good in the afternoon. I made a lot of mileage in terms of putts, especially on the front
side.” McGuiness birdied three times on the front, and made a 25-foot par putt on the
214-yard par-3 2nd after putting his tee shot in the rightside hazard.
Meanwhile Hooper, who birdied the 3rd, three-putted three times on the front,
and could never recover. “That really hurt. It put me in a deep hole from which I never
crawled out,” he said. Two of those three-putts came on the 7th and 8th, where McGui-
ness uncharacteristically missed greens. He bogeyed the 7th, but thanks to Hooper’s
three-putt halved the hole. On the par-
5 eighth, McGuiness escaped a lateral
“If you’re going to call it a slam,
hazard on his third shot and got up
and in from 79 yards on his fourth to
make it the Szewczul Slam.”
a difficult, back-right hole location to
go four up. “That flop shot was pretty
key,” said the champion. It was on these two holes in the morning that turned Hooper’s
match with Rich Jute of Topstone around. Hooper won both to reduce Jute’s lead to one,
eventually winning 4&3.
McGuiness protested when CSGA Executive Director Mike Moraghan, present-
ing the silver Match Play trophy, called him “clearly the best senior golfer in Connecti-
cut.” “It’s not lost on anybody who follows amateur golf in the state of Connecticut that
Dave Szewczul is the best senior player in the state and he couldn’t be here this week
because he’s recoveri ng from back surgery and when he played in the Senior Am in the
fall he had a broken back. He’s the guy in the state of Connecticut. If you’re going to call
it a slam, make it the Szewczul Slam.” Szewczul won the Senior Match Play four times,
along with a host of other majors, including the Connecticut Mid-Amateur and Con-
necticut Senior Amateur. But if Szewczul was missing, there were 25 other current or
former CSGA champions in the field, including Kraczkowski, a semi-finalist in 2017.
A self-described “junior senior” at 56, McGuiness had high praise for the two 75-year-
olds, Bill Lee of Yale and Shawn McLoughlin of Ridgewood, who both made match play
before falling —in the round of 16 and quarterfinals respectively.
“They were amazing,” said the champion. But then so was he.
Murphy (below left) shared medalist honors with McGuiness. Quarterfinalist McLoughlin
was one of two 75-year-olds to make match play. Hooper found trouble in the final.
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CSGA Links // July 2018 17