TPC Harding Park is turning 100 — and celebrating in style

Time flies when you’re playing golf. At TPC Harding Park, 100 years have gone by like that.

This Friday marks the centennial of San Francisco’s marquee muni, which opened on July 18, 1925. It’s a big birthday, and to celebrate it, Harding has mounted a must-see exhibit on the rich history of the city-owned course. Composed of hundreds of photos, plaques and other memorabilia, the displays fill the hallways of the clubhouse, spill into the bar and restaurant, and focus on the characters and competitions that have helped make Harding the distinctive place it is.

“Once I started digging into the history, there was always something more to learn,” said Harding general Tom Smith, who spearheaded the research behind the exhibit, in collaboration with historians from other local clubs. “It was all so fun and fascinating for me, it was hard to stop.”

Like every golf course ever built, Harding sits on acreage with a past of its own. It was once farmland, leased to the city by the Spring Valley Water Company, a private entity that held a stranglehold on San Francisco water rights in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The politics of water were rife with corruption, but for many public-minded citizens in those days, an even bigger problem was the short supply of municipal golf. Lincoln Park was the city’s only muni, and it was jam-packed, logging upward of 700 rounds a day (golfers played much faster then; busy courses today record about a third of that number). Harding was conceived to accommodate San Francisco’s overflow demand.

Its architects were Sam Whiting and William Watson (anyone who called Watson “Willie” was advised to duck; he didn’t like that name), the same Scottish-born duo who designed the Lake Course at the Olympic Club, just across Lake Merced from Harding Park. Whiting was the Olympic Club’s superintendent. Watson was a prolific craftsman who wound up designing more than 65 courses in California alone.

All of this is touched on in the exhibit, along with other aspects of Harding’s origin story. Here, for instance, is a fun fact that even longtime Harding regulars aren’t likely to know: at its birth, the course was a par 73. The 11th hole began its life as a 315-yard par-4 that required a blind drive over a ridge. That changed in 1936, when the original tee, set back and to the left of the 10th green, was pushed forward, transforming the hole into the mid-range par-3 that it is today.

Other tweaks were still to come. 

The property, then and now, is shown in the exhibit with overlapping imagery that highlights Harding’s evolution. From it, you can see that the center of the grounds was taken up with six practice holes, which went away in 1972, when the Fleming 9, the facility’s entertaining executive course, was built. And how about this bit of trivia? Across the street from Harding in its early days, land now occupied by the University of San Francisco was given over to another layout: Ingleside Golf Course, which at different times, served as the home for the California Golf Club of San Francisco and San Francisco Golf Club, prestigious private redoubts that later relocated to other sites and currently reside on GOLF’s ranking of Top 100 Courses in the World.

Harding is the opposite of private. But it has a high-falutin tournament CV. A former stop on the PGA Tour (golfers of a certain vintage might remember the Lucky International Open, a staple of the circuit in the 1960s in which Arnold Palmer played repeatedly but never finished better than runner-up), it has also hosted the WGC-American Express Championship, the Presidents Cup and the PGA Championship, among other pro events.

Big names have won here, from Ken Venturi, Gary Player and Billy Casper to Tiger Woods and Collin Morikawa. All are recognized on a Wall of Honor, a collection of 40 plaques honoring winners of tournaments at Harding as well as other figures who have played a prominent role in the history of the course, including former USGA head Sandy Tatum, who championed a watershed renovation in the early 2000s, and late San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, an ardent supporter of public golf. Less prominent names get tributes, too. Never heard of Bruce McCormick? A fireman from Southern California, he has plaque devoted to him thanks to his victory in the 1937 U.S. Amateur Public Links at Harding. 

The Public Links returned in 1956, but Harding is best known on the amateur circuit as the host of the San Francisco City Championship, a venerable tournament, commonly referred to as “the City,” that’s as notable for those who have won it (Venturi, George Archer, Juli Inskster) as it is for those who fell short in it — major champions Tom Watson, Johnny Miller and Bob Rosburg among them. Every golfer, male or female, who ever won the City is now honored on a large plaque in the bar that has room enough for names to be added for decades to come.

When it opened, in 1925, Harding played host to what was then believed to be the largest golf tournament ever staged, with 2,400 entries and seven divisions, contested over seven days. This Friday’s centennial celebration will be more understated. Vintage cotton flags will fly on the flagsticks, a 1925 Ford Model T will be displayed by the putting green, and everyone who pegs it will receive a centennial print and a commemorative poker chip made from a storm-felled cypress tree from the property. But in most other ways, it’s just another day at Harding. The tee sheet is booked solid for daily-fee play at the standard rate.

As for the exhibit, it will remain up through the end of the year. But the hope is to keep it in perpetuity, with certain displays reshuffled or consolidated to make room for daily clubhouse operations. Harding, after all, is a busy place, which is another way of saying that new stories are being written every day.