 36-hole foursomes matches.
Leading 17 ½ – 9 ½, captain Nathaniel Crosby’s team needed just 5 ½ singles wins to defeat the West and avenge the loss from two years ago.
Did the East deliver.
In the 18 singles matches Sunday, 14 of them were won by the East and only seven even made it to the 18th hole. Joe Deraney of the East squad looked at the leaderboard while watching his teammates come through the par-3 14th and smiled.
“It’s not like last time,” he said.
Blowing a double-digit lead Sunday in 2020, you could tell that Deraney and others that were on that team wanted so badly to claim the victory and make up for that meltdown.
The East surrendered just three matches to the West and split two more. The 14-4 drubbing resulted in a final score of 31 ½ – 13 ½ and gives the East its first win in the infancy of the event.
So what’s the secret to having a team pull out a lopsided win when the talent gap is practically nonexistent? Crosby gave a veteran tip from his multiple Walker Cup captaincies: “I think it was the 3 a.m. curfew that probably was the detail (that did it),” Crosby joked. “The mandatory two hours of sleep for each player, each night. … you have to think it through.”
All kidding aside, the week is more about what amateur golf is truly about: comradery.
“The coolest part about this tournament is you’re putting three generations together,” Crosby said. “Generational friendships are absolutely the best to have. The college kids being able to play with the mid-ams and the mid-ams playing with the seniors, bridging these generations is such a great format. Everybody had such a blast.”
Crosby’s crew will look to defend in 2024 when the East West Matches take place once again at Maridoe.
As for what’s next, a large handful of mid-amateurs and senior amateurs from the East West Matches, including Golfweek’s No. 1 ranked senior, Rusty Strawn, will be heading to Spain for next week’s Concession Cup.
Team rosters
Mid-Amateurs
East: Andrew Bailey, Evan Beck, Chip Brooke, Mark Costanza, Joe Deraney, Jeronimo Esteve, Scott Harvey, Matt Mattare, Tug Maude, Chad Wilfong
West: Jason Anthony, Skip Berkmeyer, Denny Bull, Derek Busby, Patrick Christovich, Nick Guyer, Colby Harwell, John Hunter, Brad Nurski, John Swain
Senior Amateurs
East: Doug Hanzel, Steve Harwell, Billy Mitchell, Bob Royak, Rusty Strawn, Matt Sughrue
West: Tommy Brennan, Jon Brown, Robert Funk, John McClure, Mike McCoy, Mike Rowley
Amateurs
East: Nick Dunlap (Alabama), Caleb Surratt (Tennessee)
West: Derek Hitchner (Pepperdine), Luke Potter (Arizona State)
Teens Alexa Saldana and Savannah Barber are the first USGA champions of the year after winning the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball.
Alexa Saldana and Savannah Barber had a short drive home on Wednesday afternoon to show off their new championship hardware. Saldana and Barber, a pair of teenagers who attend the Crown Golf Academy in Arlington, Texas, are the first U.S. Golf Association champions of the year, having kicked off the season with a hard-fought title at the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball.
Saldana and Barber, both 17 and roommates at the Academy, are based just 30 miles down the road from Maridoe Golf Club, a notoriously tough test of golf in Carrollton, Texas. Maridoe is a first-time USGA host, too, but Saldana and Barber navigated it gracefully.
The pair survived two rounds of stroke play followed by five rounds of match play to become USGA champions. New this year, both players will receive an exemption into the U.S. Women’s Amateur and the U.S. Girls’ Junior courtesy of their win.
“It feels incredible to be able to win this with everyone watching and qualify for the other two USGA Women’s Amateur and Girls’,” Saldana said. “It feels incredible.”
Neither player has ever competed in either tournament before.
Saldana, whose family remains in her native Mexico, is a first-year student at Crown. Barber, who grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, is in her fourth year. The two roommates instantly clicked after meeting in the fall. Their games are clicking, too, after so much practice at Texas Rangers Golf Club.
“We knew all of our preparation before this tournament at the Crown Golf Academy,” Barber said. “…We knew we were in a good spot.”
Barber and Saldana started match play as the No. 26 seed and advanced through their first two matches without ever seeing the 16th hole. They pulled that trick again to take down University of Kentucky stalwarts Jensen Castle and Marissa Wenzler in the quarterfinals.
In the semifinals, Barber and Saldana faced the youngest two players in the tournament in Avery Zweig and Gianna Clemente. The kids, 14 and 13, respectively, took the eventual winners through 20 holes, but ultimately Barber and Saldana advanced to the final match against 2019 Women’s Four-Ball runners-up Jillian Bourdage and Casey Weidenfeld.
