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Formidable team of Groom, Smith defend title at Salina Country Club
   2010 KGA Senior Four-Ball Championship

   Veteran Kansas Golf Association competitor Bob Vidricksen had a suggestion concerning the outcome of the 2010 Senior Four-Ball Championship contested on his home Salina Country Club course last month. After a fine showing, he and teammate Frank Roth had won the “Kansas” division of the event while Kansas City’s Andy Smith and Raytown’s Steve Groom had won the “Missouri” division.
   Right now that appears the only way to wrestle a victory away from Smith and Groom,

whose growing team resume also boasts a 2009 Heart of America Four-Ball senior title.
   The dynamic duo put together consecutive rounds of six-under 65 in its two trips around the Salina CC layout in winning the KGA Senior Four-Ball Championship for a second straight year. And for the second consecutive time they edged Mission Hills’ Bryan Norton and Overland Park’s Jigger James – who’ll again have to settle for second and a share of that “Kansas” title with Salina’s Roth and Vidricksen at 10-under 132.
   “I think winning is nice any time, any place,” said Smith, 55 and the 2007 KGA Senior Player of the Year. “To win with one of your best friends, you’re not going to get to do that forever. To win back to back is special…to win here, on a golf course I really like is special. But just winning period, it never gets old.”
   According to the two Missourians, their team success is a matter of letting each other play their own game.
   “We’ve played a lot of golf together the last couple years,” said Groom, 51. “We pretty much stay out of each other’s way. We don’t read a lot of putts for each other…(just) every once in a while.”
   That attitude has led some big-time success in KGA and Kansas City-area events.
   “I think we feel very comfortable with each other,” says Smith. “We’re not trying to get in each other’s heads…I just let him get up there and swing. We have a lot of confidence in each other. I think that’s what it’s all about. I have a lot of confidence in his abilities and I think he has a lot of confidence I’m going to keep the ball in play.”

Show Me the patience
    That faith in a partner’s ability allowed Groom and Smith to work their way through the second round of the Four-Ball, birdying a couple early holes and then patiently waiting through a long string of pars to end the front nine. They made birdie at the par-5 third hole as Groom Steve Groom

two-putted from more than 50 feet. He got the team to two-under for the day at the fourth hole, relying on a hot putter to roll in a 12-footer for birdie on the short, par 3.
   “This golf course is about patience,” Smith said. “If you get overly aggressive it will bite you. We had opportunities almost everywhere and Steve just played phenomenally today…rolling the rock as good as I’ve seen him.”
   The team remained eight under for the championship as it parred out the front side. Word began to filter back that a group in front had a hot round going and Smith and Groom responded by birdying three of their next five holes to re-claim the lead. Groom’s drive came to rest under a pine tree on the short, par-4 10th. But he created a shot, punching the ball onto the green and rolling in the putt for birdie.
   “I had to improvise there a little bit and got it up on the green,” Groom said. “I think I made about a 10 footer there.”
   Smith then played the par-5 11th hole perfectly, hitting a 100-yard approach shot to about 10 feet and making the birdie putt to get the team to double-digits under par for the first time. That was important because later, as they came off the 14th tee, an official let them know Norton and James had posted 10-under 142 on the leader board.
   “I guess we knew how we stood on 14 going down the fairway because we told (KGA president Jack Simpson) we were at 10 and he said 10 was leading in the clubhouse,” Groom recalled. “We knew we needed to get one more and we felt pretty good.”
   The feeling was correct as Groom left an approach shot from the right rough on No. 14 just 12 feet behind the cup and drained the putt to put the defending champs in front for good.
   “We wanted to get a couple more (birdies),” said Smith, who would later knock his approach Andy Smith

shot stiff at the finishing hole, only to watch his partner steal back the thunder with an 18-footer for birdie and their final 12-under-par score. “No question, when he rolled (the putt at No. 14) in that put us in the right position.”
   Groom and Smith, though they failed to take advantage of the par-5, first hole either day of the event, registered a pair of birdies early each day to get them going. Smith had birdies at Nos. 2 and 3 in the opening round and the team got off on the right foot in route to a six-under 65 and a one-shot lead over Wichita’s Craig Shultz and Wellington’s Chad Renn. Shultz and Renn added a one-under 70 on day two and their 136 netted a tie for eighth place.
   “We don’t birdie (No. 1) either day, so we kind of fell behind right off the bat. But I guess we were two under through four both days,” said Groom, who works with Srixon Golf. “Andy birdied two and three yesterday and I birdied three and four today. That put us on track and in a good mood; we just stayed patient from there. Because nothing much else happened on the front nine either day.”
   A bogey at the par-4, fifth hole in the opening round would be the team’s only bogey in two trips around the Salina Country Club layout.
   “We just kept plugging along,” said Smith with Niagara LaSalle Steel. “We got out of sorts shortly yesterday. I three-putted the fifth hole for bogey and that was our only bogey of the tournament. The irony of it is we played the front, which has some scoring holes and the two par 5s, in just two under both days. We played the back, which I think is harder, four under.”
   In the net scoring division, Tecumseh’s Craig Cooper and Topeka’s Randy Forbes shot (56-55) 111 to win by four shots over Augusta’s Bill Richey and Wichita’s Tyler Woodrow (59-56). The super senior division went to Salina’s Tom Dunn and Leawood’s Gary Morgan with rounds of 62-64 for a 126 total. That was four shots better than Manhattan’s David Anderson and Great Bend’s Paul Keller (66-64).

