Champagne Tony Lema

There is a golf course in San Leandro named for a man who learned the game a few miles up the hill, carrying bags for pocket change. There is another golf course outside Chicago with a plaque beside a pond near the seventh green, marking the spot where his story ended. Between those two pieces of ground lies the brightest, briefest comet the Bay Area ever sent through professional golf: Tony Lema — "Champagne Tony" — Open champion, Ryder Cup stalwart, and the East Bay's contribution to the era when San Francisco-area golf sat at the center of the sport's universe.

Ken Venturi came up through Harding Park, Bob Rosburg through the junior ranks at the private Olympic Club, and Harvie Ward adopted the city as his own. Lema was the fourth member of that remarkable generation, and his path started on the other side of the Bay — in the caddie yard at Oakland's Lake Chabot.

The Caddie from East Oakland

Anthony David Lema was born in Oakland on February 25, 1934, into a Portuguese-American family with little money and, soon, even less. His father died of pneumonia when Tony was three, leaving his mother to raise four children on welfare in deep East Oakland, close to the San Leandro line.

Golf found him the way it found so many working-class Bay Area kids of that era: through the caddie yard. As a boy, Lema started looping at Lake Chabot, the hilly municipal course above Oakland, and the muni became his classroom. His education there was a genuinely East Bay affair. Lucius Bateman — the African-American teaching professional who coached a generation of Oakland players out of a driving range, decades before the game integrated its front door — worked on Lema's swing. Ralph Hall, an Oakland policeman, taught him how to think his way around a course. Lake Chabot pros Dick Fry and Bill Burch drilled the fundamentals.

It's worth pausing on that. The most glamorous champion the region ever produced — the man who would one day pour champagne for the international press at St Andrews — was built on public golf, by a range pro, a cop, and two muni professionals.

Korea, a San Francisco Pro Shop, and Eddie Lowery

At 17, Lema enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Korea. Discharged in 1955, still just 21, he came home to the Bay Area and took a job as an assistant to the club professional at a San Francisco club — the standard apprenticeship of the day, folding sweaters and playing money games on Mondays.

What happened next connects Lema to nearly everyone else in San Francisco's golden golf generation: Eddie Lowery noticed him.

Lowery is one of the great connective figures in American golf. As a 10-year-old, he had caddied for Francis Ouimet in the 1913 U.S. Open — the most famous caddie in the sport's history. By the 1950s he was a multi-millionaire San Francisco auto dealer whose showroom floor doubled as a finishing school for champions: he employed and championed Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward, the two best amateurs in America. In Lema, he saw a professional worth staking. The deal was bracingly commercial — $200 a week in expense money, to be repaid, with tournament winnings split two-thirds to Lema and one-third to Lowery — but it bought a broke ex-Marine his shot at the tour.

Lema cashed the ticket. He won the Imperial Valley Open in 1957 to earn his PGA Tour card, then spent the better part of five years grinding — long on talent and charm, short on trophies.

The Night the Champagne Nickname Was Born

The breakthrough came in October 1962, at the Orange County Open Invitational in Costa Mesa. Locked in contention going into the final day, Lema joked to the assembled reporters that if he won, he'd serve them champagne. He won — in a playoff, on October 28, 1962, his first official PGA Tour title — and he kept the promise. The corks popped, the writers filed their stories, and "Champagne Tony" was born.

It was a perfect piece of accidental branding, because it was true to the man. Lema was tall, elegant, quick with a line, and generous with the press in an era when most pros treated writers as an occupational hazard. The nickname followed him for the rest of his life, and he made sure it never rang hollow: the champagne kept flowing after wins for the rest of his career.

The wins started flowing too. He pushed Jack Nicklaus to the final green at the 1963 Masters, finishing runner-up by a single stroke. Late that year he put his apprenticeship on paper, writing Golfers' Gold with Gwilym S. Brown — still one of the most candid accounts ever written of life on the early professional tour.

1964: Four Wins in Six Weeks, and the Open at St Andrews

Then came the greatest sustained stretch of golf any Bay Area professional has ever produced. In June 1964, Lema won three PGA Tour events — the Thunderbird Classic, the Buick Open, and the Cleveland Open. Weeks later, he flew to Scotland for his first Open Championship. He had never played a round of golf in Britain in his life.