Even though Barber and Saldana lost the first hole of the final match to a birdie from their opponents, they had taken a 1-up lead by the turn. Ultimately, Barber and Saldana pulled away when Bourdage and Weidenfeld logged back-to-back bogeys at Nos. 12 and 13. Barber and Saldana sealed it with a birdie at the par-3 14th.
There was certain to be a celebration back at the Academy when Barber and Saldana returned.
“A lot of congratulations as we kept on winning our matches,” Barber said of the reaction from their other friends at Crown.
Barber has already committed to play for Oklahoma after graduating, but Saldana is still weighing her college options. After this week’s performance, this much is clear: They’d make a strong one-two punch at the next level.
Three teams shared stroke-play medalist honors and are rolling into match play with confidence at the 2021 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball.
Three teams stood out from the rest during the stroke-play portion of the sixth U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball Championship.
Gianna Clemente – the youngest player in the field at 13 years old – made a hole-in-one on the par-3 14th hole to lead herself and Avery Zweig to a second consecutive round of 3-under 69 and a share of the lead at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas. The two are tied with Yale golf teammates Ami Gianchandani and Kaitlyn Lee as well as teen phenoms Paris Hilinski and Alexa Pano.
“I didn’t think that it was going to go in because the greens are so firm, but it was on the pin the whole way,” said Zweig said of Clemente’s ace. “Obviously, it was a great addition to our round and helped us gain momentum to finish strong.”
Avery Zweig celebrates with partner Gianna Clemente on the 18th hole during the second round of stroke play at the 2021 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas on Sunday, April 25, 2021. (Darren Carroll/USGA)
The tournament now shifts to match play with the Round of 32 on Monday. The Round of 16 will be played Tuesday morning, followed by quarterfinal matches Tuesday afternoon. The semifinals and 18-hole final match will be played Wednesday.
Maridoe Golf Club became a haven for competitive golf in 2020. Meet the man behind the movement, Maridoe owner Albert Huddleston.
The U.S. Golf Association will open its 2021 championship season at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, this April with the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball. It marks Maridoe’s debut as a USGA championship site, though the Maridoe community is anything but new to hosting large-scale events.
Albert Huddleston’s Texas oasis, which opened in 2017, can tip out at nearly 8,000 yards. Every hole changes direction and Texas wind is a major factor. Those who have competed there talk of a golf course that takes practice to learn. Jordan Spieth, Will Zalatoris, Braden Thornberry and Lee Trevino are among the savvy membership of roughly 200.
Beginning in April 2020, Maridoe hosted the first of seven competitive events for every level of player. Six of those were inaugural events, with the 114th Southern Amateur rounding out the lineup.
Albert Huddleston, owner and founder of Maridoe Golf Club
At the end of the 2020 season, club owner and founder Huddleston, the chief executive officer and managing partner of Aethon Energy, sat down with Golfweek to discuss everything from his desire to host so many events to his background in golf to mastering the nuances of Maridoe (competitors: take note of the latter).
Here are excerpts from that conversation:
On why competitive opportunities mattered so much in 2020…
Golf has always, to me, been more than a special sport. It is really a vehicle or a catalyst to travel, meet great friends, be with friends. It’s one of the rare sports where you can play with someone who is not as accomplished as you or more accomplished and have a great time. Every golf course is different. The weather changes to make what was yesterday’s golf course feel like it had nothing to do with today’s golf course and contest. That’s how I think about golf. I’m very passionate about it, I think it’s an important sport, it’s an important socialization opportunity.
So when COVID-19 occurred, obviously it shut down everything and at Maridoe, we have junior players, we have amateurs, mid-ams, senior ams, we have all kinds of professional players – Korn Ferry, Latin America, Canadian, PGA. We have a few ladies as well. And so what happened is they were all off the clock and they were there and in fact, I remember very clearly that Jordan Spieth and Martin Flores were out back of the clubhouse and I was talking to them and I said, ‘By the way, is this the longest you’ve gone without playing in a golf contest?’ They looked at each other and they said they both agreed since they were six years old. I came back around the clubhouse and (managing member) Alison Morrison was there. I said, we need to create an opportunity for all these wonderful players who are now just sitting on their hands to have a contest. That’s how the Maridoe Samaritan (Fund Invitational) came about. It started by word of mouth.
As soon as that tournament was over, Scottie Scheffler won, and we all of a sudden had Viktor Hovland who got beat, on the way home said, ‘I want to do this again.’ I basically want to take Scottie down the next time. So in a couple weeks … we did the 2.0. We were the only ones out there, doing something like this. It was the right thing to do and we stepped forward and we made the decision that golf was the perfect sport as a complement to maintain the COVID-19 protocols. You could do both.
