Six U.S. Senior Open Players Enjoying Newport C.C. Reunion

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During his halcyon days on the PGA Tour, Craig Barlow would often sneak away on the Wednesday before the Travelers Championship (formerly Greater Hartford Open) and make the two-hour-plus drive to Newport Country Club. 

While that might seem like an odd detour, the historic venue was a layout the Henderson, Nev., native first fell in love with as a competitor in the 1995 U.S. Amateur because it reminded him of his favorite place on the planet, Pebble Beach (Calif.) Golf Links. Fellow tour pro and Newport member P.H. Horgan III was his conduit to playing this private enclave and Barlow never could get enough. 

Yes, the course was special with its links-style characteristics, but the massive nearby mansions facing the ocean, fresh air and the area’s rich history from golf to the America’s Cup yacht races and playground for the country’s aristocrats, made it a respite from the everyday mundane nature of the PGA Tour. 

So, when the USGA announced it was rescheduling the U.S. Senior Open at Newport for 2024 – it was supposed to host in 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic intervened – Barlow was overjoyed. Having recently turned 50, he wouldn’t have been eligible four years ago. 

“When I saw it on the [USGA championship] schedule, I put my blinders on and told myself ‘I’ve got to get there,’” said the 51-year-old Barlow. “In my opinion, this is the way golf is meant to be played. It’s not manufactured.” 

Barlow is one of six competitors in this week’s 156-player field who competed in the 1995 U.S. Amateur, which was a celebration of the USGA’s centennial and also held at Newport C.C. The others are Notah Begay III, 1994 U.S. Amateur runner-up Trip Kuehne, Chris Riley, Matthew Goggin, of Australia, and Christian Raynor.  

Barlow and Raynor, then a standout at Florida State University, failed to qualify for match play, while Goggin, the son of 1981 U.S. Women’s Amateur runner-up Lindy Goggin, reached the final 16 along with Riley. Kuehne and Begay III, teammates on the 1995 USA Walker Cup Team with Riley who would lose in Wales a few weeks later, bowed out in the Round of 32. Begay’s Stanford teammate, Tiger Woods, would claim his second consecutive Havemeyer Trophy, named after the USGA’s first president and Newport member, with a 2-up victory over George “Buddy” Marucci. 

More than 50 competitors from that U.S. Amateur tried to qualify for the 44th U.S. Senior Open, yet only these six managed to advance.  

This is only the fifth USGA championship to be conducted at Newport, one of the USGA’s five founding clubs. It hosted the inaugural U.S. Amateur and U.S. Open in 1895, then waited 100 years to have the U.S. Amateur. In 2006, World Golf Hall of Famer and one of the game’s greatest players, Annika Sorenstam, defeated Pat Hurst in an 18-hole Monday playoff to win the U.S. Women’s Open. 

Interestingly enough, the USGA just conducted its 1,000th championship at Pinehurst two weeks ago with Bryson DeChambeau winning a memorable U.S. Open. Now, as if the symmetry can’t be any more perfect, Newport gets to kick off the next millennium of USGA competitions. 

“It’s the grandeur of the venue,” said Begay. “The USGA does a wonderful job of this when the venue takes center stage. That’s not often the case when Tiger is in the field [like he was in 1995]. The [Beaux Arts-style] clubhouse, the location and the roots of the game … it’s places like this that really hold a special place in golf.” 

When the game’s best amateurs assembled at Newport in 1995, they found a course that was so brown from a hot and dry summer that Goggins said you could see sand and dirt flying when shots were hit from the fairways. That’s because the club is one of the few that doesn’t irrigate the course outside of greens and teeing areas. Otherwise, it’s whatever Mother Nature offers. It reminded Goggin of courses he played in Great Britain during his 1995 summer amateur tour.

Earlier that year, the native of Hobart in Tasmania, an island off Australia’s southeast coast, won his country’s national amateur, earning him some invites to major competitions in the United Kingdom and Canada. The rules regarding amateurs were far different then – this was way before Name, Image and Likeness deals or players being able to accept free equipment – as Goggin had to pay out of pocket for his expenses during his time in the United States. The R&A, which governs the game everywhere but the U.S. and Mexico, allowed Goggin to accept expense money to play in the Canadian Amateur and select U.K. events. The USGA’s rules regarding amateurs were different.

Nevertheless, Goggin decided to play the Porter Cup in Lewiston, N.Y., and the Western Amateur in Michigan as well as try to qualify for the U.S. Amateur. The World Amateur Golf Ranking® had not been established, so international players needed to qualify to compete in the U.S. Amateur, unless they were members of the Walker Cup teams or had won The Amateur Championship. Goggin squeezed in a 36-hole qualifier between the Porter Cup and Western Amateur, then advanced to the Round of 16 at Newport C.C., losing to Mark Plummer, 2 and 1.

With his talent, Goggin was certainly a target for American college coaches – Georgia Tech, Arizona State and Arizona showed interest – but once he was accepted into the Australian Institute for Sport, he remained in Australia, getting high-quality coaching and guidance as if he were in college minus the academics. 

