Back in 2018, when then-Campbell-freshman Pontus Nyholm qualified for the 2018 NCAA Championship at Karsten Creek in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Camels head coach John Crooks orchestrated a detour. There was a scroll in Oklahoma City that Crooks wanted to see.
The player scroll is a familiar tradition for USGA championships, and Crooks knew that the one from the 1967 U.S. Junior at Twin Hills Golf Club would have his name on it – if it was still there.
“I called ahead and they were very gracious, met us and had carts for us,” Crooks remembered. “They showed me that I signed during registration for all the participants and then we rode by the golf course.”
Crooks’ run to that U.S. Junior title rarely comes up within his team, but it’s nice for the longtime coach of both Campbell golf teams to occasionally reference if he needs to drive home a point with a player.
Crooks spent this week recruiting at the U.S. Junior just up the road from Campbell. Walking the fairways at Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst, North Carolina, was a return to normalcy. For much of the past year, in-person recruiting was off-limits because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Because of COVID, I don’t know how other coaches felt but it’s just like I’ve just been standing in quicksand, there was nothing I could do, no place I could go,” he said. “To be able to walk the golf course and go up and down and walk nine holes and then nine more and then nine more, that’s what we’re supposed to do during the summertime, see players and be seen by players.”
Crooks won his U.S. Junior title in his first and only trip to the championship when he was 17. He had a local caddie at Twin Hills – one who had just signed to play basketball on scholarship at a school in Oklahoma and who Crooks distinctly remembers being unfamiliar with how to tote a golf bag. He would often pick it up by the handle and carry it that way.
Crooks met Andy North, a three-time PGA Tour winner turned ESPN golf analyst, in the final and got an early advantage. He was 6 up when he made the turn and held on to that advantage even as North came to life on the back nine. Crooks won, 2 and 1, when he birdied the 17th on top of North.
“I can’t tell you the length of every putt that I hit but I think that I played that round over in my head so much that if I can’t remember every shot I can remember most of them,” he said.
In the years since, Crooks has only seen North in person one time.
Back when Crooks competed, a player aged out of U.S. Junior eligibility when he was 18. Now, junior players have an extra year to compete. Plus, there weren’t as many outlets for word of the tournament to spread.
Still, Crooks was very much aware what it meant to be a U.S. Junior champion even before he was one.
Crooks isn’t the only current college coach for whom U.S. Junior week means a little something extra. Cincinnati men’s coach Doug Martin won in 1984 and Davidson men’s coach Tim Straub won in 1983.
Straub is one of a distinguished group to finish runner-up (in 1982 at Crooked Stick in Carmel, Indiana) before going on to win the next year at Saucon Valley in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
“The first year – the U.S. Junior when I was 15 – it was the first real big national tournament I played in,” Straub said. “I remember thinking it was the hardest golf course I’d ever seen in my life.”
A deep run in ’82 meant Straub returned in ’83 as the favorite. He also felt he was playing like one.
For Straub, winning in ’83 meant also getting a spot in the U.S. Amateur. College coaches began to turn their heads, too. Straub went on to play college golf at Wake Forest where he was a member of the 1986 NCAA Championship team.
“Even from the previous year I knew what an accomplishment it is to play well in the U.S. Junior,” he said.
And no matter how many years go by, that’s one thing that never changes.
