Druid Hills Golf Club is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and this week's Dogwood Invitational is part of the festivities.
While not as old as the club, the Dogwood is growing into one of the premier amateur tournaments in the world.
This year's field includes notables such as Georgia Tech's Anders Albertson and Bo Andrews, two of several Yellow Jackets in the field, Georgia State's Alan Fowler and Georgia's T.J. Mitchell and Keith Mitchell.
They will walk the fairways played by past champs such as U.S. Open winner Webb Simpson, who won the Dogwood in 2007, and Tommy Barnes, a legend in the state who won the Dogwood five times between the inaugural event in 1941 and 1955. Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson once played an exhibition match at the club.
"It's always as honor to walk in the footsteps of greatness and play somewhere with great history," said Ryan McCarthy, who finished 13th at the Dogwood in 2010 and will play in this year's event. "That's the thing with sport, there's always past champions to inspire you and motivate you to achieve your goals."
The course's layout hasn't changed much since it was designed by H.H. Barker and construction started in 1912.
But technology has caused drastic changes to the tournament's scores.
Barnes won the inaugural event with a 4-over 292. Charles Harrison, another Atlanta native, won with par in 1966. Nate McCoy won last year's event with a score of 22 under. Only one player in last year's field failed to break par.
"The biggest change has been the condition," Harrison said. "The course in the early days, back in the '40s, there was no sprinkler system, and the fairways were hard as a rock."
There's no better example than No. 9, a 485-yard par 5 that this week's competitors likely will gobble up.
That was rarely done when Bobby Jones, who won the Druid Hills club championship when he was 13 years old in 1915, was playing. He once called the ninth hole the most unfair he had ever played. The fairway slopes severely from right to left. Tee shots that didn't land on the far right could roll all the way across the fairway, out of bounds on to Clifton Road.
It wasn't the only difficult hole.
Harrison said shots into greens at Nos. 2, 4, 11 were hard to hold. Balls could skip and roll down hills on to hard red clay.
"Now you don't have those problems," he said. "With sprinkler systems and such it plays easier, but they've made it longer with harder pins."
That ability to shoot birdies is why Albertson said so many amateur golfers like to play at Druid Hills and in the Dogwood.
"This tournament, you know going into it you have to make a lot of birdies," Albertson said. "It's exciting to know you can go low. But the course isn't easy. If you aren't playing well, you won't score. The greens are small with a lot of undulations."
That there is still a Dogwood Invitational is a testament to a group of members at Druid Hills. The tournament has been discontinued several times, the last being in 1973. A combination of poor weather that marred the event in 1972 and the club's poor finances led to its cancellation.
The Dogwood was restarted in 1994 after the club improved its finances, which led to upgrades to the course and facilities. Allen Doyle, then a driving-range owner from LaGrange, won with a birdie on the 54th hole of the rain-shortened event. He turned pro a year later and has 14 wins on the Nationwide Tour and Champions Tours.
The Dogwood got a boost a year later when Stanford, featuring Tiger Woods, played Georgia Tech, featuring Stewart Cink, in an exhibition match. The match was put together because of the friendship between Tech coach Puggy Blackmon and Stanford's Wally Goodwin, who competed in the Dogwood when he was an amateur. Cink defeated Woods 3-2 to secure the victory for the Yellow Jackets.
"Druid was our home course when I was at Tech in the early '90s," Cink said in an e-mail. "We played there about 30 times or more every year. But long before that the club had established itself as an institution on the golf scene in Atlanta."
The course was renovated in 2003 to bring the layout more closely to its original design. The course can play as long as 6,860 yards and may get longer in coming years. Bob Cupp, who oversaw the 2003 changes, left room to lengthen some of holes by moving back the tee boxes, which should give the course more bite.
The tournament field has gotten steadily stronger, with the event now ranked as the 25th best in world, according to scratchplayers.org, a website that ranks amateurs and amateur tournaments.
"One hundred years makes me feel the tradition and strength, that we've been through a lot," tournament director Edward Toledano said. "It means that the club's tradition and honors are continuing through the current members as they enjoy the history."
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