PENINSULA GOLF CLUB’S 18th annual Apple Cup Best Ball Tournament hopes to provide some good-natured, in-state-rivalry trash talk before the 102nd Apple Cup football game between Washington and Washington State kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 28.
The tournament, sponsored by Marine View Beverage and Callaway Golf, tees off at 8:30 a.m. on game day.
Tournament format is a two-person best ball. Entries are $80 per team, which includes team merchandise awards, food and drink after the competition, and individual closest to the pin and long drive prizes.
Each player also receives a free glove from Callaway Golf. Entry blanks are available at Peninsula Golf Club pro shop or online by visiting Peninsula’s website at www.golfinportangeles.com.
For more information, call the golf shop at 360-457-6501.
Scholarship Scramble
Another play some golf and do some good for others event is quickly approaching.
The annual Rick Kaps Scholarship Scramble will tee off on Friday, Nov. 27.
Donations, and a percentage of green fees, go to funding scholarships for several Sequim High School seniors.
Tournament format is a four-person scramble with a 9:30 a.m. shotgun start.
Entry fees are $220 per team with an optional honeypot.
Golfers receive a T-shirt, a gourmet meal provided by Captain Henry, and the self-satisfaction that comes with helping provide scholarships for worthy students.
The field is limited to the first 20 teams that sign up.
This is one of the most popular tournaments of the year for SkyRidge, so early entries are advised and encouraged.
For more information or to register, call SkyRidge at 360-683-3673.
Kaps was a legendary high school boys basketball coach and athletic director for the Wolves, leading Sequim to three straight Class AA state tournaments in the late 1980s.
His 1987-88 team lost just one contest, the AA state title game to Rainier Beach and future Seattle Supersonics draft pick and Sacramento King, Doug Christie.
Kaps died of lymphoma in 1998 after a long battle with the disease.
Golf equipment
FootJoy’s western Washington representative, Brad Barnett, brings a trunk-load of golf-related goodies to the Peninsula Golf Club clubhouse from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturday.
He’ll have FootJoy’s full product line for 2010 along with him, including shoes, outerwear, gloves, hats, umbrellas and duffle bags.
Head pro Chris Repass will be on hand to co-host the sale with Barnett.
Peninsula will offer discounts on any item ordered on Saturday.
With the recent torrential downpours dousing the North Olympic Peninsula, picking out some new wet-weather gear like a rain jacket or rain pants, or a new pair of all-weather DryJoy golf shoes, seems like a good investment.
Fans of FootJoy can customize their own pair of golf shoes with the MyJoys application on the FootJoy Web site, www.footjoy.com.
Golfers could even put a Seattle Seahawks, Washington Huskies or Washington State Cougars logo on their shoes.
But after suffering through this football season, I’d say a person still interested in sporting any of those logos might be better served by spending more time on the psychiatrist’s couch than the golf course.
Easy to root for golfers
Rightly or wrongly, I project a great deal of my emotional health to the win-loss records of my favorite sports teams.
I’ve been in some mental state lately, considering the abject failure that is the 2009 football season for our Seattle Seahawks (3-6) and for my Alma mater Washington State (1-9).
Add in the improvement shown by the professional basketball team that shall not be named (5-5), but was formerly ensconced in KeyArena, and my rooting fortunes have never ebbed so low.
These failures have led me to think about why I enjoy watching televised golfing events.
One of the main factors being that it’s hard to root against these guys (and ladies).
The great majority are intelligent, charismatic individuals, performing at consistently high levels, with the pressure of expectation and potential gnawing at them.
They are also athletes who can answer questions from the press with a quick wit and avoid the boilerplate quotations so many team-sport peers use. Most of the time, anyway.
That’s why I was sad to hear that David Duval, one of the first professionals I took a rooting interest in, had missed the cut at last weekend’s Children’s Miracle Network Classic to fall out of the PGA Tour’s top 125 rankings and miss out on the full-season tour card in 2010 that accompanies a top 125 finish.
I enjoyed Duval most while he was busy storming the ranks of the PGA Tour in the late 1990s.
Back then he was anointed as the antidote to Tiger Woods, whose 1997 Masters win turned the tour on its head.
Duval was one bad dude in the 90s, typically clad all in black and never caught on the golf course without his trademark pair of Oakley sunglasses.
He could hit it a mile off the tee, and also showed such soft touch around the greens that I had him all but measured for countless Green Jackets.
Duval won 13 tournaments between 1997 and 2001, including the 2001 British Open, but somehow the expectations, injuries and personal issues caught up to Duval and he never achieved the win total that I and many others had expected of him.
When I heard that he wouldn’t be a full-tour member, my thoughts drifted back to a 1999 Sports Illustrated profile of Duval by Gary Smith.
Thanks to Sports Illustrated’s online vault, you can read the article at www.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1015615/index.htm.
In his heyday, Duval had a reputation as an arrogant jerk by many accounts, but the profile — a piece of long-form journalism rarely seen in the manic age of Twitter — provided an insight into the childhood trauma that eventually drove Duval to a No. 1 world ranking in 1999.
Even after 10 years the piece stands out as one of the best athlete profiles I have ever read, and I encourage readers to check it out.
You might need some tissue, though.
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Golf columnist Michael Carman can be reached at 360-504-0181 or at pdngolf@gmail.com.