News & Dispatches

Sponsored

Questions, optics, and the uneasy math behind the DeMartini Tour's marquee event.

By The Clubhouse Desk · Filed April 2026

There's a difference between a bold framework and a black box. Francis' latest draft for shaping the DeMartini Tour's most important event lands somewhere in between — and that ambiguity is becoming the story.

At a glance, the proposal leans on a tidy promise: redistribute opportunity, level the field, and produce a more "equitable" championship. But once you start tracing the arithmetic — how slots are allocated, how exemptions are weighted, how "form" is defined — the clarity fades. The model feels less like a transparent scoring system and more like a curated outcome.

The math that won't sit still

Francis' framework introduces multiple layers of adjustment: recent-form multipliers, strength-of-field corrections, and discretionary "balancing" inputs. Each component is defensible in isolation. Together, they create a system where small tweaks compound into large swings — and where the inputs are difficult to audit externally.

• Weighting drift. Recent performance is emphasized, but the lookback window appears flexible. A two-week shift can meaningfully alter rankings. Why that window, and why now?
• Exemption elasticity. Special entries are justified as "competitive integrity safeguards," yet their criteria remain loosely defined. When exceptions are frequent, they stop being exceptions.
• Opaque overrides. The draft allows for final-stage adjustments to "preserve narrative balance." That phrase might read well in a memo, but in practice it blurs the line between governance and curation.

If the goal is to sharpen the arithmetic, the arithmetic has to be legible. Right now, it isn't.

Motives and track record

Any architect of a system invites scrutiny — not just of the system, but of their incentives. Francis' competitive history on his own tour complicates the optics. He has yet to record a top-five finish in any event hosted under the DeMartini banner.

That fact doesn't invalidate his ideas. It does, however, raise reasonable questions:

• Is the draft designed to correct structural imbalances — or to mitigate a persistent personal disadvantage within the current structure?
• Do the discretionary levers disproportionately benefit profiles similar to Francis' own?
• How are conflicts of interest being disclosed and managed?

The cleanest way to answer these questions isn't rhetoric; it's constraints. Clear rules, limited overrides, and independent review.

Language matters — and this language is doing work

Beyond the math, the tone of the draft has drawn attention. Phrases invoking "equal distribution," "central allocation," and "collective fairness" appear throughout. None of these ideas are inherently problematic, but the cumulative effect is a lexicon that feels more ideological than operational.

In sport — especially at the highest level — participants accept inequality of outcome as a function of performance. The system's job is to ensure fair opportunity, not engineered parity. When the language leans too heavily on redistribution, it risks signaling that outcomes are being managed rather than earned.

That perception can be as damaging as any flaw in the formula. Trust, once dented, is hard to restore.

A path forward

If Francis wants this draft to survive contact with players, sponsors, and the broader audience, a few adjustments would go a long way:

1. Publish the full model. Not a summary — release the equations, the inputs, and example calculations. Let people run the numbers.
2. Lock the windows. Fix lookback periods and weighting schemes for the entire season. No midstream tuning.
3. Cap discretion. Define strict, minimal criteria for exemptions and eliminate narrative-based overrides.
4. Independent audit. Bring in a neutral committee to review both the model and any exceptions granted.
5. Tone reset. Replace ideological phrasing with operational clarity. Say what the system does, not what it aspires to symbolize.

The bottom line

There's a compelling idea buried in Francis' draft: a desire to modernize how the Tour identifies and stages its most meaningful competition. But intent isn't enough. The arithmetic has to be sharp, the incentives aligned, and the language grounded.

Until then, the draft reads less like a blueprint for fairness and more like a mechanism for control — one that asks for trust without fully earning it.

An Alister MacKenzie masterpiece joins the Tour calendar later this summer — and the very reasonable green fees come included.

By The Tour Desk · Sharp Park Special Report

The world's golf cognoscenti have long made their pilgrimages to Augusta, Georgia — a cathedral of azaleas, raked sand, and televised agony. But later this summer, the Tour turns its gaze eleven miles south of San Francisco, to a windswept stretch of Pacifica coastline where a different kind of MacKenzie masterpiece has waited nearly a century for the world to catch up. The Sharp Park Showdown is here, it is invite-only, and the green fees are frankly very competitive.

