THE RITUAL AT CORONADO GOLF COURSE!

Observation of the Day!

This is US Open week in San Diego and the nation. The Union Tribune ran an article about what happenes day to day a several of San Diego golf courses. Last year my course, Coronado Municipal Golf Course was voted by local golfers as the best public golf course in San Diego County. The following is from the Union Tribune about a day at Coronado. I have participated in this ritual many times.

6:02 a.m., Coronado

The sun has been up for 10 minutes, cresting the mountains in East County and now peeking through the pillars of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge.

SEAN M. HAFFEY / Union-Tribune
Against the backdrop of the San Diego-Coronado Bridge, golfers L.B. Rickards, Ken Trude, Bill Whaley and Sam Browning walked the greens not long after dawn at the Coronado Golf Course, which averages 103,000 rounds per year.

John Higgins takes a swig of coffee, looks at his watch and retrieves a rusty metal cage from a shelf. Inside are wooden balls numbered one to 75.

“All right, step on up,” Higgins says. “Let's get it done.”

The two courses at Torrey Pines may be closed to prepare to host the U.S. Open this week. But America's finest golf city rolls on, like a ball smacked down an endless fairway.

This is how the day begins at Coronado Golf Course, how it has begun since the course opened 51 years ago. People line up at the starter's booth. A metal cage is twirled and it spews out a wooden ball.

The lottery is for tee times two days in advance, but only for times between 6 and 7 a.m. Later tee times have been gobbled up by advance reservations; Coronado, with green fees a steal at $25, averages a whopping 103,000 rounds per year. Higgins will pull out balls for an hour, then start assigning the sacred tee times.

On this day, he has 22 available. Half go to those lucky enough to draw a wooden ball with a low number, the other half to those lucky enough to get through by phone.

He starts assigning tee times at 7 a.m. By 7:07, they're gone.

“Now I have to listen to the whining for the rest of the day,” says Higgins, who has worked at Coronado for 12 years. “That's the one thing about this job I'll never understand. If you get a tee time, great. If you don't, it's not the end of the world. Go do something else.

“But I've never heard such whining. You have no idea how seriously people take their golf around here.”

And so begins another beautiful day at "my" course. Let the Open begin.

Have a nice day!

Sam