SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA | The first time I met Al Jamieson was in fall 2008, and I must confess I had doubts about the get-together. Jamieson knew I was a rater for a leading golf magazine as well as someone who often wrote about clubs and courses, so he had reached out months before to tell me about a restoration he helped initiate at the Cal Club and to invite me to visit.
Problem was, I had never heard of Jamieson before, and only knew from our communications that he was a member of that golf-centric retreat as well as a past president and club champion. I also surmised from the letters “USMC” in his e-mail address that he was a Marine.
But I was able to discern quite easily his passion for golf and his enthusiasm for the renovations at his club. And his interest in course architecture was clear as he told stories of Alister MacKenzie designing some of the original Cal Club layout, and of Kyle Phillips – whose Kingsbarns course outside St. Andrews, Scotland, is one of the finest creations of the modern era – overseeing the recent revamping.
But I kept wondering about this friendly fellow who had called me out of the blue and followed up with the occasional e-mail. As for the California Golf Club of San Francisco, which is the official name of his place, it was just as much a mystery to me, even though I had been visiting the Bay Area regularly for both work and play since the late 1970s.
At the Cal Club, I discovered a golf course of such quality and style that it instantly rocketed onto my personal top 100, with wonderful ground movement and bunkering that screamed MacKenzie, especially around the greens.
So, I put Al off for a spell. But he continued to check back, offering additional bits of information about the Cal Club. Such as Ken Venturi being a member. And Eddie Lowery, who famously caddied for Francis Ouimet in the 1913 U.S. Open and later became a car dealer in California, having served as club president in 1947.
Jamieson was like a fisherman, casting his fly time and time again to a pool where he knew a trout lurked. Eventually I bit, and soon was teeing it up with him at the Cal Club.
The experience was truly revelatory, and on several levels. At the Cal Club, I discovered a golf course of such quality and style that it instantly rocketed onto my personal top 100, with wonderful ground movement and bunkering that screamed MacKenzie, especially around the greens. There also was something about the place and its ethos, all about golf and steeped in the game’s history. And in Al Jamieson I found a kindred spirit when it came to loving the royal and ancient game as well as a man of warmth and depth.
I also came to appreciate in later years how he almost single-handedly made that club and course among the most highly regarded in the world, by showing fellow members the wisdom of hiring Phillips, among other things, and by doing just what he had done with me, which was telling people about the Cal Club and then welcoming them for rounds there.
I later discovered that Jamieson seemed to be world famous as well. Wherever I traveled – be it Australia or South Africa, Argentina or the British Isles – if the Cal Club specifically or golf in the Bay Area generally came up, the person to whom I was speaking inevitably asked: “Oh, do you know Al Jamieson?”
Arron Oberholser, a tour professional and an honorary member at the Cal Club whose lone PGA Tour win was the 2006 AT&T at Pebble Beach, certainly answers in the affirmative.
“I’ve known Al since I was 13 years old and believe he is the greatest person on the planet at creating and maintaining relationships with people,” said Oberholser, who works these days as an analyst for Golf Channel. “Especially as it relates to golf, because he loves people who love the game. And as far as the Cal Club is concerned, he is what I call a ‘can be’ guy. He saw what the club could be, and he helped make it that.”
Andrew Biggadike, a member of the Olympic Club in San Francisco who often competes in elite amateur events, sees Jamieson in much the same way.
“When I think of Al, I think of that Harvey Penick quote, ‘If you play golf, you’re my friend.’ Al displays such a strong interest in all aspects of the game and the people who are a part of it,” Biggadike said. “As a consequence, he seems to know everyone, and everyone knows him.”
Jamieson is the son of a baker who had emigrated to the United States from Glasgow, Scotland, and married a native of New York City. He grew up in the Jackson Heights section of Queens.
“My dad was 37 years old when I was born, in 1946, the second of two kids,” he said. “He started as a baker but eventually came to be a vice president and ran the plant for the company that made the baked goods.”
Jamieson the elder was also a golfer and, according to his son, once played a round with Babe Ruth, who was a member of a Westchester County club called Leewood.
“Dad liked the game and was the one who got me playing,” said Jamieson, who has a sister eight years his senior. “In the mid-1950s, he rented a summer cottage on Shelter Island on Long Island and joined a club called Gardiner’s Bay. It was a very kid-friendly place with a good junior program. I was 11 years old when I played my first 18-hole round. I shot 103, and two years later I broke 80 for the first time. I never looked back.”
Jamieson became good enough to play on the golf team at Rider College outside Trenton, New Jersey, where he was studying business administration.