Welcome to Sharp Park. Mind the snakes.

A MacKenzie for the People

Here is a fact that will never stop being funny: the same architect who designed Augusta National — home of the Masters Tournament, temple of pristine fairways, of Magnolia Lane, of grown men weeping over a green jacket — also designed a public municipal golf course where you can park for free, order a bratwurst at the turn, and share a fairway with a man who has never taken a lesson and is fine with that.

Dr. Alister MacKenzie was, to put it charitably, not precious about prestige. A Scottish doctor turned golf architect, he designed Sharp Park right in between his two most famous private clubs — Cypress Point in 1928 and Augusta National in 1933 — as though to remind himself that genius ought to be available to everyone. He declared that his new Pacifica layout would be "as sporty as the Old Course at St. Andrews and as picturesque a golf course as any in the world." Local reporters, apparently not gifted with understatement either, immediately called it "a second St. Andrews."

MacKenzie embedded all of his signature obsessions into the design: cloud-shaped bunkers, deceptive mounding that hides the landing zone, double fairways offering multiple lines of attack, and what he called "optical illusions" — a polite architectural term for making you think a shot is safe when it absolutely is not. He also built two mirror versions of his famous "Lido Hole" here. Sharp Park is the only place in the world where he did that. Augusta doesn't have two Lido Holes. Point: Sharp Park.

"Sharp Park is Dr. MacKenzie's great gift to the American public course golfer." — Ken Venturi, 1964 U.S. Open Champion

How the Sausage (and Golf Course) Got Made

The story of Sharp Park begins, as so many great California stories do, with a Gold Rush lawyer and an extremely inconvenient death. George Sharp sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1849, made a considerable fortune, and then — in what must be considered one of the more dramatic exits in legal history — collapsed and died in a local courtroom mid-case in 1882. His widow, Honora Sharp, subsequently donated the coastal property to the City of San Francisco, with one condition: it must be used as a "public playground or park," or the land reverts to the Sharp family heirs.

This is, it must be said, an extraordinary amount of posthumous pressure. The city has been nervously maintaining a public golf course on the property ever since.

By 1930, city superintendent John McLaren had the idea to build a seaside municipal links on the dunes. He called MacKenzie, who was already a Bay Area resident with a busy portfolio of Northern California designs. MacKenzie drew up plans for free on the speculative hope that the city would hire him — which, after a unanimous vote of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, they did. Construction was supervised by Chandler Egan, a two-time U.S. Amateur champion and 1904 Olympic silver medalist, which tells you something about the ambitions involved. The course opened in April 1932.

In the early 1940s, a series of violent Pacific storms washed out several of the original seaside holes, forcing the construction of a seawall and the rerouting of four holes — now accessed, in one of golf's more theatrical flourishes, via an underground tunnel. You walk into a tunnel. You emerge onto a golf hole. MacKenzie did not design the tunnel, but he would have approved.

The modern era brought its own complications. Environmental organizations filed multiple lawsuits to protect two endangered species that had moved onto the course: the San Francisco garter snake and the California red-legged frog. The ensuing battle became known as the "Save Sharp Park" movement, which was confusing because one side wanted to save the golf course and the other side wanted to save the frogs, and both groups felt, with some justification, that they were the reasonable ones. The snakes, as is traditional, remained noncommittal.

In 2017, the course was designated a Historic Resource Property under CEQA. In 2018, architects Tom Doak and Jay Blasi advised the course to restore two greens to their original MacKenzie shapes. The course's unofficial nickname — "The Poor Man's Pebble Beach" — persists, and is used with great affection by regulars who know that Pebble Beach charges four hundred dollars and doesn't have a bratwurst window.

The Augusta Parallels No One Talks About

The relationship between Sharp Park and Augusta National is so rich with irony that it practically plays itself, but let us enumerate it anyway, for the record.