Scottie Scheffler won the Maridoe Samaritan Fund Invitational at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, on April 30, 2020. (Photo by Maridoe Golf Club)
On the homogenized fields that came together at Maridoe – most notably for two Maridoe Samaritan Fund Invitationals in April and May…
I will dare say that never again in our lifetime, in my opinion, that you’ll have a tournament like we had our (Maridoe) Samaritan (Fund) tournaments in the spring. I dare say you’ll never ever have the best juniors, the best college amateurs, mid-ams, PGA Tour professionals, Canadian professionals, Latin American professionals, Korn Ferry professionals, all playing at the same time, the same tournament. There’s no ego in it, and everyone played together and were so grateful and had a great time. I don’t think these people will ever stand down in their golf employment to have that privilege and I’m not sure those on the PGA Tour would mentally be accustomed to playing with amateurs and so to me, it was one of those— talk about making the ambrosia of lemonade by virtue of having the COVID-19. It actually created an opportunity to homogenize all of the different aspects of amateur and professional golf, placed them into one cauldron and everybody had a brilliant time. And I’m probably as proud of that as anything.
On future hosting opportunities, including potential interest in a U.S. Open…
My instructions to (golf architect Steve Smyers) very clearly were I want to have Maridoe Golf Club never hear the terrible words, ‘Had you only done something different, you could have hosted a U.S. Open, a U.S. Amateur or the North Texas Championship,’ and so I do not want to hear those words.
So Maridoe was created to be able to host anything successfully. The design, thought process, time and motion, choreography of the property was delivered and exists today to host anything that is played anywhere at any time, with or without spectators. You talk about a U.S. Open in particular, I would never be so arrogant or brash or egocentric to say we deserve a U.S. Open or a U.S. Amateur. That’s for the USGA to decide and we’ll let the chips fall where they fall.
But Maridoe was designed to host the very best, the very best players, and is so strategic and so mentally taxing that it will separate the richest cream from cream and the champion will be clearly identified and I think that’s what the USGA tends to do with their championships in particular – the U.S. Amateur, U.S. Open. If we were ever blessed and honored with the opportunity to have, for example, a U.S. Open or anything of great significance, we would be honored and it would be a privilege. We wouldn’t be surprised because we prepared for it but we would not be so arrogant as to say that we have to have it because we deserve it. That’s for the USGA to decide.
Huddleston, left, with top finishers at the Maridoe Junior Invitational. (Photo submitted)
On where the difficulties lie at Maridoe, and what it takes to be successful there…
My philosophy on championship golf is that the individual who is a great player who cannot think his way around the course carefully should fail compared to those who are elite players who can manage themselves around the course strategically and thoughtfully. So Maridoe was created to make that separation. One of the things about elite golf today particularly at the young, collegiate level, is that the ability to work the ball and flight the ball is becoming a lost art because the technology – the ball and the equipment – has allowed these young athletes in great shape to swing as hard as they want to and technology keeps it pretty much on course. So they’re used to just hitting it hard and high and my goal was the person who comes there who’s mono-dimensional who leaves their brain in the trunk of their car in the parking lot has no chance against someone who can flight the ball, work the ball and strategically think his way around Maridoe.
On Huddleston’s start in golf…
We were always around golf and dad was fantastic and he was special. We just were raised since we were very young that golf was important. I will say that when my father said we couldn’t play football and there were sports where he said I will ask you not to play because you’ll wind up being arthritic, your knees will be injured, potentially. It’s not one of the 90-year-old sports. I said what’s a 90-year-old sport?
He says well golf, bird-hunting or trout fishing. I said what about tennis? He said, tennis is a nice sport but there aren’t too many people who come back from Hawaii and say you’ve gotta go play this tennis court on this promontory of crashing waves. So I probably emphasized golf over that. It was just our family, it’s what we did. Also being around the various golf associations and the USGA and my father had a tremendous respect for that.
Albert Huddleston (second from right) stands with (from left) Jackson Rivera, Tommy Morrison and Luke Potter near a body of water at Maridoe Golf Club, where bass fishing is a popular way to pass the time. (Photo submitted)
On the Maridoe name, how it came to be and what it represents…
My wife Mary, she does not play golf. She, when approached, supported me about wanting to do this golf club, which no wife should ever let a husband do realistically, which is an indication of how nice she really is. And she is.
But, when she was born, the doctors handed her to her father and he gazed down on her and looked at her and said my goodness, look at these beautiful brown eyes. They remind me of doe eyes. And they named her Mary. So he nicknamed her Marydoe. He’s now deceased. So myself and her brother, that is a nickname that we use. That’s what I’ve called her. So I said I think Mary Doe would be great. I was playing around with it, I said what about Maridoe so phonetically it would be Mary-Doe.
