After a storm held up day one, the golfers were still playing catch up when darkness fell on day two, meaning Iturrioz still has four holes to play on Sunday to complete her second round.

The Spaniard leads by one over Scottish rookie Louise Duncan, who turned pro in July last year.

Duncan, who won the 2021 Women’s Amateur Championship, is looking for her first win as a professional.

She sits alongside Solheim Cup star Carlota Ciganda, who took advantage of the placid morning conditions by carding a three-under par 69.

“This morning I thought it was going to be a little easier, a little less windy than yesterday,” Ciganda said. “I hit some good shots, but to be honest my putting was great. I made some good up-and-downs and some good putts for birdie, so that was the key.”

Despite having to play 20 holes on Saturday, American Lindsey Weaver-Wright also shot up the leaderboard, with a second-round three-under taking her up to fifth spot.

“I played pretty steady and other than that, I made a couple of putts. These greens are kind of tricky and with the wind, it can get really tough out there, especially down the final stretch. So, I was just happy to par those holes and

then finish under par”.

Home favourite Lexi Thompson is level-par, tied 9th for the tournament, while world No. 3 Lydia Ko sits on one-under in a share of sixth.

Aside from the drama of the individual championship, it was all to play for in the team event featuring an ever-changing leaderboard throughout the day. Team Alexander finished the day at 23-under-par, leading in the clubhouse overnight. However, they have a long wait to see the final results, as ‘Team Roussin’, captained by Pauline Roussin lead the team championship at 28-under-par through 14 holes before darkness suspended play on Saturday.

60 players and ties proceed to the final round of the Aramco Team Series Florida, as the Team event concludes at the end of the second round.

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Architecture experts marvel at Seminole’s compact yet complete routing. On a trapezoid of land of just 140 acres, Ross positioned his 18 so that golfers must contend with wind from a slightly different direction on nearly every shot. His remarkable layout lies on three levels. Closest to the seacoast is a lateral sand dune parallel to the beach, on which two greens (the 13th and 18th, the latter later added by Dick Wilson) and three tee complexes now rest. Inland is a wide, low basin, just a few feet above sea level, previously swampland that Ross’ crew drained and graded into eight holes now edged by palms, bunkers and lakes. On the far west edge of the site is a wide sand ridge some 40 feet higher than the basin. It contains three complete holes and the tees and greens for seven others. Its topography is reminiscent of Scotland’s Royal Dornoch, where Ross was born, raised and first took up the game.

Competitive players have long admired the subtle challenges of Seminole. Most fairways are comfortably wide, but deceptively so, because on windy days and when turf is firm and fast, drives can trundle off a fairway and into one of the more than 70 fairway bunkers or, on some holes, into a sandscape rough recently enhanced by the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. The true test lies in shots onto the greens, putting surfaces that range from long and skinny to wide and shallow. Unless hole locations are toward the centre, flag-hunting is risky, as the perimeters of most greens slope gently toward deep bunkers that frame most greens and encircle several. Once on the greens, most contours are imperceptible at first look and make for deceptive putts. Some of today’s finest players, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff will take on these challenging elements during the recently announced TaylorMade Driving Relief Skins Game, to take place at Seminole on May 17, 2-6 p.m. on NBC.

Carlos Amoedo

While Ross had the reputation of mailing in many of his blueprints to be built by others, there are newspaper clippings that document his presence on site supervising construction of Seminole, which was built in seven months and opened Jan. 1, 1930. Ironically, whatever attention to detail Ross gave to greens and bunkers have been lost, as a regrassing effort some 50-plus years ago showed little regard to his original rolling contours. Even before that, the bunkers had been reshaped and rebuilt by Wilson in 1957 (not 1947 as repeatedly misreported in the past by this writer). There is no desire to reclaim the original Ross greens because members like what’s there now, but in recent years, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have restored the look and purpose of many original bunkers.

Stephen Szurlej

Any number of Seminole’s holes are classics of the craft. Crenshaw’s favourites are the sixth and 15th (above). No. 6 is a straightaway 390-yard par 4 that plays like a dogleg because of a diagonal string of bunkers that eat into the line of play from the right. The 15th is the second of back-to-back par 5s (a rarity for Ross) and features alternate fairways (also a rarity), a gambling right-hand route along a water hazard separated by bunkers and palms from the longer, safer left-hand one.