Augusta National was built on a former plant nursery. Sharp Park was built on former artichoke fields, wetlands, and sand dunes. Augusta has Magnolia Lane. Sharp Park has Highway 1. Augusta has a members-only policy so exclusive that the waiting list is not publicly acknowledged to exist. Sharp Park is open to literally anyone with $103 and a tee time. Augusta's greens are manicured to within a millimeter of their existence. Sharp Park's greens, until recently, ran at a pace that could most charitably be described as "contemplative." Both courses were designed by the same man, who seemed to find both assignments equally interesting, which perhaps says more about MacKenzie than anything else.

Augusta has a blooming azalea garden. Sharp Park has an endangered garter snake. We will leave it to the reader to decide which of these is more interesting to encounter at the 16th hole.

Augusta's famous Amen Corner — holes 11, 12, and 13 — is where Masters championships are made and lost, where Rae's Creek collects the ambitions of the overconfident and the unlucky alike. Sharp Park, it will be announced here for the first time, has an equivalent.

The Format: Two-Man Augmented Shamble

The format suits Sharp Park particularly well. MacKenzie built the course with "double fairways" — multiple viable lines from tee to green — meaning the optimal drive selection isn't always obvious. Partners who communicate well will find angles others miss. Partners who do not communicate well will find Laguna Salada.

The Field: Invitation Only

In its inaugural year, the Sharp Park Showdown will be a closed field. Invitations are extended at the discretion of the Tour, which is a polite way of saying that if you are reading this and have not received one, you are perhaps not yet at the level, but we respect the hustle.

The invite-only model is, incidentally, the one thing Sharp Park and Augusta National have in common from an access perspective. At Augusta, invitations to compete are earned through a labyrinthine system of world rankings, major victories, and legacy qualifications. At the Sharp Park Showdown, invitations are earned through being known to the right people and having a handicap that isn't, as one Tour official put it, "a complete work of fiction."

The 2026 World Cup Title will be decided here, on 120 acres of Pacifica coastline, on a course where 12 of the original MacKenzie holes survive intact, where an endangered frog may cross your line if you're not watching, where a dead man's widow's bequest is the only reason any of this exists, and where the same genius who built Augusta gave his gift, in the spirit of the game, to everyone.

The first tee shot of the inaugural Sharp Park Showdown will be struck later this summer. The ocean will be visible. The wind will have opinions. The frogs will be somewhere nearby, doing whatever it is endangered frogs do when championships are being decided around them.

"They are not making any more MacKenzies near the Pacific. This is a one-of-a-kind in the world of golf." — Jay Blasi, Golf Architect, 2017

He was right, of course. There is only one Sharp Park. And later this summer, for the first time, the Tour comes to it.

A definitive (and highly subjective) ledger of the five dynasties.

By The Clubhouse Desk · Filed April 2026

Family golf is a complicated thing. Bloodlines bring camaraderie, shared driving ranges, and the kind of lifelong needling only siblings (or fathers and sons) can deliver between tee shots. They also bring scandal, dysfunction, and — in at least one case on Tour — what we believe to be the active sabotage of an entire competitive ecosystem. With the 2026 season underway, we present our official Family Power Rankings: a totally objective evaluation of the five dynasties currently competing for the World Cup Title, scored on accomplishment, optics, and whether we'd want to share a cart with them.

The Bottom Line

The Legges hold the top spot — for now, with an asterisk visible from space. The DeMartinis hold the bottom — somehow, despite owning the entire enterprise. The middle is a swamp of cigars, lawsuits, ancestral sun debt, and one man who will absolutely tell you about his dating preferences if you give him a straight line.

We'll revisit after Sharp Park. By then, perhaps the Bissadas will have actually shown up.

A four-step format with captains, wildcards, and reverse-order picks. Whether it produces parity or merely produces complaints remains to be seen.

By The Clubhouse Desk · Filed April 2026

A Brief History

For two seasons, the Santa Cruz Invitational ran on a pick-your-own-team format. Friends picked friends. Loyalties held. The field, by and large, sorted itself into competitive groups — with one persistent exception. Commissioner Francis's team finished last in both years, and remains, at the time of writing, the only team in the modern era to have approached double-digit over par on the front nine alone.

That changed in 2025. The team of Ashkhaan Hakim, Conor Collins, Giuliano DeMartini, and Jack Multari posted a −10 in front of a stunned field — six clear of second place — and made it look like a casual practice round. There was no daylight. There was no drama. There was, by Sunday afternoon, only a long conversation in the Commissioner's office about whether the format had outlived its usefulness.

