Oakmont Launched Four-time Champion Marucci

Oakmont Launched Four-time Champion Marucci

By Pete Kowalski

George “Buddy” Marucci knows a bit about championship golf.

The 74-year-old from Villanova played in the State Amateur, the flagship amateur championship for the Pennsylvania Golf Association, numerous times from 1971 through 2021, counting four victories.

The event usually held sway when he was setting his competitive schedule but a conversation after his third victory in 1987 with the late and legendary Jay Sigel spurred him to higher pursuits. Sigel, also from the Philadelphia area, won the State Amateur a record 11 times and added five USGA titles during his amateur career. He and Marucci, who lived close to each other, traveled to amateur events together on a regular basis.

“When I won again in ’87 at Oakmont, Jay said if you want to go further you are going to have to play in these other tournaments,” Marucci said. “I was playing in them, but I put the State Amateur ahead of the Porter Cup and the others.

“Jay said if you are going to go further you are going to have to prioritize those other ones and if you have to miss the State Amateur, you have to miss it,” Marucci added. “So I did for a number of years.”

He entered the State Amateur at Gulph Mills Golf Club in 1991, where he had membership, and won by a comfortable margin of eight strokes over none other than Sigel for his fourth and last win. In that time the final 36 holes were played on the tournament’s last day and he shot 66-67, saying “It was one of those days, I’m not sure I’ve had one since.”

The tournament’s format in those days was 72 holes of stroke play over three days, which was changed to 54 holes of stroke play over three days in 2001.

“In the early 90s, I dedicated myself to the other events and as I turned out, it worked out OK,” Marucci said. “It wasn’t that I felt lesser about it, I just had to do other things to get to the next step.”

A nationwide schedule of events such as the Porter Cup, the Sunnehanna Amateur, the Northeast Amateur, the Southern Amateur, the Western Amateur, the Pacific Coast Amateur and the Trans-Mississippi Amateur became his regular summertime itinerary, thanks to a successful car dealership and an extremely accommodating business partner.

This competitive grind built to a crescendo when Marucci, at age 43, advanced to the final match of the 1995 U.S. Amateur at Newport (R.I.) Country Club against Tiger Woods. He lost 2-down but earned a spot in the 1996 Masters.

Marucci, who was a three-time PIAA champion at Haverford High School and then played collegiately at Maryland, earned a spot on the 1995 and 1997 USA Walker Cup Teams and then served as the captain of the winning Walker Cup teams in 2007 and 2009 (at his home club Merion).

The crowning cap on his amateur career was a victory, at age 56, at the 2008 U.S. Senior Amateur at Shady Oaks C.C. in Fort Worth, Texas, the home club of one Ben Hogan.

As the 113th Pennsylvania Amateur approaches July 27-29 at historic Oakmont C.C. with defending champion Rocco Salvitti as a member, Marucci remembers his victory there in 1987, when he beat Curt Cutler by a stroke.

“At Oakmont, I had a four-shot lead with four holes to go and I three-putted 15, 16 and 17. I’ll never forget it,” Marucci  “Cutler was standing on the edge of the 18th green and I hit it right where J.J. (Spaun) hit it (in the final round of the 2025 U.S. Open), front left corner of the green, and the hole was in almost the same spot. Fortunately, I got it up to about two feet and made it and won. It was the 36th hole of the day and it’s 7:30 at night and you’ve been out there since 6 in the morning.”

Begun in 1909, the Pennsylvania Amateur is being contested at Oakmont for the 15th time. In the last championship in 2014, John Sawin, currently the Vice President of Golf at Pebble Beach, won by three strokes. Sawin, also from Philadelphia, holds Marucci in high regard.

“Growing up in Philadelphia, elite amateur golf was more tangible than pro golf, and Buddy was the best player I had met and spent time around,” Sawin said. “I was a very impressionable, 10- year-old budding golfer when he made the U.S. Amateur finals in 1995, and I remember just being in awe when he’d practice at the same range I did. I feel very fortunate now 30 years later that we have a personal relationship, and he’s been so supportive of my own journey in golf.” 

A Philadelphia guy through and through, he is Merion Golf Club’s Championship Chair. The Club will host the U.S. Amateur in August and the U.S. Open in 2030. He won his first State Amateur in 1982 at Sunnybrook G.C. by nine strokes over Billy Musto. Rocco Mediate’s costly double bogey on the final hole of the 1983 championship at Pittsburgh Field Club gave Marucci a one-stroke edge and back-to-back titles.

Ironically, the only other player in State Amateur history with four wins is W.C. Fownes, Jr., the son of the founder of Oakmont, who won four of the first eight championships between 1909 and 1916.

“I am proud of the fact that I am second (for wins) tied with Fownes, proud of the fact that I won it four times,” Marucci said. “It really does mean a lot to me.”

Always a Pennsylvania proponent, Marucci stacks up his four State Amateur titles (and a runner-up in 1979) with all his enviable success in golf.

“They are right up there because that was the launching for me to think that I could continue to commit to play at a different level,” he said. “The Pennsylvania Amateur is right there. I put them all together. They are all part of the story. I have always been in Pennsylvania. I love Pennsylvania. I’m never leaving Villanova.”

DICK’S Sporting Goods is the title sponsor of the Pennsylvania Golf Association’s Championships.

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Pete Kowalski worked more than two decades as a department director in communications at the USGA and confides that his friendships in the game are more numerous than his greens-in-regulation.