Breakfast at the Juno Beach Café on Donald Ross Blvd. here is de rigueur for golfers down in these parts. That's true all season, but perhaps never more so than during the Coleman Invitational at the Seminole Golf Club. Ross designed the famous course, and many of the top amateurs in the game are here this week for the 54-hole tournament that will end tomorrow.
Naturally, then, I had some breakfast there this week. My companions were Ned Steiner, a senior amateur from the Ross-designed Mountain Ridge Golf Club in West Caldwell, N.J., and Robert Vallis, also a senior, from Bermuda. Vallis also lives much of the year in Crail, Scotland, near St. Andrews. He's a member of the Crail Golfing Society, the seventh-oldest golf club in the world, and of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. Steiner, a close pal of mine, is also an R&A member.
These guys can play. Steiner, 65, played four U.S. Amateurs. Vallis, 57, won the Seniors Open Amateur Championship at the Prestwick Golf Club in Ayrshire, Scotland last summer. He beat the splendid Canadian senior Graham Cooke by two shots. Cooke, from Hudson, Que., was recently inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. Cooke, 63, has won seven Canadian Mid-Amateurs and four Canadian Senior Amateurs.
Dennis Kavelman, an executive at the Canadian powerhouse company Research in Motion, wasn't at the breakfast, but he's playing the Coleman.
There was non-stop golf talk at the breakfast: Tiger Woods; the pressure Vallis put on himself after winning the Senior Amateur; the great field at the Coleman, and the super-fact and tricky greens at Seminole. The late Canadian great George Knudson used to practice at Seminole before the Masters. So did Ben Hogan.
So who was Coleman? His full name was George S. Coleman. He was a mining and oil executive and one of Hogan's close friends. Coleman, who died in 1997, was the president of Seminole from 1981-1992, and then he was made President Emeritus. He won the Oklahoma State Amateur in 1946 and, like many of the contestants at the tournament named in his honour, he belonged to a few fine clubs.
Let's see, Coleman belonged to Seminole, of course. To Cypress Point on the Monterey Peninsula in California, for 60 years. To Augusta National. To Castle Pines near Denver. Nice collection.
This week the tournament includes Buddy Marucci, a former U.S. Walker Cup player and two-time U.S. captain. He won the 2008 U.S. Senior Amateur. Woods beat him two-up in the 1995 U.S. Amateur at the Newport Country Club in Newport, Rhode Island. Marucci belongs to some rather fine clubs himself: Pine Valley in Clementon, N.J., Merion in Ardmore, Penn., the site of the 2013 U.S. Open; Seminole. David Abell, a former Coleman winner, is also in the field. He's Nick Price's business manager. The Coleman is rich and thick with golfers who are hooked up.
Then there's Jack Nicklaus. He was at Seminole, watching his son Gary.
Yes sir, the Coleman is the big amateur tournament in the U.S. this week. And if you're looking to run into some of the elite amateurs gathered here, well, drop by the Juno Beach Café. Donald Ross Blvd.
and U.S. 1, southwest corner. You can't miss it.