USGA takes golf world to historic Bel-Air CC, heads to Ann Arbor in August

Golf’s fastest-growing sector is women. The lush fairways and greens in “Pure Michigan” have served as a significant stage this summer, luring high-performance professionals and aspiring amateurs from around the world.

The Epson Tour’s road to the LPGA went, for the 13th year, through the FireKeepers Casino Golf Classic, this time at the Medalist Golf Course in Marshall, two exits from the casino and across the street from Turkeyville. Once a champion was crowned, the international field of female touring professionals traveled to Harbor Springs to compete for cash again at Boyne Resort’s Heather Course at The Highlands.

During those same two weeks, the LPGA Tour brought its pros to Midland Country Club for the Dow Championship and then to Grand Rapids for competition and a culinary experience — the Meijer LPGA Classic at leafy Blythefield Country Club. June will end with the Michigan Women’s Open (June 30-July 2) in the forests of wildflower-filled Crystal Mountain Resort.

Crystal Mountain is about 30 miles away from Traverse City, where the sport’s preeminent course architect Tom Doak, history’s most thoughtful golf designer and defender, lives. Doak says his best design work might be his Loop Course at Forest Dunes in Roscommon, but he’s created and restored far-flung, world top-100-rated tracks in New Zealand, Tasmania, Scotland, Colorado and at his Pacific Dunes Coastal Oregon’s Bandon Dunes, where the 2038 Curtis Cup will be held.

Doak’s design expertise was the stage for this summer’s biennial Curtis Cup Match, where, for the 44th time, eight amateur women from the USA competed against a team representing Great Britain and Ireland. The highly exclusive Bel-Air Country Club, in the Southern California canyons above UCLA, was designed by George C. Thomas in 1926 and meticulously renovated and restored, with reverence, by Doak in 2017.

“It’s a unique piece of property and design,” Doak said for a story in the USGA’s Curtis Cup program book. “If I told a client we were going to build a course where you took a long tunnel under a hillside, went up in an elevator, hit across a ravine, and crossed a suspension bridge to get to the green, they would think I am nuts.”

Three massive, billowing flags — the Stars and Stripes, Union Jack and Ireland’s Tri-Color — were unfurled from that Bel-Air “Swinging Bridge” above the 18th green beside the new, 64,000-square-foot, white, Spanish-style clubhouse as USGA CEO Mike Whan and Dennis Watson, captain of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, hosted the Curtis Cup opening ceremonies down the hill on the carpet-like fairway. The players paraded to the podium behind a bagpiper before the national anthems were performed. Returning captains Meghan Stasi and Catriona Matthew, whose GB&I team was defending their win two years previous in England at Sunningdale, also spoke.

In terms of tourism, golf ambassadors Madeline Kleiner, recently Executive VP of Hilton Hotels, and Heidi Ueberroth, co-chair of Pebble Beach Resort, were in attendance with pro golf stars Michelle Wie and Los Angeles resident Amy Alcott, even though star-studded Bel-Air has never agreed to open its gates to a professional tournament. The televised Curtis Cup gave the world a peek inside the Bel-Air enclave, with the media and online assistance of Griffin Genobaga, the USGA coordinator of championship communications, and Julia Pine, senior director of communications and content. Future Curtis Cup competitions will be held at “bucket list” courses Royal Dornoch, National Golf Links, Pine Valley Golf Club, Bandon Dunes, Cypress Point and Seminole.

My only other visit inside the private Bel-Air Country Club was 25 years previous. I was summoned to meet there by Frank Chirkinian, the legendary CBS TV golf director, who sat with me at the club’s famed round, corner table with other prominent Bel-Air members: ABC sportscaster Al Michaels and country music star Mac Davis. Davis wore a visor with the word “OTFIG” on it, which I presumed was a corporate logo. “Nah, kid,” he corrected me. “It stands for ‘Over the top – f—! – It’s gone.’” (Referring to a bad swing and resulting lost ball.)

At the same time as the Curtis Cup international competition took place, the FIFA World Cup soccer games were taking place in Los Angeles, on a weekend when Iran’s team would compete. Sara Joata, an Iranian now living in Beverly Hills, plays golf weekly after picking up the game a year ago. When a business venture failed to take flight, one of Joata’s debtors offered to pay her back with golf lessons. She learned she loved the game.

“I never had access to golf or knew anything about it in Iran,” she explained. “I enjoy how golf helps me to be patient and teaches me to smile even after a bad shot. The Curtis Cup is the first golf tournament I have ever attended.”

Joata bought a Bel-Air-logo headcover in the golf shop as a souvenir of the occasion.

The USGA is coming to Ann Arbor in late August to stage the U.S. Senior Women’s Open at another golf course of historic significance — Barton Hills Country Club, designed by Scotsman Donald Ross in 1919. A local rooting favorite will be University of Michigan alum Elaine Crosby, an LPGA player and past president.

Contact Michael Patrick Shiels at MShiels@aol.com  His new book: Travel Tattler – Not So Torrid Tales, may be purchased via Amazon.com Hear his radio talk show on 730 AM 1240 in Lansing weekdays from 3 pm – 6 pm.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: USGA takes golf world to historic Bel-Air CC, heads to Ann Arbor in August