Tournament regular
Published 5:00 am Wednesday, September 25, 2013
- Peach Waller chips his fourth shot to the first green at Sunriver Woodlands golf course on Tuesday. He got up and down from there for a par.
SUNRIVER — Rick “Peach” Waller believes there are only two kinds of golf.
“Bobby Jones says there is golf and there is tournament golf, and they are nowhere near the same,” said Waller, who was bundled up in all-black rain gear while sitting at a wooden patio table just outside the Woodlands course clubhouse at Sunriver Resort.
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Count Waller in for tournament golf.
Waller, a 64-year-old from Pensacola, Fla., where he owns a liquor store, completed a rainy second round Tuesday at the Lithia Pacific Amateur Golf Classic. But it was hardly his first turn at a tournament.
He is playing in his fifth Pac Am. But that is just the half of it.
Waller runs his own amateur golf tour — the Hacker’s Amateur Golf Tour — which hosts monthly tournaments in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
Waller has also played in amateur tournaments from Myrtle Beach, S.C. to Mesquite, Nev., to Central Oregon.
In fact, the Pac Am represents his second tournament in Central Oregon this year: He played in the Best of Bend Best Ball in June. And in case you were wondering, there are no direct flights from Pensacola to Redmond.
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Why does he do it?
“Nothing is better than tournament golf,” said Waller in his distinct Southern accent. “You can play golf with your buddies all day long, but it’s not the same.”
Part of the joy of tournament golf for Waller is the camaraderie, a sentiment shared by many of the more than 400 golfers playing in the Pac Am.
Waller, though, comes with his own entourage.
This year, he has eight friends (and some spouses) filling up two houses in Sunriver. Those friends are mostly from the South, though one is from Toronto.
When he travels to Mesquite in southern Nevada for a May tournament, something he has done for eight consecutive years, he takes along two dozen or so of his friends.
And Waller is the driving force behind all of it, said Dan Kinkle, of Helen, Ga., who has made a habit of traveling to tournaments with Waller, including the same five Pac Ams.
“Peach has a lot of charisma,” Kinkle said. “He’s a good salesman. If there is something he is passionate about, he can really talk you into it.”
And Central Oregon is not always an easy sell if you live in the Southeast.
“You have to really want to be here,” added Kinkle, referring to the distance and travel issues.
With an 11-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son among his five children (the oldest of whom is 41), Waller, who is divorced, sometimes finds cross-country travel a challenge.
But he limits his vacations to golf, he said, which makes the time away from family more manageable.
Waller — a former U.S. Marine Corps aviator under the call sign “Peach,” which is where the Georgia native got his nickname — is not alone in his devotion to tournament golf. He points to a tiny subculture of golfers who play from coast to coast in open amateur tournaments such as the Pac Am.
“It’s like a small fraternity,” Waller said. “You really get to know the guys.”
His fondest memory from all of his tournaments came in 2010 at the Pac Am.
That was when Waller, who currently has a 10.3 handicap index, made the championship round at Sunriver Resort’s Crosswater Club. Four strokes down with five holes to play, Waller came all the way back to win his flight championship with a stroke to spare.
“When you’re an old codger like me and you get a chance to have something in your trophy case for your kids to look at, that’s pretty cool,” he said with a smile.
With all of Waller’s tournament experience, you might think he would have trouble naming a favorite event. Not so.
“This one,” he responded Tuesday without hesitation.
Seems strange, considering that Waller had just finished a cold, wet round of golf that would send many Florida residents indoors.
So what is the attraction?
“I’ll tell you one thing about this tournament, they have the nicest people playing in it,” Waller said. “I have met some of the greatest guys out here playing over the last five years.
“The courses are great, they really are,” he added. “And it is so different. You leave Pensacola and it’s 85-90 percent humidity. And you come out here and it’s 20-25 percent humidity and you feel like you can just breathe again.”
Pacific Amateur schedule of events
The Lithia Pacific Amateur Golf Classic runs through Thursday at courses around Central Oregon:
Today
9:30 a.m.: Third round of competition, shotgun start
5:30-7 p.m.: Awards dinner at Sunriver Resort, Great Hall Complex
7-8:30 p.m.: Awards ceremony, Sunriver Resort, Homestead Room
Thursday
10 a.m.: Tournament of Champions, Crosswater Club at Sunriver Resort
* For first-round leaders, see Scoreboard, C2. For more information and complete results, visit www.pacamgolf.com