Golf loves a good comeback. In Harding Park, the municipal course in San Francisco that is serving as the venue for this week’s PGA Championship, the game has one of the best in recent years.
The story starts in the summer of 1925, when the course opened for play. It was designed by Willie Watson and Sam Whiting, who had just constructed the Lake and Ocean tracks at the nearby Olympic Club. Being named after President Warren G. Harding – an avid golfer and Ohio Republican who had died in San Francisco while in office two years prior – endowed the new layout with a certain eminence as well.
Harding Park prospered for decades as a place for area golfers of all ages and abilities to play and as a tournament venue. It hosted the San Francisco City Golf Championship, aka the City, and was the site of the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championships in 1937 and 1956.
Then in the 1960s, the facility held an annual PGA Tour event dubbed the Lucky International Open and sponsored in part by the makers of Lucky Lager, a popular local beer. It produced some notable winners, among them Billy Casper, Jackie Burke, Gary Player and San Franciscan Ken Venturi (who also captured three City championships in the 1950s and whose parents ran the pro shop there for a spell).
For decades, golfers raved about the straightforward routing at Harding Park, with the second nine winding around the edge of the property and encircling the front nine that was laid out within. They were particularly fond of the last five holes that ran along the shores of Lake Merced, and that the course’s flattish terrain did not leave golfers with the sorts of treacherous sidehill lies that were so common at Olympic just across the way. Harding had only one forced carry, on No. 18. The bucolic setting, just to the east of the Pacific Ocean and a mere 10 miles southwest from the center of San Francisco, also drew praise from golfers who enjoyed walking in the shadows of its tall cypress trees and watching rowers cut across the water in their sculling shells.
The ultimate indignity came during the 1998 U.S. Open at Olympic. That’s when Harding Park, which had been designed by the same architects who had built the layout for that year’s national championship, was used as a parking lot.
Course conditions, however, started to deteriorate due to budget cuts and institutional indifference. The PGA Tour decided to move to greener fairways after 1969. Things only declined further. Local amateur golf icon Randy Haag remembers the grass on the greens being shaggier than the turf on the tees when he played the City in the 1980s and ’90s. “It was so bad that we chipped on the greens instead of putting them because the grass was so long from the lack of mowing and so wet from the poor drainage,” he said. “To properly prepare for the City in those days, you had to really practice your chipping.”
The ultimate indignity came during the 1998 U.S. Open at Olympic. That’s when Harding Park, which had been designed by the same architects who had built the layout for that year’s national championship, was used as a parking lot.
As distressing as that development was, it ended up acting as a catalyst for a massive renovation effort. Spearheaded by longtime San Francisco lawyer and former USGA president Sandy Tatum and backed by such important local figures as financier Charles Schwab and mayor Willie Brown as well as then-PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem, it not only saved Harding Park but also revitalized it. This week, it plays host to the PGA.
A muni rising from near ruin to host a major championship. Now, that’s a comeback story.
It’s made even better by the likelihood of the PGA Tour once again staging an annual competition at Harding Park, with basketball great Steph Curry serving as the official host.
Harding Park was born in the midst of golf’s Golden Age of course architecture, and the initial plan was to build two 18-hole courses, with Watson and Whiting designing one and Alister MacKenzie fashioning the other. For reasons not entirely clear, the MacKenzie track never came to be.
The sandy-soiled land on which Watson and Whiting routed their layout had previously been the site of a lettuce farm and occupied a total of 163 acres. Published reports indicate the total cost of the project came to $295,000, and that the architects received $300 for their design plan.
According to TPC Harding Park general manager Tom Smith, the facility did not have a driving range in the early days. “But there was a three-hole practice field in the middle of the property,” Smith said. “As demand for golf surged after World War II, however, the city decided to turn that into a nine-hole golf course.”
Called the Fleming – in honor of Jack Fleming, the longtime Harding Park course superintendent – it came online in 1961, giving the facility 27 holes. Par was 30, and the layout included six par-3s and three par-4s of varying distances. Its small greens put a premium on accuracy.
One of the keys to procuring local and statewide support for the restoration – and to raising money for the effort – was securing a commitment from the PGA Tour to host revenue-generating tournaments at Harding. Once that occurred, actual work on the $16 million project began in the spring of 2002. Chris Gray, the PGA Tour’s director of golf course design and construction at the time, led the effort, and it took 15 months to complete. In addition to adding nearly 500 yards to the layout so it measured some 7,200 yards from the back tees and rebuilding all the championship tees, Gray redid the bunkers and reconstructed the greens to USGA specifications, largely to improve drainage. He also oversaw the installation of a new irrigation system, upgraded the Fleming and brought the driving range that eventually had been constructed at the facility up to PGA Tour standards.
The project also included the building of a new clubhouse, which was named quite appropriately for Sandy Tatum. Around that same time, The First Tee of San Francisco made Harding Park its permanent home.
It wasn’t long before the facility was staging professional golf tournaments once again. There was the WGC-American Express Championship in 2005, with Tiger Woods beating John Daly in a thrilling, three-hole playoff, and the Presidents Cup four years later. Following that, the facility became part of the TPC network of courses. It hosted the Champions Tour’s season-ending Charles Schwab Challenge Cup in 2010, 2011 and 2013. In 2015 it was the site of the WGC-Cadillac Match Play, won by Rory McIlroy, and a few years after that, the PGA Tour announced that it will hold the 2025 Presidents Cup there.
Tour professionals were pleased with TPC Harding Park as a tournament site and the local amateurs who competed each winter in the City were ecstatic. “It has always had an excellent routing, and the finishing holes present a very good challenge, especially when the wind is blowing off the lake,” said Andrew Biggadike, a Bay Area resident and Olympic Club member who regularly competes in the City. “Best of all, the course conditioning has improved so much. I would rank it among the best major city munis in the country.”
Now that muni is getting its major, and Biggadike and Haag are excited to see how it will hold up. “It’ll be a par-70 for the pros as opposed to the par-72 it normally is, with the par-5s at Nos. 9 and 12 being turned into par-4s,” Biggadike said. “They will each run about 500 yards, but there will be some short (par-)4s for them as well, on the seventh and 16th, and guys can try to drive those greens if they want.”
Smith says the PGA of America added five new tee boxes for this championship and brought the fairways in at places and shifted them in others to bring hazards that already existed a bit more into play.
“The course will be a bear,” said Haag, who has competed in nine professional majors and played Harding Park about a month ago. “The rough will be up, and … to do well, golfers will need to be long and accurate. I can’t wait to see how the course holds up.”
It will be another big moment for a golf facility that has had a lot of them in recent years.
What a comeback.