In the final scene of the 1946 Frank Capra classic, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” our hero George Bailey is saved by the town of Bedford Falls. George gets a message from his guardian angel, Clarence, who writes to him: “Remember, George, no man is a failure who has friends. Thanks for the wings.”
At the risk of sounding extraordinarily cheesy, let me use this column space to say, from my hometown Mill Valley Golf Course to our homegrown kid, local hero and U.S. Amateur semifinalist Niall Shiels Donegan: Thanks for the wings, kid.
If you followed The Olympic Club’s U.S. Am this summer, you saw something bigger than golf matches between the finest amateurs in the world. You saw an outpouring of love and support from Shiels Donegan’s hometown of Mill Valley that spoke to something more than just his mashed mini drivers off the 17th fairway on the Lake Course, or his steely demeanor in sinking huge putts to win all four matches — Round of 64, 32, 16 and a quarterfinal — on the 18th hole or later. Remarkable drama and fortitude.
The Golf Channel milked his rowdy interviews with his adoring fans from the local nine-hole muni in Marin, located just a few miles away across the Golden Gate Bridge. The Mill Valley denizens were more than happy to provide the images; chants of “Ni-all! Ni-all! Ni-all!” for a 20-year-old kid and boisterous physical contact with a sheepishly smiling Shiels Donegan, mobbing the kid, was certainly unusual for a U.S. Amateur. It made for memorable TV.
It was about sports, yes. And it was about a town’s pride, yes. It was about some sort of combination of love of the great game of golf and happiness for a local boy. It was bigger than the sum of its parts, really. I was there, and I was one of the ones who exploded in joy for the lad, and all of those reasons were why we came together. All of those, and more. It just felt right.
I did a podcast in Ireland about it, as the news reached overseas. When the podcast posted, they titled it: “How A Small Town Learned to Love Again.”
I asked Shiels Donegan, a month later, to try to explain it from his end.
“I think they rallied because they loved seeing one of their own fight as hard as I did,” he said from Chapel Hill, where Shiels Donegan is a junior on the national power North Carolina golf team. “After seeing how hard I work, they loved that I was finally succeeding.”
Shiels Donegan came to the game naturally. His father, Lawrence, was a prominent golf journalist for decades for the UK’s The Guardian newspaper. Lawrence and his wife, Maggie Shiels, moved to California and raised Niall in Mill Valley. While he still plays internationally for Scotland, the country of his birth, and represented Great Britain & Ireland at the Walker Cup at Cypress Point Club, Shiels Donegan attended the local public high school, Tamalpais High. Though the prestigious Meadow Club granted Shiels Donegan playing privileges, it was at Mill Valley GC where, all throughout his high school days, Shiels Donegan would hit golf ball after golf ball before school. The MVGC pro shop didn’t mind him dropping a shag bag on the par-4 6th, or the par-3 8th. They let him hit as many as he wanted before heading off to class, and Shiels Donegan would post his morning workouts on Instagram, day after day. We all saw it.
So when the U.S. Amateur was slated for Olympic, Mill Valley GC’s denizens answered the call. By Saturday’s semifinal against Tennessee’s Jackson Herrington, it was a full-blown phenomenon. The fairways were packed with NiallMania. The nature of his thrilling wins was one thing. The goodwill he had sown throughout his childhood was another. One MVGC regular noted, “It’s like Mill Valley is having a wedding.”
“One of the most humbling experiences ever to realize how much all of these guys wanted me to succeed,” Shiels Donegan said. “They helped me so much when I was struggling and gave me the courage to keep fighting even when it looked hopeless.”
Saturday’s semifinal brought another electric moment. One down on 17 green, Shiels Donegan made birdie to tie. The roar may still be echoing amid the Monterey pines and cypress trees.
Herrington made birdie on 18 to win the match, a stunning end to Shiels Donegan’s run. But the Mill Valley crowd only applauded. It was all OK. It was golf, and it was beautiful.
Later on, I met Herrington’s caddie. I congratulated him on his huge win, which must have felt like a road game. The caddie said, “Man, when Niall made that putt on 17 to tie, and y’all made that sound . . .”
I cut him off and said: “Oh, man, you must have been so bummed out —”
This time, he stopped me and said with a smile and a Tennessee drawl: “No, man. I thought it was awesome.”
So did all of Mill Valley.
Brian Murphy hosts the KNBR morning show “Murph and Markus” and was the San Francisco Chronicle's golf columnist from 2001-04.