The Commissioner — who had once again finished outside the points-scoring places — concluded that fundamental changes were necessary. The 2026 Draft Format is the result.

The New Format, in Four Steps

Step 1 — Captains are elected. The number of captains equals the number of foursomes. With a 40-player field, that's ten captains. Captains are drawn from the top tier of the Tour by recent finishes — the honor of selection is, by definition, conferred upon the field's strongest players.

Step 2 — Each captain receives a Wildcard. This is the controversial part. Each captain is randomly assigned one player from the bottom tier of the field — referred to in committee documents as the "bad player," a designation made entirely at Commissioner Francis's discretion. The interpretation of "bad" is, the committee acknowledges, subject to ongoing scrutiny.

Step 3 — The middle of the field pairs up. Players who are neither captains nor wildcards select a partner. Once partnerships are submitted to the Tour Desk, the pair becomes a single draftable unit and cannot be split.

Step 4 — The Reverse-Order Draft. Captains then draft a pair to round out their foursome. The draft runs in reverse order of captain ranking — the worst-ranked captain picks first, the best-ranked captain picks last. The intent: offset the captain advantage by handing the lower-ranked captains first access to the strongest available pairs.

The Concept

Each foursome ends up with one captain (top tier), one wildcard (bottom tier), and one chosen pair (middle tier). In theory, the format produces structurally balanced teams. In practice, it produces structurally balanced complaints — most of them about the wildcard assignment process, which remains, as of this writing, the most subjective element of the Tour's competitive infrastructure.

Whether the new draft achieves its stated goal of parity, or whether it accomplishes something more discreet on the Commissioner's behalf, remains to be seen.

The First Test

The 2026 Santa Cruz Invitational tees off later this summer at Pajaro Valley Golf Club. Captains will be announced shortly. Wildcards will be assigned in a sealed-envelope ceremony at the Commissioner's discretion. Partner pairs are due to the Tour Desk by mid-summer.

The 2025 Santa Cruz Champions — Hakim, Collins, DeMartini, Multari — will not be teammates. They will not be on adjacent teams. Indeed, under the current rules of the format, they may not even share a single foursome in any combination of captain, pair, or wildcard. Whether that is a feature of the new format or a side effect is, as ever, left as an exercise for the reader.

A roster report on the friends we've lost, the breakout we didn't see coming, and the new faces stepping into the field this year.

By The Tour Desk · Filed April 2026

The Tour, like the country around it, is always in motion. Some players leave town for new zip codes. Some show up in the right pairing on the right day and rewrite their own scouting reports in real time. Some are still figuring out how to get through the front gate. With the 2026 season underway, the Tour Desk presents its annual personnel report — three categories, no judgment, several editorialized comments per entry.

The Departed

The friends we've lost to other zip codes — and, in at least one case, possibly to interesting personal circumstances.

Joey Riherd. Moved to Orange County last year to lead BlackRock's market down south, a promotion impressive enough that we cannot, in good conscience, mock it. The status of his golf game, however, remains a matter of considerable speculation. He left town with a long, reliable driver and a chipping wedge that was, at best, ornamental. Whether he can lead a team to victory in his new market is a question presumably keeping someone at BlackRock awake at night. It is, almost certainly, not Joey.

Jake Salamida. Joined Joey in the great Orange County migration, this time settling in Dana Point. Notably, Jake did not accept a new job in connection with the move — which raises the obvious question: what exactly was he moving for, and, perhaps more pressingly, from whom? The Tour Desk has its theories. The Tour Desk does not have proof. We wish Jake well in his new beachfront chapter, and we very much look forward to hearing the full story when relevant statutes permit.

Joe Hyde. Decamped to New York City, citing a long-stated and well-documented appreciation for Latinas. Geographers, demographers, and Joe's friends alike have gently pointed out that this preference might have been better served by relocating to a city actually aligned with the demographic he is interested in — Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, even Phoenix or San Antonio — rather than moving multiple thousand miles in the exact opposite direction. The Tour Desk wishes him luck. He will be missed at the bar. He will not be missed on the course.

