PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – Ready for a hot take?
That’s what a golf industry veteran said to me over lunch at Hay’s Place before I even set foot on the hallowed grounds of Cypress Point Club, and it was a doozy.
“The Walker Cup has surpassed under the tree at the Masters as the largest gathering of the golf royalty,” the golf industry vet said.
That right there is a bold statement, but as I soon discovered, he wasn’t wrong.
Cypress Point was the place to be and be seen, and arguably the toughest ticket in golf for the two-day biennial competition between 10-man teams from Great Britain and Ireland and the United States. Everyone from former President George W. Bush to former Vice President Dan Quayle to former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in attendance.
So were Hall of Fame golfers such as Fred Couples and the list of U.S. Amateur past champions ran the gamut from Bryson DeChambeau to Matt Kuchar, Ricky Barnes, Buddy Alexander, Hal Sutton, Fred Ridley, and Jerry Pate were just the ones I happened to see. Ryder Cup legend Ian Poulter watched son Luke’s every shot for GB&I.
On a glorious day bathed in sunshine, turn left, and there was Gary Koch, the 1970 U.S. Junior champion, longtime NBC TV commentator and two-time Walker Cupper, and Solheim Cupper and CBS’s Dottie Pepper. Turn right, and Bobby Clampett, winner of the 1977 California State Junior Championship, former CBS commentator and a past Walker Cupper, was holding court as Stephen Ames, who once lost 9 & 8 to Tiger Woods, who was a 1995 Walker Cupper, wandered by.
Agents and managers hovered about along with leading equipment reps. It was a who’s who of the golf industry and attracted its fair share of sporting greats from other fields, such as Pau Gasol and Brad Daugherty. The spectators here also raised the bar for the ultimate game of Logo Bingo.
The Walker Cup always has been an intimate affair, where spectators can walk down the fairways almost side by side with the competitors and ring the green. It always attracts the die-hard golf purists who can’t help but tell golf writer Geoff Shackelford that they are charter members of his newsletter, the Quadrilateral. But this year’s 50th edition, being held at Cypress Point — one of the great cathedrals of golf but rarely seen on television or welcoming the great unwashed inside its gates — took this biennial competition next level. It remains to be seen if it will attract such a star-studded list of celebrities, past champions, captains of industry and world leaders next year when the competition is held again at Lahinch in Ireland. But as Kuchar, the 1997 U.S. Amateur champ who was attending for the first time since 2001, so succinctly put it, “What could possibly be better than watching the Walker Cup at Cypress Point on a beautiful, sunny day?”
That is a take that is hard to dispute.