Jon Cavalier

An equal share of Seminole’s majesty is provided by its timeless clubhouse, a pink stucco structure of Spanish American flavour built in 1929, with its original lockers of California knotty pine still in use. Positioned in the southeast corner of the property adjacent to the coastal dunes, it has no window to the sea. The story goes, when asked why, Ross replied, “This is a golf club, not a beach club.” As Ross had nothing whatsoever to do with the design or construction of the clubhouse, the tale is likely apocryphal.

Although it hosts a top-level amateur competition each year (the Coleman Invitational), Seminole has never before hosted a professional event witnessed by hundreds of thousands of television viewers, so most golfers around the world have known Seminole only by its reputation. How it will stand up to the rigours of the power game that dominates professional golf today is a great unknown. The four combatants in the TaylorMade Driving Relief Skins Game are capable of reducing Seminole’s par 4s and 5s into a succession of short-iron approach shots, but if the wind blows, that’s doubtful, and if the pins are tucked, the targets will become much smaller, even if approached with short irons.

In a way, the Skins Game will serve as a prelude to next year’s Walker Cup Matches, which are scheduled to be held at Seminole in early May. That event is expected to be open to spectators. For now, we’ll cherish this moment to admire Ross’ masterpiece, all for a good cause.

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Seven past captains of U.S. Walker Cup teams had assembled at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in West Palm Beach in early 2018 to salute Crosby, who had just recently been named to lead the Americans in 2019, and to offer him advice. Among them was Jay Sigel, a playing captain at the matches at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in 1983 when Crosby was a member of his team.

When it came around to Sigel, he turned to Crosby and said, “Whatever you do, play all your players three times.”

A spit-take in range of prime beef generally is considered bad form, and Crosby restrained himself. Presumably. But he made his point. “You benched me twice,” Crosby said to Sigel. “I’ve been holding this baggage for 35 years.”

The mood was convivial and all in good fun. Sigel apparently had not recalled having kept Crosby out of half the four sessions, and Crosby harbours no true ill will toward Sigel. But the experience undeniably left a scar, notwithstanding the Americans’ three-point victory.

“I was kind of mad,” Crosby said recently, noting that the ’83 Walker Cup took a distant second to his experience in the World Amateur Team Championship in Switzerland the year before when his final-round 68 propelled a U.S. team that included Sigel to a victory. “The Walker Cup was not nearly as wonderful as the World Amateur.”

Now 57 and the captain of the U.S. team, Crosby returns this week to Royal Liverpool Golf Club, site of the 47th Walker Cup, and he brings with him virtually a blank slate on which to create memories. “I don’t remember much,” he said of his prior experience there.

U.S. captain Nathaniel Crosby with team members Brandon Wu (centre) and Cole Hammer (right) in a Walker Cup practice session. (Chris Keane)

Royal Liverpool, in fact, registers barely a blip in the voluminous Crosby family album filled largely by the family patriarch, the legendary entertainer Bing Crosby, Nathaniel’s father.

Bing was an unabashed Anglophile and a devotee of British golf courses. On one business trip to London, in 1971, he flew into Scotland, played the two existing courses at Gleneagles, Turnberry, the Old Course at St. Andrews, Muirfield, Sunningdale, Royal West Norfolk, Huntercombe and Royal St. George’s before getting around to the reason he was in the U.K.—business.

Yet there is no evidence that Bing ever played Royal Liverpool, though he did perform at the historic Empire Theater in Liverpool, about 10 miles east of Hoylake. His only brush with the course was when he was considering playing the British Amateur when it was held there in 1953, until a British sportswriter, Desmond Hackett, pointedly suggested he not.

Hackett noted that when Crosby had played the British Amateur at the Old Course at St. Andrews in 1950 female admirers “ran screaming all over the course, treading thru bunkers, stamping their ignorance on the greens with high-heeled shoes …

“Bing Crosby is entitled like any other golf-minded citizen to enter for the Amateur so long as he complies with the rules which set down plainly but firmly, ‘I am eligible under conditions of the championship and have a handicap not exceeding three strokes.’ If Bing Crosby can play to three, then I am entitled to top billing at the Palladium.”

Bing did play to a three but chose not to compete at Hoylake, no doubt to the dismay of those who would have enjoyed seeing him. It would not have been a small turnout, either, for an entertainer held in the highest regard there for his talent, fame and, especially, his contributions to the war effort, in entertaining troops and raising funds.

Thirty years later and six years after Bing’s death, Nathaniel drew crowds on and off the course at Royal Liverpool in 1983 thanks at least in part to his family ties.

