Art Spander: Five Decades on the Golf Beat
Every golf town needs its chronicler. San Francisco's is Art Spander (b. 1938), who has been writing the Bay Area's golf — and everything else in its sports pages — since 1965, long enough to have covered most of the history on this site as it happened.
Chronicle to Examiner
A UCLA graduate (class of 1960), Spander started at UPI in Los Angeles, moved to the Santa Monica Outlook, and joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1965, covering golf, football, baseball and basketball. In 1979 he became lead sports columnist of the San Francisco Examiner (Wikipedia) — a title he has carried across five decades of Bay Area sport.
The golf record
The golf résumé stands alone: Spander is the only person to win the Golf Writers Association of America's first-place writing award in each of five different decades (Wikipedia). He has covered 41 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Ams reaching back to the Crosby era, along with U.S. Opens and PGA Championships on the courses in this guide (artspander.com). The game's institutions have returned the regard: the Masters Major Achievement Award in 2007 and the PGA of America's Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism in 2009 (The Golf Wire).
Venturi explained the game on CBS, Miller on NBC, Rosburg from the fairways for ABC — and Spander wrote it down. He is the print corner of San Francisco's claim to be the voice of American golf, and his columns are a first draft of the city's golf history.