The way I do a capital M is essentially the logo. And after I said this story (to members of a hired branding agency), the three ladies and the gentleman there who owned the company, they were all going, ‘That’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever heard.’ They said, we need to do this. So that was how it was born. I will give them great credit, they came back because we have a 33-acre lake with bass fishing. They took my M and they put a reverse loop on the backside, that I don’t use when I sign a capital M, to be reminiscent of a fishing loop to designate that Maridoe Golf Club subconsciously has a fishing loop in it’s logo. So nobody knows that.
Juniors Luke Potter and Preston Summerhays put on a shot in the 36-hole final of the Maridoe Amateur. Ultimately Potter left with the title.
Luke Potter likes to go it alone on the golf course. When the 16-year-old made his U.S. Amateur debut in August, he carried his own bag. He did the same for the past six days at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, this week.
When the formula works, you stick to it. Potter got himself through three rounds of stroke play and six more rounds of match play this week at the marathon Maridoe Amateur, a new event for the nation’s top amateurs that unfolded under the watchful eye of U.S. Walker Cup captain Nathaniel Crosby.
“I just like to work alone on the course,” said Potter, from Encinitas, California. “Maridoe is not that hard of a walk so I thought I could do it. I kept my energy and I did just that.”
The field for the event was selected based primarily on rankings, with priority given to U.S. players. It was an overwhelmingly college-age field, with just a handful of juniors. As it turned out, Potter and 18-year-old Preston Summerhays were the last two players standing for Sunday’s 36-hole final.
And they’d had plenty of sparring practice leading up to the title match.
Potter recently spent a week at the Summerhays home in Phoenix. They played three or four competitive rounds, which was motivation for each of them. Summerhays, who won the 2019 U.S. Junior Amateur, will arrive on the Arizona State roster next fall. Potter will be there a year later.
It’s good and bad to play a friend under such high stakes, Potter said. He faced the same situation in the Round of 64 against Alexander Yang. Yang conceded Potter few putts.
“I knew Preston’s strengths and weaknesses, same with my buddy Alex’s strengths and weaknesses,” Potter said. “It’s good to play against your buddies, in my opinion. I beat them both so at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter.”
In the final match, the first 18 holes went back and forth with Summerhays getting an early 1-up lead. Potter fought back to lead by as many as three holes and then the two hit the halfway point tied. Potter surged in the afternoon and was 5 up by the time the match hit the back nine. On the par-4 10th hole, he was in the fescue but pulled off a clutch recovery shot from 210 yards – over water, bunkers left and right, couldn’t miss long – to set up a par.
“I striped a 4-iron to about six or seven feet and then when I won that hole, I went 6 up so I kind of knew I was in full control,” he said.
He eventually won by an 8-and-6 margin.
Potter had played three tournaments at Maridoe so far in 2020: The Maridoe Samaritan Fund Invitational 2.0 in May, the Maridoe Junior in June and the Southern Amateur in July.
“Four times a charm for sure,” he said. “Experience really does matter here and this is probably the best field and so I’m happy to win this one.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIeS7UXFRwd/
After rounds of 73-76-73 in stroke play this week, he landed the No. 3 seed on the 64-man match-play bracket. He named his Round-of-32 match against Baylor’s John Keefer and his quarterfinal match against Oklahoma’s Jonathan Brightwell as being some of the toughest. Still, Potter loves this one-on-one format.
“You can be a little bit more aggressive and things can go against you really quick,” he said. “In that second 18, I got hot and that’s match play.”
As the field shrunk, it allowed players making a deep run to put on a show for Crosby. This isn’t the first time that a spot on the Walker Cup team has crossed Potter’s mind. In February, Potter won the AJGA Simplify Boys Championship on Carlton Woods on the strength of a 10-under 62 in the second round. His 20-under total was a new AJGA record.
“After the big win in Houston earlier this year, I was inside the top 100 in the rankings so it entered my mind there but I had a bad summer so I just kind of threw it out the door,” he said.
Sunday’s final pairing could easily be a match-up you’d find on the last day of the U.S. Junior Amateur, the title many juniors covet. After all, it comes with a U.S. Open exemption.
Both of those events make Potter’s 2021 goal list. He’d like a title in the former and a spot in the latter.
“A U.S. Junior win would be awesome,” he said. “I know it’s a big goal and one tournament. If I can just keep improving, I think I can reach that goal. The U.S. Open being at Torrey Pines in 2021, I’m making that a premium on trying to qualify and hopefully make the cut.”
Medalist Will Holcomb and Sunnehanna Amateur champion Preston Summerhays will face off at the top of the Maridoe Amateur bracket Saturday.