Four years later, he moved to the U.S. to compete on the Web.com (now Korn Ferry) Tour and later PGA Tour; the five-time Web.com winner currently resides in Charlotte, N.C. Having celebrated his 50th birthday 13 days ago, Goggin didn’t pass up a chance to play Newport again, shooting an impressive 63 at Florence (S.C.) Country Club on May 30 that matched the lowest score every posted in qualifying.

Ditto for Kuehne. The 52-year-old Texan, who qualified for the last year’s U.S. Senior Open in his first year of eligibility, arrived at Newport in the summer of 1995 with much more fanfare than a year earlier when he saw Woods rally from an early 6-down deficit to defeat him in the 36-hole final at TPC Sawgrass. That spring, he had helped Oklahoma State win its eighth NCAA title and played in the Masters.  

But Kuehne ran into Mark Wilson in the Round of 32 and fell to the future five-time PGA Tour winner who had lost to Woods in the 1992 U.S. Junior Amateur final. Kuehne would eventually join little brother Henry, and little sister Kelli, as a USGA champion, making the Kuehne clan the only family with three siblings to have won USGA titles. Henry won the 1998 U.S. Amateur at Oak Hill C.C. with Trip on the bag, and Kelli won the 1994 U.S. Girls’ Junior and 1995 and 1996 U.S. Women’s Amateur, the former at another USGA founding club, The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. Trip’s title would come in the 2007 U.S. Mid-Amateur at Bandon Dunes, which would be his last USGA event in a decade, as he “retired” from competitive golf to watch son, Will, play high school and Division I college football at North Texas and later at Southern Methodist University (he was a quarterback).

With Will set to tackle his first post-college job, Trip, a career amateur, decided to rev up his golf game again, hoping to rekindle the past magic that made him a three-time USA Walker Cupper and low amateur in the 2003 U.S. Open. His goal this week is to join Marvin “Vinny” Giles and Jeff Wilson as the only players to have earned low-amateur honors in a U.S. Open and U.S. Senior Open.

He couldn’t think of a better venue to do it at.

“The greatest people in golf have done exceptional things here, which makes it even more special,” said Kuehne, who in 2005 founded Double Eagle Capital, an investment capital firm based in Westlake, Texas. 

The USGA even made the week a bit more special by pairing the three past 1995 Walker Cup teammates Begay, Kuehne and Riley for the first two rounds. Despite the 4-point loss at Royal Porthcawl in Wales on a team that included Tiger Woods, all three had an amazing week overseas. Golf and other life pursuits have made reunions a little more challenging. Riley, a 1989 U.S. Junior Amateur semifinalist who starred at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Begay, who won the 1994 NCAA title at Stanford University, competed on the PGA Tour for more than a decade. Riley, a member of the 2004 U.S. Ryder Cup Team, captured one PGA Tour win before retiring after the 2016 campaign to become the head men’s golf coach at the University of San Diego.

Riley, who lost in the Round of 16 to Duke Delcher in the 1995 U.S. Amateur, enjoyed his seven seasons at USD, leading the Toreros to five NCAA Regional appearances and a berth in the 2021 NCAA Championship. He was named the WCC Coach of the Year for the 2023-24 season. But with the demands of Division I coaching ever-changing with NIL, the transfer portal and fundraising, the job responsibilities had changed drastically since 2017. Only 15 percent of the job, Riley said, was actually about coaching. Plus, his daughter, Taylor, is a rising junior on the golf team at Louisiana State University, where his wife, Michelle, played for three seasons, and another daughter, Rose, just graduated from Point Loma High in San Diego. He’ll continue at USD as a consulting third assistant while pondering other professional opportunities, which could include more competitive events. His last USGA championship was the 2004 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.

“I loved it,” said Riley of coaching. “That was kind of a hard decision. At the same time, it was an easy decision because it turned into an 80-hour a week job. Fundraising is big. The transfer portal. It was just a lot more than I bargained for when I signed up [in 2017].”

Begay comes into his second U.S. Senior Open fresh off a pair of top-20 finishes at the Principal Charity Classic (T-18) and Dick’s Open (T-16). He’s hoping momentum turns into a solid performance on a course he knows well.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love going down Memory Lane,” said Begay. “But we’re here to win and compete.”

Barlow was set to join Riley at UNLV after spending a couple of seasons at Taft (Calif.) Junior College. But he wound up never playing for the Rebels, with the 1995 U.S. Amateur his final amateur competition. From 1998 to 2011 he competed on both the Nationwide (KFT) Tour and PGA Tour, with his lone victory coming at the eGolf Tour’s ArrowCreek Open in 2014. He qualified for six U.S. Opens, the last in 2014 at Pinehurst. He’s currently the director of instruction at the Lake Las Vegas Golf Academy, where he’s mentored players as young as 12. 

While on tour, he fell in love with Pebble Beach for obvious reasons, but Newport is not far behind in the pecking order, especially with its historic context.

“In Vegas, we have some very nice golf courses, but everything has been manufactured,” said Barlow, donning a Newport Country Club-logoed polo during Tuesday’s practice round. “That’s modern golf. The trenches down No. 1 [at Newport] are from the Revolutionary War. The fairways have these little dips. They were filled in when [architect A.W. Tillinghast designed] the [current] golf course [in 1923], but those used to be trenches for the Revolutionary War. That’s the kind of stuff you can’t make up.”

David Shefter is a senior staff writer. Email him at dshefter@usga.org.