In Good Company
July 19, 2007
By Jon Terry, Bucknell Athletic Communications One of the coldest Lewisburg winters in recent memory was the spring of 2007, but Tuesday, April 3 was one of the few exceptions. A sun-splashed afternoon with temperatures in the low 70s greeted Charlie Waddell as he joined teammates and fellow seniors Kyle Moran and Chas Wagner for a quick round at the Bucknell Golf Club, just three days before the start of the Navy Invitational in Annapolis. Waddell, who has just laced up his spikes after a long day of classes and labs, is only six weeks away from wrapping up arguably the finest career in the 65-year history of the Bucknell men's golf program. Watching him glide smoothly from tee to fairway to green, even in a leisurely practice round with little warmup, it is easy to see why Waddell is a certain Bucknell Athletics Hall of Famer. In fact, he only needs three shots to show the difference between an elite golfer and the mid-handicap weekender. On No. 1, a sharp dogleg right, Waddell cracks a soaring, majestic drive that can't be contained by the fairway, leaking through to the second cut of rough. The 90-yard approach required only a three-quarters wedge shot, but, in his only error on the tricky front nine, he leaves it 15 feet short of the small, well-protected green. A hacker who has just walked from the parking lot to the first tee would do well to get this chip shot within 10 feet of the hole and two-putt for bogey, but a decorated collegiate golfer like Waddell can practically execute it in his sleep. And he seemingly does just that, nonchalantly scooting a bump and run onto the putting surface, where it spins to a halt just six inches below the cup, resulting in a tap-in par. Bucknell coach Jim Cotner is known as a stickler for practicing the short game, and when Waddell is asked how many times he's worked on that exact shot, he just grins and says, "I'm sure any of the guys on our team would be able to get that one close. They know if they want to play on the weekends they are going to have to. In his very first recruiting letter, coach stresses the importance of hard work around the greens." That consistency with the short sticks has served Waddell well over the last four years, as he given the Bison a legit No. 1 player on a deep and resurgent team. In his very first collegiate outing, he shot 71-72 and finished third at the Bucknell Invitational, leading the Orange & Blue to their first team title in 16 years. All he has done since then is become the first and only player in Patriot League history to win back-to-back individual conference championships. He has posted four total victories and 24 top-10 finishes, while leading the Bison to tournament team titles nine times. In 2005 Waddell became the first Bucknell player to win the Patriot League individual title, posting birdies on two of the final three holes of the tournament to edge teammate Ben Pellicani by one stroke. Last spring he emphatically repeated as medalist, shrugging off tough weather conditions to shoot 69-70-71 for a 10-shot victory at Navy. Just as importantly, his scores carried the Bison to win their first Patriot League team championship, ensuring them a bid to the NCAA Championship for the first time since 1961. Waddell appeared in Sports Illustrated's "Faces in the Crowd" following his repeat performance last spring, but Waddell saved perhaps his best golf for the fall of his senior season, when he was in title contention virtually every week. He won the Army Mulekicker Classic in October (at the site of the 2007 Patriot League Championship) and also had three second-place finishes, a fourth and an eighth. His 73.3 stroke average was a program single-season record. In the spring of 2007 he would later win the Lafayette Invitational, then earn his fourth All-Patriot League medal with a third-place finish. More importantly, his final-round, 2-under 68 paced Bucknell to its second straight league title, and Waddell went on to shoot 71-73-73 at the NCAA West Regional in Tempe, Ariz. That staggering portfolio is far from anyone's mind on this stunning afternoon, as the senior trio makes the short walk from the first green to the No. 2 tee, where they face a menacing 209-yard par-3. A deep ravine separates the tee from a slender green. Anything left is suicidal, missing right only slightly less so. As Waddell ponders his choice of clubs, Wagner whispers, "toughest hole on the course." Wagner, a solid player in his own right (career best: 69) and the son of Bucknell Hall of Fame golfer Chick Wagner '76, is exactly right. Many a round has been blown apart on No. 2 after only about 10 minutes on the course.
