It’s easy to be nostalgic for a historically rich place like the Country Club in Brookline, Mass., where Francis Ouimet won the 1913 US Open and where the US Ryder Cup team rallied under Ben Crenshaw. to stun Europe in 1999, to name but two. events. For NBC golf broadcaster Gary Koch, however, his sentimentality runs deep at the private club in suburban Boston — in fact, it’s second nature, rooted in him by memories stretching back more than 50 years.
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When the 122nd US Open kicks off on Thursday, no one will surpass Koch in first-hand Country Club experience as a player and broadcaster. Koch and his cohort, Roger Maltbie, both competed in the 1968 US Junior Amateur at the Country Club as well as the 1988 US Open, where the two missed the cut while Curtis Strange beat Nick Faldo in an 18-hole playoff.
Koch, however, does better than his California-born colleague, or even two. Koch was a medalist in the Junior 68 before losing in the first round to a San Diego player named Steve Brown in the 64th round. (Maltbie failed to reach match play.) Five years later, after redeeming himself by winning the 1970 US Junior, Koch returned to the Country Club as a member of the US Walker Cup team .
Later, of course, Koch was on the court for NBC when Team USA overcame a 10-6 deficit to overwhelm Europe in the 1999 Ryder Cup, a record comeback since tied by the Europeans in 2012. He also worked the 2013 US Amateur, the release party of Englishman Matt Fitzpatrick.
“I don’t know a lot of sports where you can say you’ve been involved, so to speak, in a competition in a certain place going back over 50 years now,” Koch, 69, said by phone from his home. in suburban Tampa, Fla. “Obviously I’m not competing like I was years ago, but I’m still involved in the competition because I’m going to help present the competition. So yeah, there’s definitely going to be a sense of, you know, bringing back some really good memories, no doubt. I’ve kind of been around this place many times in many different capacities, so this week is certainly personally rewarding.
Koch was 15 when his parents, who both worked, put him on a plane with high school teammate Eddie Pearce – the eventual winner – to a part of the country he had never seen and a golf course that upset him. . (He wasn’t the only one; Crenshaw, who was also on the course in 1968, said his first experience at the Country Club that year sparked his interest in golf history and course design.)
“The first time I saw the place, it was breathtaking for a kid coming from Florida with everything flat and water everywhere, palm trees everywhere,” Koch said. “So, yeah, that was a revelation for a young golfer. It was amazing.
“It was literally the first competitive golf I’ve played anywhere other than the Southeast,” he continued. “The first thing that stood out were the greens. These things were like putting up pool tables. I thought you should never miss a putt. I learned to putt on crappy old Bermudagrass greens. Also, I had never played on a golf course with blind shots. I had never played on a golf course with so many uneven sides, and there were rocky outcrops everywhere. It was a totally different experience.
With rounds of 73 and 72, one over par, Koch was the medalist among 64 players who made the cut. The course was so difficult that 162, 18 over par, qualified for match play. That player was Brown, who fired Koch, 4 and 3. “I probably got a little cocky,” said Koch, who stayed to watch high school teammate C. Leon King Pearce, who, like Koch, continued to play on the PGA Tour. , take the title.
Koch, who won six times on the tour, continued to impress as an amateur, winning the Florida Open in 1969 and in his last US Junior in 1970 beating 15-year-old Mike Nelms, 8 and 6 years, for his only USGA title. In 1973 he added the Trans-Mississippi Amateur to earn selection to that year’s Walker Cup team.
The United States won the 1973 Walker Cup, 14-10, and Koch went 1-1-2 for the home side. The captain that year was Jesse Sweetser, a contemporary of Bobby Jones, who was 71 when he captained Team USA. He didn’t know the players, including future British Open winner Bill Rogers, but he did know the Country Club. He had won the US Amateur there in 1922, beating Jones in the semi-finals, 8 and 7 – the worst defeat of Jones’ career in a championship he won five times – and Charles “Chick” Evans in the final, 3 and 2.
Koch says Sweetser may have known the route, but he didn’t know much about traversing the Boston area.
“I’m in the hotel lobby getting ready to go to class and he’s in the lobby so he’s like, ‘Come on, I’m going to kick you out. Well, he got lost,” Koch recalled, starting to laugh. “I mean, getting to Brookline isn’t easy anyway. There are many two-lane roads and they go everywhere. This was before GPS and cell phones and everything else so we stop about every 15 minutes to ask where it is. Finally, we get there. »
And Sweetser, one of 13 men to win a US Amateur and a British Amateur, has a fond memory. “We stop and drive through the driveway, and the 16th hole is just to the left as you drive, the par 3,” Koch said. “He stops the car, looks and says something like, ‘This is the hole where I finished the match against Bobby Jones to win the US Amateur. And I kinda went, ‘Holy sh–.’ It was pretty cool.
Later, of course, Koch learned that Sweetser closed Evans on that hole. Another nice story.
Koch’s competitive history at the Country Club ended with a missed cut at the 1988 US Open, a month after his last tour title in Las Vegas. He would play in the Championship four more times, the last in 2001 when he passed the section qualifiers. During this time he turned to broadcasting in 1990 with ESPN and joined NBC in 1996. In the 1999 Ryder Cup he covered the first singles match, when Tom Lehman beat Lee Westwood to start the rally American, and he was on the 18th green when Payne Stewart conceded a 1-up victory over Colin Montgomerie when their game had no bearing on the result.
“I interviewed Payne on the green. It was probably the last interview he did, except maybe the one at Disney before he passed,” Koch said solemnly. Stewart, who won the 99 US Open earlier that year at Pinehurst, died in a Learjet crash a month after the Ryder Cup.
Koch can’t predict how many more US Opens he’ll cover for NBC. But he thought about it. “My television career is probably coming to an end here at some point. I mean, I don’t know exactly when, but that can’t be too far away,” he said.
Which makes this year’s US Open particularly noteworthy. A walk down Memory Lane can be enjoyable, and certainly worthwhile too. The course has changed, and just to make sure it’s ready, Koch recently spoke with course architect Gil Hanse, who oversaw the renovation of the Country Club. The bunkers have been moved, the greens enlarged. But the print remains on that same small patch where Koch made several of his own prints.
His personal story is closely linked to the many events organized in this emblematic place. Of course, it will be special.
“I’m sure I’ll think of a lot of things that happened there that I was a part of, maybe I’ll share some of those memories,” Koch said. “All these years later, it’s still a pretty amazing place for me.”