Five days and six rounds into the Maridoe Amateur, the quarterfinals are set. Half of the remaining field was seeded inside the top 10, and that includes Will Holcomb.
The Sam Houston State fifth-year senior is channeling some of his Pinehurst magic on this bracket. Twice in the past year and a half, Holcomb played his way deep into match play at that resort’s famed No. 2 course – at the 2019 U.S. Amateur (semifinals) and the 2020 North & South (finals).
On Friday at Maridoe Golf Club, Holcomb got past Coastal Carolina’s Zack Taylor in the morning but needed an extra hole to do it. He then defeated Oklahoma’s Logan McAllister by a 4-and-3 margin in the afternoon. It doesn’t get any easier from here. Holcomb will face Preston Summerhays, the 2019 U.S. Junior champion, in the quarterfinals. Summerhays also won the prestigious Sunnehanna Amateur over the summer.
Summerhays, a Class of 2021 player bound for Arizona State next fall, dispatched two college players in Oklahoma’s Patrick Welch and SMU’s McClure Meissner, the latter having the distinction of winning the Southern Amateur at Maridoe over the summer.
Down the bracket, No. 45 seed Benjamin Shipp, who won the South Beach International Amateur to end 2019 continues a gritty run that included victories over Santa Clara’s Matthew McCarty and SMU’s Noah Goodwin on Friday. Now he faces Christopher Gotterup, who had a similarly tough road. Gotterup, a Rutgers senior, barely got past stroke-play star Frankie Capan, of Florida Gulf Coast, on Friday afternoon.
Sam Choi, the New Mexico player, and Ryan Grider, a Baylor junior who won the 2019 Texas Amateur, will meet on the bottom of the bracket. The winner of that match will face the winner of a showdown between Luke Potter, a high school junior verbally committed to Arizona State, and Jonathan Brightwell, a fifth-year senior at Oklahoma who got past U.S. Amateur medalist Wilson Furr and Arizona State’s David Puig on Friday.
After a double-round day of matches on Saturday, two finalists will play a 36-hole final on Sunday to determine a champion.
Will Holcomb has an impressive resume when it comes to head-to-head golf. He’ll take the No. 1 seed into Maridoe Amateur match play.
It isn’t all that unusual for a Tour player to avoid venues that don’t seem to suit his game. After missing the 36-hole cut at the Southern Amateur in July, Will Holcomb decided to take that approach with Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas.
“I found out it was match play and I love match play,” he said.
Holcomb finished a brutal 54 holes at Maridoe with rounds of 73-76-69, good for medalist honors at 2 over and a navy cashmere sweater emblazoned with the Maridoe patch to commemorate that. He noted that his wife Graycie, who was on her way to Carrollton to watch the match-play portion of the tournament, might be a bit angry with him.
“She says the No. 1 seed never wins,” Holcomb noted.
Will Holcomb, Maridoe Amateur medalist
Standing off the 18th green waiting for his medalist photo opp, Holcomb was at a bit of a loss for words at the accomplishment. In a tough field full of the country’s best-ranked amateurs (Holcomb checks in at No. 73 in the World Amateur Ranking), the player from Crockett, Texas, rose to the top.
“It’s every bit as hard as any golf you want on a calm, sunny day,” Holcomb said of playing Maridoe in this week’s cold and windy conditions. “The first day was 35 degrees and freezing cold. That wasn’t easy. Yesterday was a little better. Ever since it warmed up, I’ve been kind of warming up myself.”
Holcomb is perhaps most well-known for his deep runs in match play at Pinehurst No. 2. He was a U.S. Amateur semifinalist in 2019 and finished runner-up to Tyler Strafaci, the eventual 2020 U.S. Amateur winner, at the North & South Amateur earlier this year.
It bodes well for him that six rounds of match play are to follow – just like a USGA championship.
“Just keep doing what I know how to do in match play and just fight – that’s really what I love doing,” Holcomb said of his match-play mindset. “I don’t play golf because it’s fun, I play golf because I want to win. When you get to play golf in the purest form, like one-on-one basketball, that’s really fun.”
Holcomb, a self-described “corona year senior” at Sam Houston State, can banter on the course as well as anyone. He marks his ball with a smiley face with the tongue sticking out in homage to a high school golf buddy who used to make that face when he’d drop a putt on Holcomb in a friendly match. He’s walking the course this week with caddie Marcus Jones, Maridoe member who works for College Golf Fellowship.
Holcomb’s final-round 69 on Wednesday helped him overtake 36-hole co-leaders Leo Oyo, who ultimately got the No. 2 seed, and Frankie Capan, who landed the No. 12 seed.
