Santa Ana rises, then falls
“Wait ‘til next year!” isn’t really a rallying cry as much as a simple statement of annual frustration for Santa Ana Country Club when applied to the Jones Cup competition. For the 16th straight year, covering the entire history of the local team golf tournament, Santa Ana is not taking home the cup nor the bragging rights that go with it.
“We have to wait a whole year to play again,” Liz Slater, Santa Ana’s woman team member, said with a smile that far outshined any disappointment. “We tied for third. We had fun and we did our best.”
The five-member SACC team finished the 18-hole tournament at 7-under-par 137, the same score as Mesa Verde and Shady Canyon on Tuesday. All were three strokes behind Newport Beach Country club, which won for the first time in 11 years. Host club Big Canyon finished second, two strokes back at 8-under par.
“As a team we really had a great time — we really did,” Boyd Martin, SACC’s senior champion, said. “We just didn’t make the putts — that happens in golf. We were very competitive, we had a good solid team, but they just didn’t fall today.”
Indeed, missed opportunity was a theme, as SACC struggled to create good birdie chances to begin with. Martin and men’s club champion Joe Doody paced the team with three birdies each. Team captain and head pro Geoff Cochrane and club pro Nick Kumpis contributing one birdie apiece.
Starting on the back nine at Big Canyon, SACC made its first strike on the second hole of competition. At the par-4 11th, Martin stuck a spectacular nine-iron approach within 10 inches of the pin. The tap-in birdie put SACC in red number for the rest of the afternoon.
Cochrane’s 15-foot birdie two holes later appeared to ignite momentum when Doody rolled home the putt of the day on the very next hole. From left of the cup on the slightly sloped 14th green, Doody drilled a 38-foot bender that broke the ice on his first round ever at the Jones Cup.
“I wanted to get that first birdie,” Doody said. “I gave it run, hit it firm, it would have gone 10 feet by if it didn’t go in.”
By the time SACC hit the turn, things were looking even better after a double birdie on their ninth hole, the par-5 18th at Big Canyon. Kumpis drove to a greenside bunker in two before his long-range blast out of the sand settled 3 feet from the cup. Birdie. Then came a roar when Slater finessed home a 30-footer as a growing crowd of spectators cheered at the clubhouse turn. It was the team’s only birdie-birdie score of the day.
“That was good, huh? Nick had that good shot out of the bunker and I was lucky to make that putt,” Slater said of the moment SACC briefly took the tournament lead at 5-under par.
“Liz played phenomenal today. She was so solid,” Martin said. “I think she saved us with saving putts five times today.”
But no one could save the momentum on the very next hole when Doody lipped out a short putt for birdie and no one else reached par. The collective bogey on the scorecard cost SACC the lead they would never regain.
Martin scored two more birdies on the 11th (2nd) and 14th (5th) holes to reach 6-under about the time standard bearers showed the leaders two and three strokes ahead. Coming down to the final hole, Doody was determined to make it memorable in front of a clubhouse swelling with late afternoon spectators.
“I love that, it definitely helped me make a birdie on the last hole,” Doody said after knocking in the 18-footer on the final hole. “In front of all these people, I didn’t want to miss that.”
“I think everybody contributed and that was nice to see,” Cochrane said of the team he captained. “Obviously you’d like to have that and shoot a lower score doing that. It was fun to see all the teammates contribute.”