Watching this year’s U.S. Amateur wind down to the final match (Devon Bling vs. Viktor Hovland) at Pebble Beach Golf Links, it’s hard for me to take my eyes off the unrelenting beauty of the golf course and Monterey Bay. It’s also hard for me, when the coverage turns to the final hole, to take my eyes off the spot, a little more than halfway up No. 18, from where St. Paul’s Jimmy Johnston hit the Shot on the Rocks that helped propel him to victory in the 1929 U.S. Amateur.

I wrote about Johnston’s historic shot in last week’s St. Paul Pioneer Press — twincities.com/2018/08/11/shot-on-the-rocks-st-paul-golfer-jimmy-johnstons-quest-to-win-a-major-championship/ — and keep thinking about Johnston and his caddie standing on the rocks 89 years ago and sizing up the recovery shot that led to a par and the halve of the hole in Johnston’s championship match against Oscar Willing (Johnston ultimately won, 4 and 3).

Oh, about that caddie …

A phone call last week from a Johnston family member called my attention to a piece of Pebble Beach-U.S. Amateur trivia.

The fellow standing alongside Johnston in the 1929 final was a Pebble Beach caddie named Dede Gonsalves. When the U.S. Amateur returned to Pebble in 1961, a 21-year-old from Upper Arlington, Ohio, arrived at the tournament and, according to the story I was told, went searching for the best Pebble Beach caddie he could find.

The golfer’s name was Jack Nicklaus. He went on to win the tournament — and, of course, a few more. The caddie Nicklaus had been lined up with was one Dede Gonsalves — the same man who had looped for Johnston en route to the championship 32 years earlier.

Below, a photo of Gonsalves and Nicklaus in the 1961 U.S. Amateur, taken from the pages of Neil Hotelling’s book “Pebble Beach: The Official History.” (Original photo credit PBC-Graham/Brooks)

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Joe Bissen

Joe Bissen is a Caledonia, Minnesota, native and former golf letter-winner at Winona State University. He is a retired sports copy editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and St. Paul Pioneer Press and former sports editor of the Duluth News-Tribune. His writing has appeared in Minnesota Golfer and Mpls.St.Paul magazines. He lives in South St. Paul, MN. Joe's award-winning first book, "Fore! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses 1897-1999," was released in December 2013, and a follow-up, "More! Gone. Minnesota's Lost Golf Courses, Part II" was released in July 2020. The books are most readily available online at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble (bn.com). He continues to write about lost courses on this website and has uncovered more than 245 of them.

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