Harding's Hero
Former USGA president Sandy Tatum's effort to save San Francisco's most famous public course is strictly personal
Sandy Tatum and Harding Park seemed an odd couple when they became inextricably linked six years ago.
On one hand was the now 82-year-old former USGA president, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford and Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a distinguished and still-active barrister from an old-line San Francisco law firm, a member at Cypress Point and San Francisco GC, a resident of the city's exclusive Presidio Heights. With close friend Alistair Cooke he shares a gift for both gravitus and epigrammatic eloquence, as evidenced by his memorable defense of the course set-up at the 1974 U.S. Open at Winged Foot: "Our objective is not to humiliate the best players in the world. It's to identify them." To top it off, Tatum is still a trim 6-feet-2 and possesses the kind of rugged visage Harrison Ford can only hope for in 22 years.
On the other hand was the now 78-year-old golf course, the very definition of a tattered muny, its dank stucco clubhouse echoey with the clatter of pullcarts, its patchy fairways pushing up daisies, its greens rock-hard despite the ever-dampening fog, tended by too few city workers supervised by beaten-down administrators. The place may have spawned Ken Venturi, George Archer and Johnny Miller, and it may have staged the fabled 1956 San Francisco City Golf Championship final between Venturi and Harvie Ward that drew 10,000 spectators, but by the late 1960s Harding was deemed no longer suitable as a tour stop. The pipeline of good young players had run dry, and the course was spiraling slowly into utter disrepair.
Golf World July 4, 2003
Still, Tatum and Harding had bonded before Tracy met Hepburn. Tatum, who grew up affluent in Los Angeles, had first played Harding Park in the 1939 San Francisco City Golf Championship when he was a member of both the golf and debate teams at Stanford, for whom he would win the 1942 NCAA individual golf championship. He would go on to play in the tournament some 40 more times and, though he never won, he came to feel much the same way about Harding as he did his favorite golf shrine, the Old Course at St. Andrews.
"The quality of the place just fixed in my being," intoned Tatum recently while standing on the back tee of the newly stretched and strengthened 470-yard par-4 18th at Harding, bundled in cashmere and poplin, and his eyes watery but bright. "As the years passed and the condition got worse, I still saw it -- what I thought it should be. Then in early 1997, I simply decided, 'I'm going to try to do something about this.' "
And so, after a circuitous and sometimes interminable ride, Tatum's vision has become Harding Park's $16-million renovation. When it reopens around Labor Day after being closed for 17 months, it will surely draw raves for its retained character, suddenly superb conditioning and majestic but traditional challenge. At its new full length of about 7,250 yards and par 70 (it will play as a 6,800-yard par 72 from the men's tees), including 18 new greens and nearly as many tees, Harding specifically was designed to stage a major PGA Tour event every three years, most likely the WGC-American Express Championship beginning in 2006. By that time, odds are Harding will have surpassed Torrey Pines South and Bethpage Black as the finest publicly administrated golf course in the land.
Harding, designed by Willie Watson in 1925, is built on the same sand-dune region on the western fringe of San Francisco that Alister Mackenzie in the 1920s called "the finest golfing territory I have seen in America." Adjoined by the Olympic Club and the A.W. Tillinghast masterpiece at the San Francisco GC, it is actually on a better piece of property than either one -- a gently rolling bluff surrounded on three sides by Lake Merced. "Most of the top players of my era thought Harding was the best layout in the city," says Venturi, whose father, Fred, served as the head pro at the course for many years, and who won his last PGA Tour event at Harding in the 1966 Lucky International.
"It was easy to see it could be something great," says Chris Gray, the PGA Tour's lead course architect. "We added some strategy and some length [about 400 yards] to accommodate the modern game, but basically we just had to bring it back to life. To me, it's a little utopia of golf." Tatum, who for the last several months has been giving tours of the course, says, "I get at least two 'wows' a hole."
Completing the project will be a First Tee facility, a fully renovated nine-hole "inner" course geared to less advanced players, and a more spacious driving range. A new clubhouse overlooking Lake Merced is due by next year. For even nongolfing San Franciscans, Harding Park's ascendancy is gratifying in the way of doing right by an old friend. "We have some jewels in our city, and Harding Park was always one of them," says city supervisor Tony Hall, a nongolfer who was the chief political muscle behind the renovation. "It's just that for the last 30 years, we forgot about her."