Seemingly everyone in this field has a Maridoe war story to tell, particularly as the North Texas wind howls and temperatures hover near 40 degrees.
Capan, a past U.S. Amateur Four-Ball champ who plays for Florida Gulf Coast, had two-time Korn Ferry Tour winner Davis Riley on his bag on Wednesday. Riley has played Maridoe frequently and helped Capan with some local knowledge before the event.
Leaders are on the course. Frankie has gone from carrying his bag in round 1 and most of round 2…to a soon to be PGA Tour card carrying member who has a little experience around Maridoe. pic.twitter.com/gXpSLztamd
Julian Perico, an Arkansas junior, said Maridoe doled out plenty of punches. Perico snuck into match play as the No. 61 seed, calling Maridoe the hardest course he’s played. That’s from a player whose home course at college is Blessings Golf Club, a notoriously difficult, hilly layout.
“If I had to compare Maridoe to Blessings, this one is way tighter, the greens are way harder to hit, it’s way more penal off the tee, the greens are way harder to put on. It’s also faster, firmer and the wind feels 20 mph harder,” he said.
Perico was paying close attention to the leaderboard on Wednesday afternoon – excitedly shouting to another player at one point during his post-round interview when he learned he was safely on the bracket. He’ll face No. 4 seed Noah Goodwin, an SMU player who won a college event at Maridoe this fall, in the first round.
Thursday can’t be as adventurous as Perico’s previous 24 hours. Perico didn’t finish his second round, but realized once he left the golf course he had forgotten about a project and an essay due on Wednesday. He spent most of the night on the project, which was for an entomology class he’s taking.
He went to bed at midnight and woke up at 5:30 a.m., to finish the final three holes of his second round. Two hours later, he was off for his third round.
He’s used to balancing golf and schoolwork, he said, but not firing tournament rounds in the 80s.
“I think it’s so cool we get to play three rounds. At least you get to stay three days out here,” he said when asked about the format. “…I would have been done by a long shot. They gave me a chance and I took advantage of it.”
The bracket had only two holes in it on Wednesday night as a playoff was still needed to determine the Nos. 63 and 64 seeds.
How tough did Maridoe Golf Club play in the second round of the Maridoe Amateur? Only one player posted a number under par.
Jonathan Brightwell thought he was pretty adept at controlling his golf ball. Then the 22-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, moved to Oklahoma for a fifth year on the Sooner golf roster. He had never even been to Oklahoma (or Texas) until then.
“You gotta adapt and I think I’m getting better and better at it,” he said. “Playing it every day is definitely helpful. There’s some type of wind every day back home. The East Coast you get plenty of days where it’s just perfect. No wind.”
Wind control is key this week at the Maridoe Amateur, a new event at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas, that pits the top amateurs in the country against each other in a similar setup to a USGA championship (plus one extra round of stroke play).
After an early round of 3-under 69 in Tuesday’s second round – an 11-shot turnaround from his opening 80 – Brightwell climbed the leaderboard with every refresh. If you don’t know where you’re trying to place it at Maridoe, Brightwell said, you’re going to struggle. Experience helps. Brightwell saw this course in October when he played the Maridoe Collegiate with his team. He finished T-13 that week.
“This place can kind of make you look silly,” he said. “It’s just that tough.”
Temperatures have hovered in the high 30s and low 40s so far this week, with winds gusting as high as 30 mph in Round 1. Brightwell – who had climbed inside the top 10 by mid-afternoon – needs to remain inside the top 64 through one more round of stroke play, which seems likely at this point. You might say he’s sneaky good in that format.
In his past four years at North Carolina-Greensboro, Brightwell saw little match play in the regular season. That was a summer thing. But this fall, two of his three starts with the Sooners included head-to-head play. He was 4-1 at Big 12 Match Play – losing only to Baylor’s Johnny Keefer – and won both matches at the East Lake Cup (the only Oklahoma player who can make that claim).
Brightwell was unaware of that stat entering the Maridoe Amateur, but appreciates the format mostly because growing up in North Carolina, it meant playing against his buddies. As has been his story this fall, match play rewards good play.
“Very rarely someone wins if they don’t play the best in a match-play event,” he said.
His surroundings helped him in that respect. At Oklahoma, which finished a shortened 2020 season atop the Golfweek/Sagarin College Rankings (and remained there after the fall season), if you don’t play well, you don’t play. Brightwell knew that it would test his game when he transferred in to use the fifth year the NCAA made available to college seniors after the 2020 spring season was canceled.
“Being in that fire and having to play against these guys that are really, really good all the time made me uncomfortable, but it was a good uncomfortable because I had to play well,” he said of team qualifying at Oklahoma. “I had to constantly constantly play well.