On the steep down-and-back-up hike to the No. 2 green, Waddell announces, "Days like these are a really nice way to go to practice. I get to hang out with my boys and work on my game on a beautiful sunny day." He's being modest, of course. To play at this level requires a foundation of natural ability refined by hours of practice. And while no one would ever be foolish enough to compare the physical demands of golf practice to that of, say a football player or a distance runner, there is usually more to it than simply playing nine holes with your buddy when the weather is nice. Tuesdays are long academic days for Waddell, a political science and religion major who last summer attended a pre-law institute at Northwestern, leaving him without much time for anything but a late round. On other days, however, he can wrap his golf routine around his class schedule. The day typically starts with a morning jog, then a meeting with Cotner to discuss a plan for the week, encompassing everything from travel and logistics to a practice strategy based on the upcoming tournament. With a large driving range, a number of short game practice areas and the beautiful 18-hole course at his disposal, Waddell has plenty of practice options. That practice comes in handy on the BGC's monster third hole, a 593-yard par-5 that features a generous landing area off the tee, which merely serves as a tease prior to demanding second and third shots. Waddell only requires a driver on seven of the 18 holes on the course, and this is one of them, particularly with the hole playing into the wind as it is on this day. He blisters another high-arcing drive down the left-center of the fairway. As the hole crosses the course's access road and bends back to the left around a small creek and a patch of trees, Waddell takes an aggressive line over the trouble and smashes a fairway metal to 77 yards. Average golfers need at least three cracks to get here, and from this point they would still face a scary wedge shot coming in. Waddell's low spinner checks up five feet to the right of the cup, giving him his first good birdie chance of the day. He is not feeling it with the blade yet, though, and leaves the birdie putt on the high side of the hole. Moran, after starting the hole with two average shots that left him about a 155-yard approach, steals the honor by sliding in a hard-breaking 15-footer for birdie. Players who can survive the difficult opening three holes get a breather at No. 4, a short par-3 that plays to one of the largest greens on the course. As will become a common theme in Waddell's round, he leaves himself about a 15-foot birdie putt, but again he cannot convert. To be fair, in the wake of a late-arriving winter the Bucknell greens are just starting to come back into shape, resulting in some odd bounces and inconsistency from green to green. Wagner is not fazed by the bumpy surfaces, however. Wielding a ridiculously large mallet putter that is backed by three golf ball-sized aiming dots on the heel, Wagner dumps in his second straight 20-footer, this one for birdie. Walking off the green, Waddell and Moran engage in playful debate over the amount of break in their putts, which were on similar lines. Despite letting another opportunity to get to red numbers slip by, Waddell still appears to have as much fun playing the game as he did at the age of five, when he was first introduced to the game by his father Rick, an avid golfer himself. Young Charlie would tag along around the course, and by the age of 12 he was playing in his first junior tournaments. The native of Wilmette, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, also played baseball and hockey throughout his high school days at the prestigious Lake Forest Academy. It became apparent that golf was going to be his ticket to college athletics, however, as he was named the Independent School League Player of the Year following his senior year, when he averaged 36.3 strokes for nine holes. Charlie's brother Fred, two years his elder, was already a member of the golf team at Denison University, and Fred showed him the way in terms of wading through the recruiting process. Unlike many of his Midwestern peers, Charlie was very familiar with Bucknell, as both his grandfather and great-grandfather graduated from Bucknell 30 years apart to the day. (Great-grandfather Robert Waddell played football, then later served as a football coach at Bucknell and Carnegie Tech.) "Having family who attended Bucknell gave me familiarity with the school," says Waddell, who was also interested in the golf programs at Iowa and Purdue, "but what really sold me was Coach Cotner. I was very impressed with him and the direction that he wanted to go with the golf program. He had very precise goals, and he told me that I could be a big part of it." The par-4 fifth hole at the Bucknell Golf Club is one of several holes on the course that has a much different look from the back tees than from the regular men's markers. Situated within its own tee box well back and to the left of the others, hitting from the "blues" requires a precise draw for a righthander to a narrow, undulating fairway. Waddell gets plenty of length on his tee shot, but with the wind working against any right-to-left action, his ball finds the right rough. Still, it is a good angle for the uphill approach shot and he has a good lie. Only the top of the flagstick can be seen from back in the fairway, and the white flag indicates a middle hole location (a red flag would be situated in the front third of the green, a blue flag in the back third). Waddell's short iron shot flies right at the flag, and his quick nod indicates he thinks he's close. Walking up the steep slope to the plateau in front of the green, all three players are at once surprised and a little miffed to discover a hole cut much closer to the front than they had predicted. "Shouldn't that be a red flag?" Moran asks rhetorically. Waddell's approach settled about 15 feet behind the hole, but this is one of the flatter greens on the course. It's a realistic birdie chance, one he would expect to make in tournament competition. But for the second time on the hole, Waddell is slightly fooled. This green, located a significant distance away from the first four holes, is much softer than the others. He leaves the putt well short and settles for a fifth straight par. Wagner's tee shot on No. 6 provides some