Thirty-six hours, nine holes, and Tip Anderson

What followed is one of golf's enduring legends, and it happens to be documented fact. Lema arrived at St Andrews roughly 36 hours before the championship began and played just nine practice holes on the Old Course — a links whose blind bunkers and double greens were supposed to demand a decade of study. His masterstroke was hiring Tip Anderson, Arnold Palmer's regular British caddie, a St Andrews man who had grown up on the course. With Palmer skipping that year's Open, Anderson was free — and Lema, by his own account, essentially putted where Tip told him to.

Over three days, July 8–10, 1964, Lema went 73-68-68-70 for a nine-under total of 279. He led after two rounds, stretched the advantage to seven after three, and won by five strokes — over Jack Nicklaus, who had equaled the course record with a third-round 66 and still couldn't catch him. Roberto De Vicenzo finished a shot further back. The first-place check was £1,500 — about $4,200 — which tells you everything about why the champagne mattered more than the money.

A kid who learned golf carrying bags at Lake Chabot had won the oldest championship in the sport, at the home of golf, on his first try. Lema always gave much of the credit to Anderson. The Claret Jug went back to the East Bay anyway.

The Ryder Cup Record Nobody Talks About

Lema's brilliance in team golf has aged into trivia, and it shouldn't have. He played on the U.S. Ryder Cup teams of 1963 and 1965 and compiled an 8–1–2 record across 11 matches — one of the best winning percentages any player has ever carried through multiple Ryder Cups. By the mid-1960s he had established himself alongside Palmer, Nicklaus, and Player as one of the handful of players who could win any week: he would finish his career with 22 professional victories, including 12 official PGA Tour titles by the Tour's own count — a tally that includes his 1964 Open Championship.

He was 32, at the height of his powers, and seemingly just getting started. His last win came in May 1966 at the Oklahoma City Open.

July 24, 1966

Two months later, Lema finished the PGA Championship in Akron, Ohio, and boarded a chartered twin-engine Beechcraft with his wife Betty, bound for a one-day exhibition near Chicago. The plane, reportedly low on fuel, went down just short of its destination — and came to rest, in an irony no novelist would dare write, on a golf course: in a water hazard short of the seventh green of the Lansing Sportsman's Club in Lansing, Illinois. Lema, 32; Betty, 30, who was pregnant; pilot Doris Mullen; and co-pilot Dr. George Bard were all killed.

The golf world went into mourning for its most charismatic champion. The Bay Area brought him home. Tony Lema is buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Hayward, a few miles from the muni where he learned the game. The Lansing club has since placed a commemorative plaque near the crash site, so that the ground where his story ended would not forget him either.

The Toast That Still Stands

The East Bay never let go of Champagne Tony. In 1983, San Leandro named a public course in his honor — the Tony Lema Golf Course, today part of the Monarch Bay Golf Club complex on the shoreline, a few minutes from the neighborhood where he grew up. In 2017, Jack Nicklaus — the man Lema beat by five at St Andrews and lost to by one at Augusta — made him the Memorial Tournament's honoree. In 2018, the Northern California Golf Association inducted him into its Hall of Fame, his nephews Marc Matoza and Ryan Lema accepting on behalf of a man gone more than half a century.

His place in the Bay Area's golf story is secure, and it is bigger than the nickname. Consider the generation together: Ken Venturi won the 1964 U.S. Open. Harvie Ward won the 1955 and 1956 U.S. Amateurs. Bob Rosburg won the 1959 PGA Championship. And Tony Lema won the 1964 Open Championship. One metropolitan area — Harding Park and Lincoln Park on one side of the Bay, Lake Chabot on the other, the Olympic Club above them, and Eddie Lowery's checkbook stitching so much of it together — produced champions of three of golf's four professional majors, plus back-to-back national amateur titles, inside a single decade.

Lema was the one who made it look like the most fun. He came from nothing, won the oldest trophy in golf on 36 hours' preparation, and picked up the tab for the press while he did it. Sixty years on, the toast still stands: to Champagne Tony, Oakland's Open champion.