SOMETIMES YOU WALK in the door ready to write your next golf column on the relative lack of labor strife in the world of golf (non-existent at least compared to the probable work stoppages that the NFL and NBA will be dealing with next season) and sometimes that plan goes out the window before you’ve had a cup of coffee.
This one goes under the latter option.
Chimacum High School graduate and former University of New Mexico Lobo Mark Wurtz has been named head golf pro at Discovery Bay Golf Club in Port Townsend.
He will begin at the venerable course on March 7 but will be in the area this weekend for the Seattle Golf and Travel Show at Qwest Field Events Center.
He’ll be at Discovery Bay full-time for the golf season and then head back to teach lessons at his winter home in La Quinta, Calif.
Wurtz is the first pro at Discovery Bay since Dave Ramsey in 2006.
Wurtz learned the game out at Port Ludlow Golf Club where his father Ted Wurtz was head pro in the 1970s.
The elder Wurtz is semi-retired and still teaching, this time at Meadowmeer Golf & Country Club on Bainbridge Island.
Mark Wurtz turned pro after three years at New Mexico.
“My college career was very mediocre,” he told the Kitsap Sun in 1994.
“I tried Tour school, but couldn’t get through.
“Coming right out of college, I don’t think I was ready to play the PGA Tour.”
He would get there in 1994, breaking through after honing his game while working a variety of jobs in Palm Springs, Calif.
His talent allowed him to pick up a sponsor to help him travel to the variety of golf mini-tours that were around in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Halfway through his rookie season Wurtz led the PGA Tour in putting with a 1.720 putts per hole average, ahead of Greg Norman, Loren Roberts and Ben Crenshaw.
He also won the 1997 Nike (now Nationwide) Shreveport Open.
His putter helped him compete on the PGA and Nationwide tours until 2006.
Since then Wurtz has taught the game down in the desert at Big Horn Country Club and The Plantation Golf Course in Palm Springs.
For the past few years Mark has become a proponent of E.A. Tischler’s New Horizon’s Golf approach and is featured in several swing videos displaying the fundamentals of this concept.
You can watch him in action at http://tinyurl.com/4momlte.
He’s known for improving upon a student’s existing swing rather than starting from scratch with a new swing that may not fit one’s personality or physical ability.
I’ll have more from him soon when he gets back up to the North Olympic Peninsula.
Discovery Bay will hold an open house to welcome him at some point in March or April but details are still being worked out.
That 1994 Kitsap Sun article is available at http://tinyurl.com/4n8me7q.
Welcome home Mark!
Arctic Open readied
Port Townsend Golf Club’s next tournament is the always popular Arctic Open on Saturday and Sunday.
Bundle up, the game goes on in any weather.
The golf course also holds an all-day $10 skins game on Saturdays.
It’s $10 for the game and $10 for greens fees.
For more information on any Port Townsend Golf Club event, phone the course at 360-385-4547.
Golf Expos in NW
Sequim’s 7 Cedars Casino, and by extension, Cedars at Dungeness Golf Course, is one of five presenting sponsors for the annual Seattle Golf and Travel Show at the Qwest Field Event Center on Friday through Sunday.
All the big names in the world of golf equipment and apparel will be on hand for the event.
Call it a coincidence, call it poor planning, but the Portland Golf Show is the same weekend at the Oregon Convention Center.
If you are headed south, stop on by for some deals.
As I mentioned earlier in the column, Discovery Bay Golf Club will have a booth and so will Port Ludlow Golf Club.
Port Ludlow’s par-4 second hole on the Tide course was recently lauded in the February edition of Pacific Northwest Golfer Magazine.
It was recognized as one of the “Great Holes of the Northwest,” one of just four holes selected each year by the Northwest’s largest and longest-running golf publication.
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Michael Carman is the golf columnist for the Peninsula Daily News. He can be reached at 360-417-3527 or at pdngolf@gmail.com.