The Discovered

The breakout — the man who showed up on a Friday and made it genuinely interesting.

Blaz Perko. Appeared on one day's notice last year, slotted in as the fourth on the down-and-out old-man team alongside Bret DeMartini and Dirk Amara, and proceeded to play the most consequential six holes of his Tour career to date. Legend, and more importantly the scorecards, have the team at −4 through 6, with Blaz authoring a brand of golf nobody on Tour had previously associated with him. They were genuinely poised to win.

Then Chris Collins arrived. Late. Whatever quiet momentum the trio had stitched together over the front nine evaporated by the turn — sayonara to Blaz's heroic appearance, hello to a top-half finish that nobody else on that team is willing to take public credit for. The Tour Desk maintains that Blaz was robbed.

The Debuted

New names, new arrivals, new opportunities for the Tour to take their money.

Ben Hoban. When he is not pouring beers for local boomers in Danville, Ben is on the range hitting genuine bombs. Tour observers will remember him as the only sober witness to Giuliano's now-storied collapse at Franklin Canyon — the round in which the Tour's golden boy famously posted an 11 on the opening par 5 and never quite recovered. Ben made his official Tour debut at the Montclair Classic; his technical performance left some to be desired, but his decision to bring McDonald's for the entire field was met with universal acclaim, and frankly, balanced the scorecard.

Jackson Zepf. Whether or not Jackson actually shows up to anything remains, at present, an open question. Sources close to Jackson confirm that he is unmistakably too good to be playing in this tour. Sources close to the Tour confirm that we'd love to have him anyway. The conclusion the Tour Desk has reached is that Jackson is, perhaps, a glutton for punishment — and the Tour, with its limited-club Minor and its 620-yard course of unspecified menace, is excellent at delivering exactly that.

Conner Walbrecht. The DeMartini Tour is fortunate, blessed, and frankly relieved that Conner is not in charge of handicapping for this event. The Tour Desk would like to draw the field's attention to the fact that Conner suspiciously won his own self-titled "Ox Cup" only a few weeks ago in Oxnard. A scouting note for anyone considering a side bet: if Conner casually mentions he is anything less than a 20, run — do not walk — for the hills. He is, by every available measurement, considerably better than that.

Johnny Clement. At long last, the Red Mustached Man arrives. Whispers in the locker room have suggested for years that the Tour was actively trying to keep Johnny off the roster. The reasons remain murky, the rumors unverifiable, but multiple — including some loosely involving Nancy Pelosi and a Super Bowl that Johnny himself has notable trouble remembering specific details about. None of this, we should clarify, has been substantiated. All of it is presented here purely for narrative completeness.

A scouting note of our own: be very careful of Johnny's golf game. He is just bad enough to not impress on the front nine, and just good enough to take your money by the 12th hole. Do not engage on the back nine unless you can afford to lose.

Everest Damaschino. A potential dark horse, though the available data is, to put it gently, contradictory. Everest claims, repeatedly and credibly, to not play golf. Witnesses, however, report that he was recently observed at a TopGolf — wearing a cast for a broken arm — striking golf balls one-handed with what one onlooker described as "alarming ease." Nobody knows exactly what to believe at this point. The Tour Desk recommends caution. Possibly a putting drill or two beforehand.

Arjun "AJ" Mehta. A regular at The Round-up, a beloved local establishment with one of the most loyal clienteles in the East Bay. Anyone who frequents The Round-up is, we have come to understand, either remarkably committed to the place or quietly carrying around the weight of some very interesting stories. AJ, by all accounts, is one of the most cheerful and charismatic patrons in the building, and we are very much looking forward to finding out which category he falls into when the bag taps come out at Pajaro Valley.

The Bottom Line

The Tour loses three to other zip codes, gains one beautifully unexpected breakout from last summer, and welcomes six new names to a field that has now grown large enough that Francis's draft format is, by any honest reading, structurally necessary.

Some of these men we have known for years. Some of them we have just met. Some of them will, by year's end, be quietly rewriting our understanding of the Tour competitive hierarchy.

We'll know in July. Welcome, gentlemen — and to the departed: please come back. The bar misses you.