Lewis Chitengwa would have turned 50 on Jan. 25. I can’t picture him as a 50-year-old. In my mind he’ll forever be a humble and kind young man, and an incredibly talented golfer, one of a handful of extraordinary players who emerged in the early 1990s.
I knew Lewis for a little more than eight years, and they were really good years, until the summer of 2001 when, at age 26, he died during the Edmonton Open on the Canadian Tour.
In 1992, I was coaching the golf team at the University of Virginia and doing my best to bring the world’s greatest players to Charlottesville. Like every other coach in the country, I’d been pursuing Tiger Woods, the best junior golfer in history. It was widely known that he was a good student who announced in eighth grade that he would go to Stanford. But man, he was so good I had to at least try to get him interested in Virginia.
I watched Tiger play eight full rounds of golf in the summer of 1992 and began writing to him on Sept. 1, the date the NCAA designated as the first day a coach could correspond with a high school junior.
The kid was phenomenal. Of the eight rounds I witnessed, he had no bogeys in four of them, including a 66 in the second round of the U.S. Amateur at Muirfield Village, a masterpiece of four birdies, one eagle and 13 tap-in pars.
At Pinehurst No. 7, I saw Tiger dominate the 72-hole Insurance Youth Golf Classic and win by nine shots. The third round there was brutal, with constant rain and wind that pushed the average score to around 77. But Tiger, in an amazing display of focus and concentration, was in the middle of every fairway, hit every green in regulation, and shot 69 with 15 pars and three birdies to build an insurmountable lead.
That summer, Tiger also won four American Junior Golf Association titles and the U.S. Junior for the second year in a row, so when it came time for the Orange Bowl Junior at the end of December, it was a foregone conclusion as to who would win. The only real question was who would finish second.
But on Dec. 30, the day Tiger turned 17 years old, it was Lewis Chitengwa blowing out the candles on the 1992 season.
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