Berganio Wedges Into Final : Match play: Deft shots from sand traps on 17th and 18th holes allow intense 23-year-old from Sylmar to advance.

Dave Berganio Jr. of Sylmar stood on the 17th tee under a fast-closing fog late Thursday, his match against Craig Steinberg of Van Nuys deadlocked.

The winner would go into today’s championship match of the 81st California Amateur golf championship, the loser to the parking lot to prepare for a long drive home.

Before him lay 173 yards of screaming trouble.

On each side of the green was grass so thick a snake would try to go around it.

In front and in back of the green were extremely deep bunkers.

And everywhere was ocean. And kelp. And otters and seals and gulls and terns and crustaceans of many sizes.

Berganio hit it into the sand trap.

And then he won the match.

Crashing a wedge through the white sand with near-perfection, Berganio sent the ball almost into the cup. It stopped four feet away and he made the putt for par, taking the hole from Steinberg in match play and holding the one-hole advantage to the end, although his ultra-aggressive style brought him close to disaster on No. 18.

The win put Berganio, raised in decidedly non-country club environments in Pacoima and Sylmar, into the final of the prestigious tournament. Last year he won the U.S. Public Links championship and the Pacific Coast Amateur title.

Berganio, 23, will face Todd Demsey of Rancho Santa Fe in today’s 36-hole title match. The final pits the University of Arizona--Berganio will be a senior there in the fall--against Arizona State, where Demsey enters his sophomore year in the fall. Berganio helped Arizona to the NCAA championship this year. Arizona State, with Demsey, was runner-up.

To get to the afternoon semifinal against Steinberg, Berganio first dispatched Steve Wood of Ontario, 2-and-1, in the morning’s quarterfinals.

Steinberg made it to the semifinals by ousting 1990 California Amateur champion Charlie Wi of Thousand Oaks, falling behind by three holes at the halfway point but then overtaking a faltering Wi on the 14th hole and beating him on the 17th with a seven-foot birdie putt.

Wi, 20, who won the 1990 tournament two weeks after graduating from Westlake High, couldn’t hide his disappointment.

“This is bad because I feel I gave it away,” he said. “I came apart and Craig was there to take advantage of it.”

After a one-hour break, Berganio and Steinberg then locked up in a memorable battle, neither player putting consistently well but both hammering their way out of trouble over and over again.

Other than Berganio’s blast from the trap on No. 17, the most dramatic escape came on the 14th hole when Berganio left his approach shot to the numbingly difficult 565-yard, par-five on the fringe of the green, 50 feet from the pin.

But he snapped a hard putt over a steep side-slope, the ball catching the edge of the green on its long journey and then hanging for a second on the lip of the cup before dropping in, keeping Steinberg, who had played the hole brilliantly, from taking the hole.

The intense Berganio, who plays golf with an almost homicidal look on his face, allowed a brief smile to flash across his face.

“I started saying, ‘Man, that putt looks good,’ ” Berganio said. “As it kept going I was saying, ‘Man, that might go in!’ It was just crazy. I couldn’t even see the hole when I hit that putt.”

With a one-hole advantage heading to No. 18, perhaps the most famous and possibly the most dangerous golf hole in the world, the average player would take the cautious route.

Berganio doesn’t have that route on his map.

He lashed a three-wood instead of an iron on his second shot to lay up in front of the green on the 548-yard beast but hooked it, sending the ball soaring left toward the crashing waves of the Pacific. Only a sand trap and a cement sea wall kept the ball on the course.

But he came out of the trap to within 15 feet and needed only to two-putt to tie the hole and win the match.

“I honestly didn’t expect to get this far,” he said. “I wasn’t playing well at the start of the week, but I kept grinding and never quit.

“That’s my game.”

The loss was another sad ending for Steinberg, 34, an optometrist and third-year law student who has been to the tournament 13 times, qualified for match play in 11 of those tournaments and been to the quarterfinals or further seven times.

“But I’ve never been to the championship match,” he said. “It hurts to get this close and not make it. It hurts every time.”

Demsey, 20, made it to the title match by beating Pat Duncan, also of Rancho Santa Fe, in the morning’s quarterfinals and then ousting Mark Johnson, a 38-year-old truck driver from Barstow, in the semifinals.