The City Game

Golf, by nature, is never perfect, but there was a time and a place in America—before the words cartpath only were first heard—where the game came close. In this Camelot, July and August were never too hot, and classic courses, built on sandy coastal soil akin to the linksland of the British Isles, turned the deepest green. A cross section of townspeople played, 18 holes could be walked in three hours, young golfers had a place to learn, and local champions were celebrities.

Golf was just golf—beautiful, natural and simple. The time was the two decades between the end of World War II and the Summer of Love. The place was San Francisco.

Today, anyone who endures five-hour rounds at one of the city's threadbare municipal courses knows those halcyon days are long gone. "I'm afraid that at the moment golf in San Francisco could be classified as paradise lost," says Sandy Tatum, the former president of the USGA who is leading a campaign to make the city's public courses wonderful again. Whether that happens or not, next week's U.S. Open at the Olympic Club will bring back memories of an era of golf as rich as any this country has ever seen.

San Francisco had it all. The half-dozen courses near the rugged western rim of the city—from A.W. Tillinghast's masterpiece, the San Francisco Club, to the 5,300-yard miniaturistic marvel at Lincoln Park—require a style of play that struck a chord with the game's best. Ben Hogan, the finest U.S. Open player in history, called the Olympic Club his favorite of all the venues used for that championship. Byron Nelson had an even stronger bond with the city's courses, formed when he won the San Francisco Open three times in the mid-'40s and strengthened in the '50s when he came to the city to play exhibitions and tutor the young Ken Venturi. "In my experience," says Nelson, "it's the best area in the country to play golf if you want to be a good player. I really loved playing there."

San Francisco's courses acted as greenhouses that nurtured such homegrown greats as Venturi, George Archer, Johnny Miller and Bob Rosburg—a foursome that collectively has won the Grand Slam—as well as honing the games of transplants such as Tony Lema, Lawson Little and Harvie Ward. Sprouting along with them were dozens of locals nearly as good. "Damn, we had a lot of good players," says Rosburg. "I used to wonder if I was born too soon, but the older I get, the more I think I was in the right place at the right time. To grow up a golfer in San Francisco when I did was special."

Golf strongholds such as Chicago, New York and Philadelphia have courses that rank with San Francisco's, while Sun Belt cities in Florida, Southern California and Texas have produced more players. Venues other than Olympic have held more championships, although of the three previous Opens there, two are among the most memorable—Jack Fleck's upset of Hogan in 1955 and Billy Casper's impossible comeback against Arnold Palmer in '66. What made San Francisco special during its golden age was the ambience and energy of the town, and the way golf was woven into the fabric of the community thanks to the annual City Championship, which remains one of the largest amateur tournaments in the world. San Francisco had a spirit that seemed to have been delivered directly from St. Andrews.

According to Ward, a North Carolinian who became the top amateur in the country after moving west in 1953, San Francisco "was probably the best city ever in which to be a good player. It seemed like everybody played golf, especially all the restaurant owners, and they treated us like we were big time. When we walked into one of their places, we were on par with Joe DiMaggio or Hugh McElhenny."

Not every good golfer was given a key to the city. Consider Hank Magnaris, a 72-year-old retired starter at San Francisco's munis, whom Archer calls the best putter he has ever seen. Magnaris's turf was a now-defunct putting green at Lincoln Park, where he would play putting games for money with up to a dozen other men. The game was simple: Collect a dollar from everyone for his one-putts; pay every one 50 cents for three-putts. On warn weekend evenings, under the glow of a per fectly placed street lamp where 34th Avenue meets Clement, the games would sometimes go all night and into the next day, with exhausted or tapped-out player; floating in and out, sometimes catching some sleep on a nearby bench.

"On the practice green I had an edge," says Magnaris. "I could putt six or eight hours at a crack without getting tired. When it got dark I gained the advantage especially around one or two in the morning, because I'm a night person and I could remember all the breaks around the holes."

San Francisco's golf history began on the western side of the city, on an urban green-belt that would later include Golden Gate Park. At the turn of the century most San Franciscans found the area undesirable because of persistent fog, but when the golf architect Alister Mackenzie visited the city in the '20s, he saw potential. "The sane dune country owned by the Olympic Club although not so spectacular as that on the Monterey Peninsula, is the finest golfing territory I have seen in America," he wrote. John Fleming, the superintendent al Olympic, whose father, Jack, assisted Mackenzie in building several courses in Northern California, says the area possesses perfect growing conditions. The proof is the thousands of cypress, cedar, pine and eucalyptus that the course builders planted on the otherwise barren landscape. Today the gnarled and majestic trees are the most distinctive feature of the city's courses.