Century Unlimited

It all began with the Southern California Golf Assn.

There are more than 400 golf courses in Southern California and new ones continue to sprout. Nearly two million Southern Californians play the game, which is at an all-time high in popularity.

And five men started it all when they met July 29, 1899, in a downtown Los Angeles bank and agreed to form a governing body with a sole directive: to preserve and protect the game of golf in Southern California. They called it the Southern California Golf Assn.

The SCGA kept golf afloat through world wars and economic depression in the first half of the 20th century. When real estate development and tax laws threatened to wipe out golf courses in the 1950s and ‘60s, the SCGA intervened and saved the day.

Some will argue that the SCGA is the history of golf in Southern California.

But as the association celebrates its 100th anniversary, the only direction it cares to look is forward.

“We are very proud of what we have accomplished over the last 100 years,” SCGA Executive Director Tom Morgan said. “But we are absolutely not going to rest on our laurels.”

That attitude has prevailed in the SCGA throughout the last century, and has propelled it to become one of the most prominent, well-respected and progressive golf associations in the nation.

While the U.S. Golf Assn. governs golf in the United States, and to some extent the world, the SCGA governs the game in Southern California.

“I compare it to the USGA as one would compare the Pac-10 to the NCAA,” Morgan said. “They run the big picture on the national level. We use them as a guideline, but we operate independently at the regional level.”

Indeed, the SCGA is a miniature version of the USGA. Representatives from the five original SCGA Clubs--Los Angeles Country Club, Pasadena Country Club, Redlands Country Club, Riverside Polo and Golf Club and Santa Monica Golf Club--studied the USGA bylaws before drafting their own.

Even the SCGA headquarters, Golf House West in North Hollywood, takes its name from Golf House in Far Hills, N.J.--home of the USGA.

The SCGA has grown from those five founding members to 1,118 clubs with a total more than 160,000 golfers.

All but a handful of courses from Santa Maria to San Diego, including heavily played municipal courses to the most exclusive country clubs, are SCGA members.

The staff of 24 working at Golf House West is responsible for maintaining handicaps, rating courses for difficulty, maintaining and administering the rules, running tournaments and getting information to all its members.

The SCGA has always been at the forefront of handicapping, first introducing the “Green Sheet” in the mid-1960s. The sheets were the first to allow golfers to post scores at courses other than their home course.

The SCGA introduced the concept of equitable stroke control and using the low 10 of the last 20 scores to compute handicaps, both later adopted by the USGA.

“Handicapping is probably the most important thing we do,” Morgan said. “It touches all of our members.”

Computers facilitated the process, and today, the SCGA handicap computers can be found at every course in Southern California.

The next step in the SCGA’s pioneering efforts of handicapping is the EHS 2000 system, a touch-screen, Internet-based system that will allow golfer’s handicap files to be updated overnight. The system will be introduced this year and in approximately three years, all Southern California courses will be equipped with it.

The SCGA web site, introduced in 1996, was the first to allow members to look up indexes, among its many other features.

“We pride ourselves on being at the forefront of the field of golf associations in the country,” Morgan said. “We’ve just always seemed to be more progressive than other associations.”

The SCGA was around when hoes, shovels and rakes were used to hack out the first Orange County course (now Santa Ana Country Club) in 1914. It was there when handicaps were handwritten on green sheets of paper and computed manually. But much of the history of the association can be found in its tournaments.

Or perhaps more accurately, its tournament champions.

Tiger Woods, Al Geiberger, Phil Mickelson, John Cook and Craig Stadler are among the dozens who won major SCGA tournaments before going on to professional success.

The SCGA Amateur Championship has been conducted every year since 1900 and is the second oldest continuously contested amateur tournament in the nation. Only the Utah State Amateur, begun in 1899, has a longer consecutive string. The U.S. Amateur began in 1894, but was suspended in 1917-1918 and 1942-1945 because of war.

Orange County golfers had their heyday in the mid-1980s when David Hobby of Santa Ana CC, Brad Greer of Mission Viejo CC and Dave Sheff of Huntington Beach combined to win the SCGA Amateur championship from 1983-86. Greer, who won in ’84 and ‘85, is one of only five players to win consecutive titles.

John Richardson, who won the California Amateur in 1961, became the oldest SCGA amateur championship winner when he won the 1973 title at age 52. He went on to win the 1987 U.S. Senior Amateur, and is widely considered the best amateur golfer from Orange County.

Conducting tournaments became much easier for the SCGA when, in 1994, it purchased its own course in Murrieta, joining the Northern California Golf Assn. as the only golf associations in the nation to own courses.

Today, the SCGA Members’ Club, a Robert Trent Jones Sr. design, is one of the state’s finest public courses and hosts numerous tournaments year-round.

It all began with the first official meeting in 1899.

Original handwritten minutes from that meeting show that the association was founded “to promote interest in the game of golf . . . to establish uniformity in the rules of the game . . . to be a Court of Reference as a final authority in matters of controversy; to establish a uniform system of handicapping. . . . “

As the SCGA begins its second century armed with new technology, knowledge and 100 years of experience, it is hard to imagine golf in Southern California without the SCGA and that objective.

“There would be some association here,” Morgan said. “It just happens to be the SCGA and it’s one of the best.”