“But I never graduated,” he said. “I was an indifferent student, and when the Vietnam War started heating up, I decided to enlist in the Marine Corps. It was June 1966 and we all knew we were going to have to go. And our thinking was, it was better to join the Corps and be with Marines than to go into the Army with a bunch of unmotivated draftees.”
Not long after finishing basic training, Jamieson shipped out to Vietnam, arriving in November 1967. He was there for 13 months, serving as a forward observer in a rifle company. His primary job was adjusting artillery being fired on the enemy, and he says he saw “a fair amount of combat.”
Jamieson’s first duty station after that was at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps base in Southern California, and he remembers going to the Bob Hope Desert Classic in spring 1969 and watching Arnold Palmer compete. He also recalls seeing people playing golf wherever he went in Southern California, and that had a lot to do with his remaining there instead of going back to the Northeast when he was discharged from active duty. “I loved that you could play golf through the winter,” he said.
So Jamieson stayed put, opening a franchise restaurant called Minnie Pearl’s Roast Beef with a couple of friends who had just gotten out of the Army. He also worked on his golf game, getting his handicap index down to 1 and marveling along the way about “the nice people” he kept meeting through the game. One of those ran a savings and loan association in the San Francisco Bay Area, and not long after the Minnie Pearl’s franchise failed, that fellow offered what Jamieson describes as his “first real job.”
“He was also the guy who got me into the Cal as a junior member, in 1973,” Jamieson said.
From that point on, the Cal Club became a central part of his life. It was where he was married in 1982 when he was 36 years old. And it became his refuge after the S&L industry blew up some years later and his marriage ended in divorce, with Jamieson gaining custody of his two sons, Tyler and Blair, the oldest of whom is autistic.
Around that time, in the early 1990s, Jamieson realized that as much as he liked the Cal Club, he was not satisfied with the state of the nearly century-old golf course or the direction the club was taking and what he saw as its low golf IQ. So, he wrote a six-page letter expressing his concerns and offering ideas as to how things could be improved.
“I am still not really sure why I did it,” said Jamieson, who had started working as a mortgage broker and dabbling in real estate development. “Maybe it was because I was a little depressed, and I liked to write. Whatever the reason, I mailed it out, first to some friends and then to all the members. Soon after, I was invited to join the board of directors.”
Jamieson’s involvement in club governance only grew from there, and in 2005 he took control of the group interviewing architects to help the Cal Club develop and then implement a master plan. “That was a really big step,” explained Jamieson, who has dark eyebrows, a full head of silver hair and looks as fit as a man half his age. “A lot of our members had no idea that we had such a special golf course.”
The Cal Club hired Phillips for that job and, in 2006, with Jamieson now serving as club president, members agreed to proceed with the master plan the designer had created.
“The real kicker was getting Venturi’s support,” Jamieson said. “By this time, he was living in the Palm Springs area. Kyle and I went down to visit him, and when we eventually presented the plan to the membership, Ken was there, saying to the members that we should do it all, and do it all at once.”
Also lending support was Oberholser, who had just won the AT&T. And those endorsements no doubt had a lot to do with the master plan passing. “We broke ground with the restoration in May of 2007 and re-opened the course the following July,” Jamieson said.
Phillips remains awed with how ably Jamieson led the charge. “At every step of the way, Al saw what needed to be done to get the job done,” said the architect. “He was charming, and he had a knack for engaging the right people at the right time and in the right atmosphere.”
The club’s head golf professional, Matt Viguerie, was equally impressed. “And Al wanted to do more than make the golf course as great as he thought it could be,” he said. “He wanted to make the club great, too, by emphasizing things like walking and having a caddie program. He wanted it to be a place that was fun and welcoming but also where people were serious about the game and their love for it.”
Once the course renovation was complete, it largely fell on Jamieson to induce people of influence in golf to come visit. “I became the unofficial ambassador to golf for the Cal Club and was invariably the one who showed them around when they came to town,” he said.
Slowly but surely, word of this great club and course started to spread. Suddenly, the Cal Club was climbing the rankings of the leading top-100 lists and being as highly regarded by many in the game as San Francisco Golf Club and the Olympic Club, which was exactly what Jamieson had hoped would happen.
“For decades, people played San Francisco and Olympic when they came to town, and then went right to Pebble,” explained Jamieson, who is still single but now has three grandchildren. “But I wanted them to come here as well. I did not care if anyone thought we were better than those places. But I wanted us to be in the same conversation, and I was happy to be a strong No. 3.”
The California Golf Club of San Francisco is that, and then some. That is thanks in many ways to Al Jamieson.
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