Long Beach Golf Festival

LOOKING BACK 4 • Long Beach Golf Festival Tournament Guide • 2019 Edition to compete, and it's great for the area. People travel from all over the country for these tourna- ments, which says a lot for a city event." The history of the tournaments themselves goes back decades before Long Beach Parks & Recre- ation Director Ralph Cryder first brought them to- gether under the umbrella of the Festival in 1989. The inaugural Long Beach Open was contested in 1923 and won by Walter Hagen during the prime of a Hall of Fame career that would see him win 11 major championships. Three years later, the Long Beach Men's City Championship debuted as an amateur match-play event and in 1928 came the inaugural Long Beach Women's City Championship. Two decades after that, sisters Alice and Marlene Bauer won the Women's City before joining with 11 others as the founding members of the LPGA. The 1950s brought the creation of the Long Beach Junior Golf Championship, later renamed the Crosby Memorial Junior Golf Championships. In 1971 the Men's City was reformatted to become a stroke-play event, but the legacy of the original tournament was carried on through the creation of a separate Long Beach Match Play Championship. Following its debut in 1923, the Long Beach Open became a regular stop on the professional tour from 1926 to 1930 at Virginia Country Club, and then Lakewood Country Club from 1949 to 1951 before being reincarnated by Cryder in 1989 as the jewel of the newly minted Long Beach Golf Festival. The "new" Long Beach Open took the baton from the Queen Mary Open (1972-1989), and con- tinued serving as a launching pad toward PGA Tour careers for many young players such as Fred Couples, Mark O'Meara, Craig Stadler, Peter Ja- cobsen, Paul Goydos, Scott McCarron, Dennis Paulson and Kevin Na. The most recent addition to the Festival was the Long Beach Senior Amateur Championship in 1991, rounding out a roster of major champi- onships that also features additional events such as a volunteer tournament and a charity pro-am. Tim Forbes, the Festival's Executive Director, said the three decades of longevity have a lot to do with the passionate base of golfers in the area, the city's top-notch public courses, and the fact that there's a championship event for players of all ages and skill levels. "It's really all of the above," Forbes said. "But when we surveyed the participants of each of the multi-round events, the two most frequent positive comments were that the tournaments are played on a different course each round and that the level of organization and onsite management made it feel like a prestigious event." CLICK HERE for everything you need to know about the 2019 Long Beach Golf Festival. LEARN MORE!

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