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By Chris Lang
AMHERST — Andrew Kennedy and Nick Taliaferro, who are teammates at Radford University and grew up together playing Richmond Golf Association events, are good friends and consummate competitors, even when they’re on the same side.
They opened Sunday’s second and final round of the 55th Virginia State Golf Association Four-Ball Championship at Poplar Grove Golf Club tied for ninth, four shots off the lead, so they figured they’d turn the second round into a birdie contest between the two of them.
“We started off, Tally makes nine pars on the front, I make five birdies, and I look at him at the turn, and I’m like, ‘Are you going to start contributing?’” Kennedy said, jokingly. “Do I need to do this all by myself?
“Next thing you know, he goes and makes five birdies on the next six holes.”
The result of the intra-squad contest? Each player made six birdies, leading to a second-round 60 that helped Kennedy and Taliaferro surge up the leaderboard and capture the championship by three strokes. They shot a two-day aggregate 126, tying a tournament record, and they shot the lowest closing-round score in the 55-year history of the event.
The victory was the first in a VSGA championship for either player, and it takes a little bit of the personal swing away for Kennedy, who reached the championship match of the 2018 VSGA Amateur before falling.
“I’ve always said I wanted to get my name on all of the trophies,” Kennedy said. “That’s one cool thing about the tradition that the VSGA has. (Your name engraved on a trophy) is something that you look at every time you go to the event. And trust, being so close at the State Am, seeing that trophy the past few years, it hurt a little bit.
“I do enjoy getting this one. My partner, he couldn’t have played any better, and I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. All in all, we just clicked and played well.”
Taliaferro (Salisbury CC) and Kennedy (Richmond CC) played against each other plenty of times in RGA events as juniors and crossed paths in high school events when Taliaferro was at James River High School in Midlothian and Kennedy was at Mills Godwin. Kennedy arrived at Radford at year before Taliaferro did, and the two forged kind of a “big brother, little brother” relationship. They’ve also paired together a ton during intra-squad competitions, and that familiarity helped this weekend.
“This might have been my first four-ball tournament,” Taliaferro said. “It’s not like you’re trying to hit any bad shots out there, but there were a couple of times, like on 16, where I picked my ball up, because I’m out of the hole probably going to make bogey, and he’s got a five-foot putt for birdie. … It just so happened that we didn’t mess up on the same hole.”
Indeed, after a first round in which they left some shots out there, Taliaferro said, the side posted a bogey-free round on Sunday to race past the competition.
They weren’t the only ones to surge up the leaderboard. Connor Burgess (Boonsboro CC) and Isaac Simmons (Poplar Grove GC) followed their first-round 67 with a Sunday 62 to finish in a three-way tie for second. Joining them were Scott Shingler (Dominion Valley CC) and Justin Young (Ballyhack GC), who posted an identical 67-62—129, and the first-round leaders, Steve Serrao and Joey Jordan.
The Willow Oaks members couldn’t find the same magic on Sunday that they did in Saturday’s bogey-free round. They bogeyed No. 4 and were over par for the day until making a birdie on 6.
“The start stalled us a little bit,” Jordan said. “One over through five, that’s not what we were looking to do, obviously. That put us in a little bit of a hole. We checked the scores on 6, and we said, ‘everyone is going low, we need to make it happen.’”
They made birdie on No. 6, starting a run of six birdies in nine holes to keep the pressure on Taliaferro and Kennedy, who had started 40 minutes earlier. But Serrao and Jordan finished with four straight pars and couldn’t make up any more ground.
“It was kind of disheartening,” Serrao said. “Because we battled back and we thought we were close, and I kept asking, ‘Are they done yet? Have they run out of holes yet?’”
Three sides rounded out the top five by finishing at 14-under 130 for the two days: Harold Dill and Kyle Bailey; Jordan Utley and Dustin Groves; and Adam Houck and Blake Carter.
Lang is the VSGA’s manager of media and communications.