Last month Colorado Golf Club made some history by becoming the westernmost venue ever to host the Senior PGA Championship, which debuted in 1937.
But The Colorado Golf Club — the original one, since renamed — has been making history in the Denver metro area for more than a century, and it shows no signs of stopping now.
This week — from Tuesday through Thursday — Lakewood Country Club, which was founded as The Colorado Golf Club in 1908 before changing its name four years later, will host the CWGA Stroke Play Championship. It will mark the 22nd time the club has served as the site of one of the CWGA’s two flagship tournaments. The first time a CWGA women’s amateur —
the Match Play — was contested at Lakewood CC, World War I was still going strong in 1918. And even before there was a CWGA, The Colorado Golf Club hosted the Women’s State Championship in 1912.
A similar number of CGA championships have been held at Lakewood, which first hosted a men’s state amateur in 1913.
“It’s a great contribution that the membership is willing to support amateur golf like that,” said Tim Lollar, Lakewood’s head golf professional and a former major league pitcher.
But that’s just part of Lakewood Country Club’s rich golf history. The club features one of the half-dozen oldest golf courses in the state of Colorado. It tells you something that its original mailing address was “Golf, Colorado.”
This is the course Babe Didrikson Zaharias — the greatest female athlete of the first half of the 20th century, according to the Associated Press — called home through much of the 1940s and early 1950s, when she lived in Edgewater with husband George Zaharias.
This is the course that has hosted several significant national and international golf events. Harry Vardon and Ted Ray played an exhibition at the club in 1913. The LPGA Mile High Open was contested at Lakewood in 1955 and ’56. The USGA visited for the 1957 U.S. Girls’ Junior and the 1965 U.S. Women’s Amateur. And the men’s Trans-Mississippi was contested at Lakewood in 1952, when the winner was Charlie Coe, who would end up being a two-time U.S. Amateur champion.
This is the course that, in a hallway outside of the golf shop, features a display devoted to the members of the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame who have strong ties to Lakewood CC. For the record, there are 26 inductees in the display. Among those included are Didrikson Zaharias, one of the most successful female golfers in the mid-20th century; Dale Douglass, a multiple winner on both the PGA Tour and the Champions Tour; founding Lakewood Country Club member M.A. McLaughlin, the first president of the CGA, which formed in 1915; Phyllis Buchanan, who won five consecutive CWGA Match Plays in the 1930s; four-time CGA championship winner Babe Lind; Janet Moore, who claimed four straight CWGA Stroke Play titles in the mid-1990s; Gary Longfellow, who swept titles in the Colorado Open, CGA Stroke Play and CGA Match Play in 1974, and became the first amateur winner of the Colorado Open; and Larry McAtee, who won three straight CGA Match Plays the same years (1963-65) that Hale Irwin won the Stroke Play.
This is the course that includes a current member, John Gardner II, who first joined the club in 1940. Gardner, a member of the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame and a former CGA president, had a grandfather who became a member in 1912. Three other family members, including John’s father, joined before 1920. John Gardner II himself became a junior member at age 15 near the beginning of World War II. Though he served in the Army Air Corps from 1943 to ’45, Gardner has likely played more than 3,000 rounds at Lakewood Country Club over his 70 years as a member.
Asked what first comes to his mind when Lakewood CC is brought up, Gardner said, “I always think it’s kind of the home of competitive golfers. It has all those people in the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame, a lot of state champions and a lot of people who have qualified for national championships. There have been many very good players.”
Indeed, in paying tribute to Longfellow in 1974, the club newsletter refers to Lakewood CC as “the Club of Champions.”
The 100-year anniversary book notes that Lakewood members have won the CGA Match Play title 24 times, with Steve Irwin being the most recent champion, in 2004. McAtee claimed the championship four times in all.
The course was originally laid out on farmland by architect Tom Bendelow — nickname: The Johnny Appleseed of Golf — and it featured dirt fairways and sand greens. The layout was refined in 1916 by the much-heralded Donald Ross, then partially redesigned by Press Maxwell in 1961. In the 1990s, Gil Hanse headed a project to restore some of the elements of Ross’ work at Lakewood CC. (The current-day course, and how it appeared almost 100 years ago, are pictured above.)
The course is short by modern-day standards (about 6,700 yards from the back tees), but it’s still a formidable test with its small greens and mature trees. In last year’s CGA Stroke Play, for instance, just four players broke 280 for four rounds.
“You could take this course and put it in the upper Midwest and it would look right at home,” said Lollar, who became head professional at Lakewood in 1997, after a year-plus as an assistant. “It’s a very deceiving golf course. It’s not excessively long, but you walk away from a hole with a bogey and say, “˜God, how did I make bogey there?’ You have to execute the shots.
“There are subtleties that provide the player challenges day in and day out. You don’t get tired of playing this course. You’re playing the same course, but you think, “˜Wow, I really hadn’t thought of this particular spot.'”
The pace of play at Lakewood is “notoriously fast” — four hours or less — according to Lollar. And, Gardner noted, “It’s been known as one of the biggest gambling clubs. If you wanted a good game, you came out to Lakewood Country Club.”
The clubhouse at Lakewood has burned down not once, but twice — in 1913 and just before Christmas in 1948. The fourth — and current — clubhouse, all 38,850 square feet of it, opened in 2007, a year before the club celebrated its 100th anniversary.
“Lakewood is a great club,” Lollar said. “I’ve always been a firm believer that memberships make the club, and the group of people here are great. They want to have fun, so we try not to get in the way.”
