HARDING PARK’S FELICITOUS FLEMING 9
MACKENZIE’S SPIRIT LIVES AT THIS SAN FRANCISCO TREASURE
» BY JAY STULLER
No. 7 D
esigned and built by fabled Willie Watson and Sam Whiting during the Golden Age of golf course architecture, Harding Park
opened in 1925 as arguably the nation’s greatest muni and perhaps second best worldwide, after the Old Course at St. Andrews. Covering 163 acres along the shores of Lake Merced in the south- west corner of San Francisco, the stir- ring layout predated Torrey Pines and Bethpage Black, and rivaled America’s top private courses. It hosted a surfeit of pro tour events from the 1940s into the 1960s, the 2009 Presidents Cup and, among others, the most recent World Golf Match Play Championship. Wedged within Harding’s fair-
ways—and yet largely unknown out- side of San Francisco—is the Fleming 9, named after former city parks
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NCGA.ORG / WINTER 2016
superintendent Jack Fleming. Opened in 1961, the par-30 layout is a civic treasure, with modest green fees and a fast pace of play, measuring more than 2,015 yards. And though written accounts of its history are sparse, Flem- ing may have architectural provenance equal to that of Harding’s main course. Indeed, while its namesake gets
offi cial credit for the design and development, the nine-hole gem was initially sketched out three decades before its construction, by none other than Dr. Alister MacKenzie. “We know that MacKenzie was
in Northern California at the time, after designing Cypress Point and Pasatiempo,” says Bo Links, a San Francisco attorney, author and golf historian. “He’d already agreed to work on Sharp Park. And I hardly
think the report in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin would be untrue.” On Feb. 4, 1930, the Bulletin car-
ried a four-paragraph item on plans to convert a six-hole Harding Park practice area into a nine-hole course, to help relieve weekend congestion. H. Chandler Egan, a well-known amateur golfer, and Robert Hunter, a course builder and socialite with excel- lent “connections,” were to inspect the prospect with Joseph Hickey, manag- ing director of the city’s municipal courses. They intended to work with a route that MacKenzie, already quite fa- mous, had drawn up three weeks prior. “On completion of the plans for
the reconstruction of the practice course,” said the paper, “Hickey...will submit estimates and the plans to the park commission for approval.”
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