Art Spander: Five Decades on the Golf Beat

San Francisco's greatest golf export was never just its champions. It was its voices. Ken Venturi left Harding Park for a 35-year run in the CBS tower. Johnny Miller, who came up through the city's junior ranks at the Olympic Club, carried his blunt candor to NBC. Bob Rosburg took his to ABC's fairways. And alongside all of them — outlasting all of them — was a man who never swung for a living at all: Art Spander, the columnist who has narrated Bay Area golf in print for more than sixty years.

If the story of the history of golf in San Francisco is the story of a golf scene that produced a generation of players and then a generation of narrators, Spander is the narrator who stayed. The players went east to the majors and up to the broadcast booths. Spander stayed on the beat — Chronicle, then Examiner, then the internet — and kept writing.

From UCLA to the San Francisco Chronicle

Spander is not a San Francisco native; like more than one figure in Bay Area golf history, he adopted the place and was adopted back. Born in Los Angeles on August 30, 1938, he graduated from Dorsey High School and then UCLA, where he served as sports editor of the Daily Bruin. His first professional job was as a news writer for United Press International in Los Angeles in 1960, and by 1963 he was writing sports full time for the Santa Monica Outlook, covering the Rams and the Dodgers.

The Bay Area chapter — the one that would define his career — began in 1965, when he joined the San Francisco Chronicle. There he covered golf, football, baseball and basketball, arriving in a region whose courses — from Harding Park, where Ken Venturi learned the game, to the Olympic Club of Bob Rosburg and Harvie Ward, to the East Bay fairways that produced Tony Lema — had already turned out a generation of champions, and were about to turn out Johnny Miller. A sportswriter could hardly have picked a better place, or a better decade, to start covering golf.

Lead Columnist at the Examiner

In 1979, Spander became the lead sports columnist of the San Francisco Examiner. In the decades since, his column has been a fixture of Bay Area sports pages — at the Examiner, later at the Oakland Tribune, and eventually online. That longevity is the spine of his story. Beat writers come and go with news cycles; columnists tend to burn out or move to television. Spander simply kept filing.

The numbers he accumulated along the way read like typographical errors. By the time the PGA of America honored him in 2009, his own bio counted 43 consecutive Masters tournaments, 40 U.S. Open golf championships, 29 British Opens and 33 Super Bowls covered — plus 56 straight Rose Bowls attended, a streak that began when he was a spectator (and, early on, a vendor) rather than a journalist. The Masters streak kept running: by the mid-2010s it had reached 50 consecutive tournaments — half a century of April drives down Magnolia Lane, most of them filed back to readers in San Francisco.

Closer to home, no event has carried his byline more often than the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which he has covered for decades — from the Crosby Clambake era into the modern tour stop. For generations of Bay Area readers, the tournament's rain delays, celebrity pairings and Sunday finishes along Carmel Bay arrived in Spander's voice.

Chronicler of a Golden Age

Spander's beat happened to be the richest golf territory in America. The Bay Area he arrived in had already sent a remarkable generation out of its municipal and club ranks: Ken Venturi won the 1964 U.S. Open, Bob Rosburg the 1959 PGA Championship, Tony Lema the 1964 Open Championship, and Harvie Ward collected amateur golf's grandest titles — the 1952 British Amateur and back-to-back U.S. Amateurs in 1955 and 1956. (San Francisco-born George Archer would complete the professional set with the 1969 Masters.) The region's courses kept making news throughout Spander's tenure: the Olympic Club's U.S. Opens, the long civic fight over Harding Park and its eventual restoration under Sandy Tatum, and finally Harding's arrival on the game's biggest stages, culminating in the 2020 PGA Championship on a city-owned muni.

That is what separates Spander's career from a conventional press-box biography. He wasn't a national golf writer who occasionally parachuted into San Francisco; he was a San Francisco columnist whose local beat kept intersecting with golf history. When the sport's center of gravity ran through the Bay Area — and for a remarkable stretch of the twentieth century it did — the man writing the first draft was usually Spander.

He also belongs squarely in the other great San Francisco golf tradition: the export of voices. As we trace in San Francisco: The Voice of American Golf, the city's most durable contribution to the game may be narration itself — Venturi at CBS, Miller at NBC, Rosburg at ABC. Spander is the print wing of that same phenomenon, and he extended it beyond the page: he had a regular gig on ESPN Radio in the late 1990s and made appearances on the Gary Radnich Show on KNBR 680, the Bay Area's sports-radio institution.

Five Decades of First-Place Awards

The distinction that gives this profile its title: Golf Writers Association of America first-place awards in each of five separate decades — a run that, by his own bio's accounting, no other writer has matched. Plenty of writers have won GWAA honors; keeping on winning them across fifty years of changing editors, changing formats and a changing sport is the rarer feat.

The rest of the trophy case is just as unusual for its range:

  • 1980 — California Sports Writer of the Year

  • 1999 — the Dick McCann Award, the Pro Football Hall of Fame's honor for distinguished football writing

  • 2007 — the Masters Major Achievement Award from Augusta National

  • 2009 — the PGA of America's Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism

  • 2017 — induction into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame (his selection was announced in 2016; the induction ceremony came on January 1, 2017)

  • Membership in the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame

Read that list again: honors from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Augusta National, the PGA of America, the Rose Bowl and the basketball writers. Golf is the through-line, but Spander's career is a reminder of what the metro columnist's job used to be — everything, every season, every sport the city cared about.

The Books

Spander's longer-form work bookends his newspaper career. He wrote Golf: The Passion and The Challenge (1977), a collection titled The Art Spander Collection (1989), and Keeping On Course (1997). The titles are almost on the nose: passion, collection, keeping on course. Few writers have kept on course longer.

Still on the Beat

Here is the fact that turns this profile from history into current events: Spander is still writing. His site, artspander.com, carries columns dated as recently as July 2026 — dispatches from the British Open and Wimbledon, with U.S. Open coverage filed the month before — alongside his other lifelong beats of tennis and Bay Area teams. He lives in the East Bay, and the byline that first appeared over Bay Area golf coverage in 1965 is still appearing over it today.

Every other figure in this series is remembered. Spander is the one still doing the remembering — the last working link to the era when the Bay Area's fairways were producing major champions and its press boxes were producing the people who told you about them.

Art Spander at a Glance

  • Born: August 30, 1938, Los Angeles, California

  • Education: Dorsey High School; UCLA (Daily Bruin sports editor)

  • Bay Area arrival: San Francisco Chronicle, 1965

  • Columnist: Became the San Francisco Examiner's lead sports columnist in 1979

  • Masters covered: 50 consecutive as of the mid-2010s

  • Signature distinction: GWAA first-place awards in five separate decades

  • Major honors: Masters Major Achievement Award (2007); PGA Lifetime Achievement in Journalism (2009); McCann Award (1999); Rose Bowl Hall of Fame (2017)

Where Spander Fits in San Francisco Golf History

The arc of this series runs from the Presidio's first nine holes in 1895 through Harding Park's 2020 PGA Championship. Players carried San Francisco's golf reputation for the first half of that story; voices carried it for the second. Art Spander belongs to the voices — and among them, he is the marathoner. Venturi's CBS run lasted 35 years. Spander's Bay Area column writing, now in its seventh decade, has already outlasted it.

For the full story of the city that produced them all, start with our pillar history, The History of Golf in San Francisco.