“I think that translated into some of our fall events because you play well and you know you’re supposed to be there and then you go out and you play well for your guys and your team when you’re traveling. It’s like this recurring you gotta play good golf.”
No other player had a red number on the Maridoe leaderboard on Tuesday, with many players going in the reverse direction. Brightwell, at 5 over, was three shots behind co-leaders Frankie Capan and Leo Oyo (who both went 70-76) by the time they finished their rounds in near darkness.
As the field thins out, the competition gets more intense.
With U.S. Walker Cup captain Nathaniel Crosby on property this week, selection to that team becomes a talking point – especially with the matches moved up from September to May. Brightwell hasn’t spent much time thinking about it. Once again, good play takes care of itself.
“This is a pretty unique event but stout competition, match play,” Brightwell said in noting the theater in North Texas this week. “The last three or four matches coming down to quarterfinals and on will be probably some incredible golf on a really tough golf course.”
Monday was cold at windy at Maridoe Golf Club, but Frankie Capan took it in stride to open the Maridoe Amateur with a share of the lead.
As soon as Frankie Capan received his invitation to play the Maridoe Amateur, he knew he wanted to be there. Over the course of 2020, as the club in Carrollton, Texas, hosted tournament after tournament, it built a reputation for attracting strong fields at every level of the game.
Starved for tournament starts, like many players, Capan watched from afar.
“I saw the other tournaments going on at Maridoe and kind of wished I was playing,” he said.
Capan, who grew up in North Oaks, Minnesota, saw Maridoe for the first time the day before this event began. He arrived for his practice round with just enough time to register and snag a yardage book. He didn’t even get a chance to warm up. Capan usually isn’t the kind of guy who likes to play practice rounds, but at Maridoe, you have to know where to place it.
Despite the limited reps, Capan returned for Monday’s opening round and fired a 2-under 70. He birdied the final three holes of the back nine (he started on No. 10), and after a long day of brutal North Texas wind and temperatures near 40 degrees, Capan came out with a share of the lead.
Leo Oyo, who transferred from San Diego State to Oklahoma State, is also 2 under through 16 holes. Oyo was among a handful of players who didn’t finish the first round on Monday. Those players will wrap up their final holes Tuesday morning before the second round resumes. After 54 holes, the 92-man field will be reduced to 64 men, who enter a match-play bracket that will play out much like a USGA championship – with a 36-hole final on Sunday and all.
Capan said he expected the conditions at Maridoe to be British Open-like this week, though quickly corrected himself to say U.S. Open-like. Perhaps both are true.
“I ended up bogeying the first hole but I’ve been playing pretty well the past few weeks so I wasn’t really beating myself up too much because I knew everyone was going to make some bogeys out there,” he said.
Capan’s only start since a match-play run at the U.S. Amateur in August was a College Golf Fellowship-sponsored event at Trinity Forest, just south of Maridoe in Dallas. He finished 12th. After COVID cut short his sophomore season at Alabama last year, Capan entered the transfer portal. While Alabama was a special place, he knew it wasn’t the best fit for him.
Fellow Minnesotan Van Holmgren had recently transferred from North Dakota State to Florida Gulf Coast. Holmgren stayed with Capan during quarantine and Capan picked his brain about the Florida school.
Even though Capan has been based in Fort Myers, Florida, this fall, he’s only been to the library and to team workouts. It’s a funny feeling after leaving Tuscaloosa.
“It was weird not being on campus at all after coming from one of the biggest campuses,” he said.
Since making his decision to transfer in July, Capan won the Minnesota Amateur and finished second at the Minnesota Open. He also played the Sunnehanna Amateur and the Western Amateur, barely missing the 16-man match-play bracket in the latter. In 2019, Capan played his way to the quarterfinals of the grueling Midwest event.
Capan admits to feeling a bit more freed up since making a major change in his golf life.
“I think there’s something about being excited for a clean slate somewhere and I think that subconsciously might have freed me up a little bit,” he said.
Asked for his match-play record, Capan put it this way: He thinks he’d win seven out of 10 matches. His history in the format certainly backs up that thinking.
“I just really like the fact that it’s me versus you,” he said of match play. “The golf course is standing in between us. I’ve always been a fan of other sports and in football, I used to play defensive linemen when I was young. It was always me versus the guy in front of me. I think it’s such a cool concept especially in the game of golf.”
More on the Maridoe Amateur…
The Maridoe Amateur came to fruition after the club hosted the Southern Amateur in July. It was a way for Nathaniel Crosby, the U.S. Walker Cup captain, to see the nation’s best amateurs play a match-play event at Maridoe.