comic relief. The manageable 357-yard par-4 has a cart path running along the left side of the the hole in front of a square of pines. Wagner's ball strikes the right edge of the asphalt path and caroms 90 degrees back across the fairway on the fly, finally settling in the right rough. "That was well-played," deadpans Moran. Apparently attempting to mimic Wagner's cart path strategy, Waddell's iron shot also goes left off the tee, but he doesn't quite get to the path and winds up with a shaky lie in a thick section of rough. Now utilizing appropriate tactics, he plays safely to the middle of the green and two-putts for par. Moran plays the hole to perfection, striping a drive down the middle of the fairway, followed by a short iron shot to two feet. The tap-in birdie cancels his bogey on the previous hole. Waddell's route on No. 6 illustrated another difference between seasoned golfers and the proletariat ranks. The best, even Tiger, knows when to take his medicine. Many amateurs, standing in the rough and still mentally smarting from a loose drive, attempt to atone for the mistake by following with a heroic shot. With a cavernous bunker in front of the sixth green and out-of-bounds behind, Waddell has been coached to understand the value of a conservative shot, and while his play to the center of the green sacrificed a realistic birdie opportunity, it also took five, six or seven out of the equation. Particularly on Northeastern courses that the Bison play annually, such as those at Navy, Cornell and Colgate, Waddell and his teammates typically go in with a game plan as to which holes are accessible and which ones conceal possible doom. Cotner prefers that his players to stick to the plan, but things are often a little more complicated for Waddell, who is often either in contention for an individual title, or as Bucknell's No. 1 player is the last one coming in with the Bison vying for a team title. "I usually just have a gut feeling where we stand coming down the stretch," says Waddell, who doesn't get to benefit from the giant leaderboards that are common at PGA Tour events. He actually had more than a gut feeling on the home stretch of the 2005 Patriot League Championship, when he won that historic individual crown. Pellicani finished a sensational weekend with rounds of 71-65-74 and walked into the clubhouse in the lead. A few minutes later he found Waddell back on the 14th hole and told him where he finished. Waddell birdied the par-3 16th to tie Pellicani for the lead, but he seemed destined to fall behind again when his tee shot on No. 17 went too far left and almost found a hazard. But Waddell proceeded to hit one of the most memorable shots in Patriot League Championship history. Standing in a deep gully with the ball sitting on firm ground but at waist level, he choked down on an iron and miraculously put the ball on the upper level of the two-tiered green, the same level as the hole. He dropped the 10-foot birdie putt, followed by a two-putt par on 18 to win the tournament. "I don't think I could ever pull that one off again," Waddell says now. On the seventh hole of his practice round, an uphill par-4 made tougher by a left-to-right crosswind, Waddell hits a perfect drive and a perfect approach to five feet, but again he burns the edge on the birdie putt and walks off with a seventh straight par. So lucky to be disappointed with seven straight pars, mutter the 18-handicappers looking on. The eighth at Bucknell would not be considered a birdie hole. It is the longest par-4 on the course at 432 yards, and players have to guard against out-of-bounds to the left the whole way. Waddell's drive trickles into the right rough, and his downhill approach rolls to the back left corner of the green. He executes a nice lag putt on a difficult downhill, left-to-right breaker and finishes up to remain even on the day. With the practice round nearing an end, Waddell allows himself to reminisce about some of his fondest memories in a Bucknell legacy that will someday have to be heralded as one of the best of all time. "Getting to hang out with a fun group of guys has been great, and it's tough to argue with winning," admits Waddell, who is proud that at least one of his parents has managed to see every one of his wins. "The Patriot League wins have obviously been great, because that's what we gear our year around. I will always remember [the team] winning the Bucknell Invitational in my freshman year. It was the team's first win since the `80s and was a very special moment. This fall was a very fun season because I felt like we were all playing very well and I was in contention in almost every tournament. You just get on one of those rolls where every time you need a birdie you find a way to get it." With the biggest tournaments of the year looming on the horizon, Waddell figures he will have plenty of time for full reflection when it's all over, but he is glad that his sport of choice is one that he will be able to continue to pursue after graduation. Unlike an offensive lineman in football who may never partake in that specific activity again after his last game, Waddell has plenty of championship-caliber golf left in him. Before bidding farewell to his buddies Moran and Wagner for the day, Waddell is determined to make a birdie. While the par-5 ninth is rated as the third most difficult hole on the course, for the top players birdies and even eagles are common. Moran and Wagner lay up short of the large pond that fronts the large green, but Waddell has hit a good drive and elects to go for it in two. He clears the pond, but his approach settles at the top of a large grassy mound to the left of the green. It is the first time he has had to hit a chip shot since the first hole, but just like at the start of his round, he is spot on. This time he is playing from thicker grass, and he allows it land softly and release to the hole, where it stops 18 inches short. Waddell taps in the short birdie putt, but not before Moran steals his thunder with his third bomb of the day, a 25-footer for a bird of his own. The three friends share a loud laugh, then they decide to continue on the back nine to see how many holes they can squeeze in before dark. With only a few weeks remaining in his college career, the weather, and the company, is simply too pleasant for Waddell not to be playing golf. |
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