Mr. Smith goes to Augusta (again)

    Thursday, September 13, 2012
    Writing from Lake Forest, Illinois

    Nathan Smith thought he was playing golf on Thursday at Conway Farms Golf Club.
    Turns out he was getting into the ring with amateur golf’s equivalent of Joe Frazier.
    Garrett Rank, who has already survived testicular cancer and on Friday night will be on the ice in Kitchner for his first Ontario Hockey League refereeing assignment of the season, just kept coming in the championship match of the 32nd U.S. Mid-Amateur.
    It didn’t matter to Rank that he was 1-down to Smith after the morning round. Or that he was 3-down after six holes in the afternoon, with Smith on his game. Rank kept coming, driving the green on the 300-yard sixth hole. He made birdie and forced Smith to sink a 25-footer to match. Rank birdied the eighth hole as well, dropping a 15-foot putt, and forced Smith to make a 12-footer to match.
    Finally, Rank made a dent at the ninth with his third straight birdie, but Smith won the 10th – the 28th of the match – to go 3-up again.
    And still, Smith wasn’t comfortable.
    “He just kept coming,” Smith said. “It was like guarding (Michael) Jordan. You hold him to four in the first quarter, but he goes off on you for 28 in the second.”
    This went on all day, until one miscue by Rank, an ever-so-slightly overcooked chip shot on the par-3 17th, gave Smith the lead for good. Smith would capture a 1-up victory, his record fourth U.S. Mid-Amateur title, in a scrap that went the distance under windblown dishwater gray skies, and nearly went beyond it.
    “He was awesome,” Smith said. “He was just so good.”
    Smith wasn’t bad himself, especially in the afternoon, when his only miscue was in making three straight 5s beginning at the 13th, allowing Rank to come from 3 down and square the match.
    Smith proved just a bit better, and proved it on the 17th, playing safely to the left of a sucker pin on the par-3 after Rank ended up in the left fringe with a dicey downhill chip. He clipped it well, but it skidded past the cup, then down the slope and ended up 40 feet away.
    “It was almost like a moral victory just getting to the 36th hole with him,” Smith said. “I was lucky to come out on top.”
    Luck had far less to do with it than sheer skill. Smith’s smart play on the 17th, the capstone on a week of excellent golf against difficult foes, earned him the margin he needed to get his hands on the Robert T. Jones Jr. Memorial Trophy for a fourth time. He also won the title in 2003, 2009 and 2010, and now has captured the crown in half the Mid-Ams he’s played in.
    “It’s pretty surreal,” Smith said. “Any time you can say you’ve done something that nobody else has, no matter what it is, sports or life, it’s pretty surreal. I played some great opponents this week in my bracket.”
    Smith, a 34-year-old financial representative, was in the Mid-Am’s equivalent of the East Regional. He had to knock off pal and fellow Pittsburgh native Sean Knapp, a Mid-Am stalwart, in the third round, and faced two-time Mid-Am winner Tim Jackson in the semifinals, escaping with a 3 & 1 victory. Then came Rank, just turned 25 and thus just eligible for the Mid-Am. He’ll be one to reckon with for a while.
    “I was just fortunate to get through,” Smith said. “This one was the toughest (of the four victories) to win by far. The competition gets better, and the breaks don’t go your way and you have to make them. I guess that’s why nobody has won four.”
    Until now. Until Smith, who becomes the 16th player to win at least four of the same USGA title.
    “He is a great player, and I have nothing but respect for him,” Rank said. “I’d like to say I played the best I could. A week or even two days down the road, I’ll kick myself for a shot or two, but finishing second isn’t half-bad either.”
    It earned Rank a three-year exemption into the Mid-Am (Smith gets a 10-year pass from qualifying), and a few other baubles, but the one prize besides the title and the trophy that only the winner gets is an invitation to next year’s Masters Tournament. The past three visits to Augusta National, Smith has failed to make the cut, though the first was memorable beyond all expectation, in that he was paired with fellow Pennsylvanian Arnold Palmer, who invented golf in 1956 or so and was playing in his last Masters. But a fourth visit was on his mind overnight.
    “It’s one of those where you go to bed so early, get a couple hours of sleep, then you wake up and look at the clock and start thinking what might be,” Smith admitted. “I’ll think about it a lot.”
    Now he can dream of it as well.

    Around Conway Farms

    Smith’s match-play record in the U.S. Mid-Amateur is an astounding 32-4, an .889 batting average, and 22-1 in his last 23 matches. That’s even more amazing than his four titles in eight appearances. But Jerry Courville Jr. has the record for match wins with 36. ... Smith had been tied with another Pennsylvanian, Jay Sigel (1983, 1985, 1987) with three Mid-Am wins. ... Attendance was about 150 for the final match, most of the gallery Conway Farms members. ... Next up for Conway Farms is the BMW Championship, a.k.a. Western Open, at this time next year. The rough will be lower, the fairways may be wider, and large areas of fescue, and more than a few trees, will be removed to make way for the skybox suites and other accouterments that go with big-time professional golf.
    – Tim Cronin