“…[E]ven though he wasn’t necessarily the most feared golfer in the USA team, he was definitely the one who aroused the most curiosity,” head professional John Heggerty recalled in Royal Liverpool Golf Club Magazine’s 2018-2019 edition.

“You have to remember that all those years ago the Crosby name was much more firmly in people’s imaginations than it is now, even though Bing Crosby had passed away a few years earlier … so Nathaniel had something of the celebrity about him, especially to non-golfers.”

Crosby (first row, far right) played on the 1983 U.S. Walker Cup team at Royal Liverpool, where he returns this week to captain the U.S. team in the biennial matches. (David Cannon/Getty Images)

Heggerty noted that Crosby and a few of his teammates ventured to Liverpool’s Green Lodge pub one night. When word spread that he was there, a crowd gathered. Crosby does not recall that, other than noting that in those days, including his few years as a professional on the European Tour, he often drew “disproportionate crowds to who I was,” he said. “I didn’t pull like Seve, but there was a curiosity factor.”

What Crosby does remember of the Walker Cup was an amusing story involving him and his caddie, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Rod Stewart. “Everybody called him Rod,” Crosby said. Golfers in those days provided their own practice balls and their caddies shagged them for the player.

“You’ve got to go shag some balls for me,” Crosby said to Rod within earshot of the gallery that included women aghast at him using the word “shag,” a vulgarity according to its British definition.

What he also remembers was sitting out the morning foursomes on the first day, then getting routed by GB&I’s Phillip Parkin, 6 and 4, in the afternoon singles. In morning foursomes the second day, he and William Hoffer beat George Macgregor and Phillip Walton, 2 up.

“We beat their best team,” Crosby, the ’81 U.S. Amateur champion, said. “I played out of my wazoo.” Then he was benched in afternoon singles, “an emotional slight,” he called it. “There’s definitely some baggage for me that I got benched twice.”

But that was then and this is now, an opportunity that moves near the top of a golf career that largely wasn’t. “To be honest, the way my career went, retiring at 26 in front of my girlfriend and my dog, I took a step back and chose not to play competitive golf as an adult,” he said. “I was a poster child for the possibly sobering event of not going on to be a PGA Tour star.

“But being a Walker Cup captain is a real privilege, carrying on in my dad’s tradition, a little bit. A great way for to me to give back.”

He was never entirely certain he would get the nod, notwithstanding what he calls generational friendships with so many USGA presidents and executive committee members, including Sandy Tatum, Grant Spaeth, P.J. Boatwright, Jim Hand and Harry Easterly from his youth.

“Now I’ve come full circle,” he said. “Stu Francis [president-elect of the USGA] and Diana Murphy [a past USGA president] are great friends. Her stepdaughter went to high school with me at Burlingame [Calif.] High. Stu and I have been friends playing golf at Burlingame Country Club [in Hillsborough, Calif.] since I was 14 years old.”

Crosby’s concern about his potential candidacy was twofold. He had played professional golf, which in USGA Walker Cup circles is not a resume enhancer, and he had played only a single USGA event, the U.S. Mid-Amateur, since regaining his amateur status in 1994.

“I haven’t had a great moment in 35 years, haven’t won a tournament in 35 years,” Crosby told Golf Digest when his appointment was announced.

When Murphy called to inform him that he would captain the 2019 U.S. team, he was breathless, he said, and his captaincy already qualifies as a great moment personally. “It’s the younger generation that makes it special,” he said. Crosby, in his duties as captain, attended the Western Amateur, the Porter Cup and the U.S. Amateur, among other tournaments, scouting and acquainting himself with potential team members. “It’s already been an incredible experience, getting to meet the kids and the families, having these kids texting me.”

He received a text one night from Vanderbilt star John Augenstein, the runner-up at last month’s U.S. Amateur, who had recalled that a Crosby friend is Scott DeSano, founder of the DeSano’s pizza chain. “Hey, Captain,” he wrote, “I’m at DeSano’s Pizza.”

Another favourite is University of Texas star Cole Hammer, the No. 1 golfer in the World Amateur Golf Ranking. “I watched him win 11 straight matches last year,” Crosby said. “I’ve already filed adoption papers. I’ve told his parents they have to make room for me in the family.”

Both Augenstein and Hammer are on the Walker Cup team, and it is reasonable to expect that neither of them, nor their eight other teammates, will sit more than one session.

Crosby might recall little from his first go-round at Royal Liverpool, but he remembers too well having been consigned twice to the role of spectator.

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