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CRABAPPLE, Ga. — It’s an unanswerable question, but one that
every insider in golf is asking: Is California the best men’s college
golf team in history? And if so, how did that happen?
There is a
good argument to be made for the Golden Bears. They’ve won 11
tournaments this year, a modern-day NCAA record, and their coach, Steve
Desimone, believes they would have won 12 if redshirt junior Michael
Weaver hadn’t been distracted … by playing in the Masters.
In
the only two tournaments of the year they didn’t win, Cal finished
second in one and third in the other. The Bears’ total margin of defeat
in those two events: four shots.
And their average margin of victory has been 14.75 shots, again the best in the modern era.
Not
only that, the Bears are doing it on what would is considered a
shoe-string budget in the modern era of college athletics. The
university does not have its own golf course — which many do along with
state-of-the-art practice facilities and locker rooms that are better
than most players see on the professional tours — and the golf program
takes no money from the university. The entire $600,000 program is paid
for through fund-raisers and endowments.
It is quite a success
story, especially given how heavily favored the Bears are to win the
Men’s NCAA Tournament, which kicked off on Tuesday at the Capital City
Club in Crabapple, Ga.
But tooting your own horn is never a
good thing in sports, especially before the biggest event of the year.
So when Weaver, who is making his first trip back to Georgia since
missing the cut at the Masters, told the San Jose Mercury News that if
the Bears win "there wouldn't be any doubt we're the best team they've
ever seen,” it didn’t go unnoticed.
“All I’ll say about it is
call me in three years and we’ll talk about how good they are,” said
Hall of Famer Curtis Strange, who was a member of the 1974 and 1975 Wake
Forest Demon Deacons that is almost universally recognized as the
greatest college golf team in history.
Wake Forest won
back-to-back national championships, beating teams like Florida, which
had Andy Bean and Gary Koch, and Alabama, which had U.S. Amateur
champion Jerry Pate. In addition to Strange, the Deacons had Jay Haas,
Bob Byman and David Thorne, a group that won the 1975 team title by a
record 33 shots. Strange won the individual title in 1974; Haas won it
in 1975.
That team was so good that Scott Hoch, who would go on to win 11 PGA Tour events, did not make the traveling squad.
“I’m
not being a protectionist old-timer,” Strange said. “(Cal) is a good
team. But there have been a lot of great teams over the years. Look at
Oklahoma State and all those great teams they had.
“I will say
this, the current NCAA format of match-play for the final three rounds,
does not benefit the best team. You take that Oklahoma State team from a
few years ago that had Rickie Fowler, Kevin Tway and Peter Uihlein: I
don’t think anyone would question the fact that they were the best team
in the country that year, but they got upset in match-play.”
The Wake Forest teams of the '70s also have hindsight on their side.
Pate,
who finished runner-up to Haas for individual honors in 1975, won the
U.S. Open in the summer of 1976, while Koch won six tour events and Bean
won 11. All four of the Deacons’ top players went on to play on the PGA
Tour with Haas winning nine PGA Tour tournaments and 16 times on the
Champions Tour. Strange captured 17 PGA Tour wins including back-to-back
U.S. Open titles. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in
2007.
“I don’t want to compare teams from back then with teams
from today, be it Cal or anybody else,” Strange said. “But, you know,
guys who played on that (1972) Miami Dolphins team don’t want their
record to be broken, and there is nothing wrong with that.”
Then
he paused for a second before adding, “There are guys from our team who
don’t want those records broken. And, you know what, there’s nothing
wrong with that, either.”