Riding the current to 61
   Seldom does one entrant shoot the low round of an event by three shots. But that is precisely what Norton and James did on the second day of the 22^nd KGA Senior Four-Ball with an event record-tying 61. Norton, a former PGA Tour player, really got it going and almost Bryan Norton

lifted the team to the title with his seven birdies and an eagle on the day.
   “Today we were just hot right off the bat,” said Norton, a Mission Hills Country Club member along with James. “We were five under after (No. 5) and just kept going from there. We had eight birdies and an eagle on the day. The scores were good today and we played well. It’s like that in golf, you get days when the momentum is bad and you’re fighting upstream…today we were floating downstream. It was all going our way.”
   Norton got the team to five-under for the event when he holed out on the par-5 fifth hole.
   “I hit a nice drive and had 102 yards; (I) just hit a full sand wedge. It landed six feet in front of the hole and rolled right in,” said the 2009 KGA Senior Player of the Year. “We couldn’t see it until we got up to the green.”
   The team crept up and up the leader board, but eventually it was just too big a hole to climb out of after an opening-day even-par 71 left them six behind Groom and Smith.
   “We just fell too far behind yesterday; we shot even par and had one of those rounds where we played pretty good, but couldn’t get it in the hole – nothing really went our way. Finally, I birdied the 18th hole and that got us back to even,” said Norton, now in insurance sales with Lockton of Kansas City. “We just didn’t do enough yesterday; we did plenty today though we parred the last two holes. When you find yourself in that position you just have to find a way to make a birdie. We had a couple little (times) of Jigger James

bad luck, but all in all, you hit some good shots and hole one from the fairway and I’m pretty happy with that.”
   Norton said, after putting his clubs away for an extended period this winter, he’d played a lot of golf in April. But some poor weather in May left him having played just six holes in six days coming into the Senior Four-Ball.
   “I was a hair rusty on just the little stuff yesterday,” he admitted. “Distance control on my irons was the only issue yesterday. Today I got it dialed in a little better.”
   James and Norton tied the Four-Ball record 61 shot by Don Cox and Bill Toalson in 2002’s first round, and Don Kuehn and Randy Apgar in 2006’s second round, both at Flint Hills National in Andover.

‘Pot of gold’ eludes home boys
   Salina Country Club members Vidricksen and Roth won the KGA Senior Four-Ball title back in 2007 with a 134 total at Brookridge Country Club. The tandem said they saw the KGA championship schedule and knew the event was coming back to their club for the first time since 1992. They wanted to play well on their home course and did just that with two bogey-free rounds.
   “We have played in four of five of these and won it two or three years ago at Brookridge and were really looking forward to playing it on our home course,” said Roth, 63 and a college professor at Kansas Wesleyan University. “We just came up a little short. (132) is nice, but we thought we could break 130. We just needed a better Monday.”
   Utilizing an aggressive mentality on a course they’d played countless times led to a 64 in Tuesday’s second round and it would have been the low round of the tourney if not for the Norton/James 61 of day two.
   “Attack, simply attack,” Vidricksen “simply” summarized the team’s strategy. “You know this is a short course and you try to out-drive the trouble a lot of times. Sometimes that will get you into trouble when you’re too aggressive. Just attack…and we did a pretty good job of that. We just didn’t get the putts in the hole and that’s the difference.”
   Roth and Vidricksen moved into position with a three-under 68 in the first round. But lack of holing putts cost them turning in an even lower opening round.
   “I putted poorly the whole two days; I played real well from tee to green, but I just don’t have that putter working right now – you’ve got to have that,” said Vidricksen, a 62-year-old retiree from the steel business who also owns a 1999 Senior Four-Ball title with Nick Onofrio at Kansas City’s Dub’s Dread. “We accomplished some things. We just didn’t get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
   According to Roth, not taking advantage of the home course’s par-5 holes may have been the difference in finishing tied for second at 132 after a seven-under 64 and not sharing another KGA Senior Four-Ball title.
   “Good conditions for scoring today; the greens rolled well,” he said. “We didn’t birdie the (par) 5s yesterday and that hurt us. We played better today. Bob played a lot better than I did tee to green. I hit a few greens and made a few putts, but overall didn’t hit enough greens.”