The field, which started Monday at 96 players, was selected mostly by ranking and with priority given to U.S. players. The top 150 players in the World Amateur Golf Ranking (after the U.S. Amateur) were invited in addition to any player inside the top 200 in the Scratch Players World Amateur Ranking. Players who made the Round of 32 at the U.S. Amateur or the Sweet 16 at the Western Amateur – who weren’t inside that top echelon of the rankings – were also invited, and so were all Palmer Cup players.
With six rounds of match play coming later in the week, the Maridoe Amateur certainly will provide a telling look at the nation’s top talent in a head-to-head format. Last week, the USGA announced its 16-man Walker Cup practice squad that would meet at Bay Hill in December. The Walker Cup will be played May 8-9 at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Florida.
As for the Maridoe Amateur? It will be played annually and is expected to return in the summer of 2021 with the field likely doubling in size.
Mac Meissner, who is about to enter his senior season at SMU, was six shots back starting the day at Maridoe Golf Club but still won.
Sometimes you just need to see some putts go in. This played into McClure Meissner’s Southern Amateur victory on Saturday in a few ways.
Meissner, who is about to enter his senior season at SMU, was six shots back starting the day at Maridoe Golf Club in Carrollton, Texas. He birdied his first two holes to start cutting the deficit. At the first hole, it was a dead-center putt off a 9-iron approach to 18 feet. At No. 2, he hit a 3-hybrid into the back fringe from 275 yards out and two-putted.
The hot start showed Meissner there were birdies available at Maridoe, which is not always the case on this layout. The 21-year-old has played it a handful of times in competition recently and knows it’s tough to make up shots.
“I woke up today and I didn’t think that I really had a chance, honestly,” Meissner said. “The guys at the top were phenomenal players and I knew that I needed something extremely low to have a chance.”
Cole Hammer, the No. 9-ranked player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking was 7 under through 54 holes and at the top of the leaderboard. Meissner stood at 1 under and teed off four groups ahead on Saturday.
Meissner’s final day kept progressing, though, with two more birdies at Nos. 6 and 8. His lone bogey came at No. 10, but he followed it with three consecutive birdies from Nos. 12-14. He calls the best shot of the day the 7-iron approach he hit to inside 5 feet at No. 12
“To get the bogey back I made on 10 that quickly,” he said. “I think at that point I saw that I was maybe one back or two back.”
As Meissner was climbing the leaderboard, so was Illinois State’s David Perkins. Meissner shot a final-round 66 but Perkins closed with a 70. It left them both at 7 under, but Meissner won on the first extra hole.
As for Hammer, the Texas junior closed with a pair of double-bogeys for a final-round 79 that dropped him to a tie for 13th.
Quade Cummins finished strong to stand third place with a low score of 70 (-2) to wrap up the final round with a total gross of 283 (-5). . . . Marcus Jones was our Mid-Amateur Champion shooting 76 today for his final round with a total gross of 298 (+10). pic.twitter.com/kAvEd0q8AH
Despite more than four months having passed since he came in fourth at the Southern Highlands Intercollegiate, annually one of the best fields in college golf, it doesn’t seem like Meissner has lost much. The coronavirus pandemic ended all NCAA athletics prematurely on March 12. Meissner finished his classes online and took it easy on the golf.
The San Antonio native spent some time in Dallas with friends, hanging around the lake, not thinking about golf.
That kind of downtime doesn’t happen in a normal year. If you’re a top player, as Meissner is at No. 35 in the world, you go from one college season to the summer amateur circuit to the next season. Many play a handful of tournaments over the winter breaks. There is no off-season.
“As much as it stung for the year to end, I was able to get fresh and take a little time off and focus on other things,” he said.
By mid-May, he was ready to work hard on his golf again. He buckled down with instructor Bryan Gathright to work his swing into a place it felt comfortable.
And he holed a lot of putts. Meissner devoted time to his stroke and his setup, his lag putting and just logged repetition. Before, he’d felt like he was a streaky putter – he’d make everything one day and nothing the next.
“Seeing a lot of putts go in during the time off, it helped me a lot,” he said. Meissner also switched out his putter since he last played in the spring.
Courtesy of his Southern Am win, Meissner earns a spot in U.S. Amateur. Perkins also earns one as the runner-up. Both players were already in the field, however.
Almost exactly a year ago, Meissner finished third at the Maridoe-hosted Trans Miss Amateur, a tournament that was canceled this year because of the pandemic. All that experience carried forward this week.
“It’s a really visually intimidating course and to be able to play it a couple times, it just gives you a lot of confidence,” he said. “… The more I play it, the more I feel comfortable and the more I love it. It’s a great place and it tests every aspect of your game.”
