Two of Southern California’s most prestigious clubs, Lakeside Golf Club in Toluca Lake (Burbank) and Oakmont Country Club in Glendale, will host the 2008 California Amateur Championship June 16-21, 2008.   Stroke play competition will be played over both courses with the match-play portion being contested at Lakeside GC.

Next year’s tournament will be the first time that the 97-year-old event will have been held outside the Monterey Peninsula and continues a new trend that will see the championship rotate to great courses around the state.   From its inception in 1912, the California Amateur was played for the first seven years at Del Monte GC.   Beginning in 1919, the event was held at Pebble Beach Golf Links every year except 2000.   

 “We’re delighted that these two great classic clubs have agreed to host the 2008 California Amateur,” says Ed Holmes, who will be the 2008 president of the California Golf Association, which conducts the tournament.   “These are just two of this state’s great courses on which we hope to conduct this prestigious event.”

Both Lakeside and Oakmont were originally designed by Max Behr in the 1920s, the first great “Golden Age” of golf course design in Southern California.   

Behr was a fine amateur golfer and became the first editor of Golf Illustrated & Outdoor Magazine in 1914.   After his first wife died unexpectedly, Behr moved to California and turned his focus to golf course architecture.   

In addition to Lakeside and Oakmont, Behr designed Rancho Santa Fe GC (site of the 2006 U.S. Junior Amateur and the original site of the “Crosby Clambake,” now the PGA Tour’s AT&T National Pro-Am in Pebble Beach). Behr also designed several other Southern Californias courses and assisted on others, including The Olympic Club in San Francisco.   However, Lakeside remains his best-known course, a layout that Alister Mackenzie called “one of the world’s greatest golf courses.

Down through the decades, Lakeside (which is a well-struck driver from Warner Brothers studios and also close to Universal Studios, Walt Disney Productions and many other entertainment giants) has been the home club of thousands of Hollywood stars, many of whom were (and are) fine golfers.   Bing Crosby was a former Lakeside club champion and Bob Hope was a long-time member with a house next to the 11th fairway.   

One of its current club members, Jim Vernon, was Southern California Golf Association president in 1987 and is the current USGA vice president.

The Kelly Cup — named for great amateur golfer Roger Kelly (one of just six people to win back-to-back California Amateurs, in 1937-38) — is one of the nation’s premiere invitational tournaments.   The club has hosted the SCGA Amateur five times.

Although Oakmont was originally designed by Behr, it has undergone extensive renovations since then.   For several years, it was the site of an LPGA Tour event and has also hosted the SCGA Amateur Championship five times.   Oakmont members J. Clifford Argue (1950) and John C. Argue (1980) are the only father and son to serve as SCGA president.   John Argue was instrumental in bringing the 1984 Olympic Games to Los Angeles.