Sports

One was 0-for-43 and the other was a rookie. Both won Alaska match play golf championships.

Alaska recently crowned its match-play golf champions, and it’s hard to match these fairy-tale endings:

An Anchorage teenager captured a championship in her state-tournament debut.

And an Anchorage man claimed his first state title after more than 40 years of trying.

Abigail Ante is the 15-year-old who claimed the women’s title a week ago at the Palmer Golf Course despite zero experience in a state tournament.

Mark McMahan is the 59-year-old who captured the senior men’s championship 43 years after he made his state amateur debut as a 16-year-old from Fairbanks.

McMahan ended a title quest that lasted nearly half a century by beating Gregg Frost in the championship match.

He joked that he came into the tournament with “the record for the longest attempt without winning.”

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“It puts something to rest,” he added. “It’s not something I’m still missing.”

McMahan is no hacker. He started playing with his dad as a kid in Fairbanks and kept playing when he moved to Anchorage to work at the American Tire Warehouse, the family business. He brought a 2 handicap into the four-day match play tournament, he won the state Publinx tournament in 1987, and he has come close to winning a state championship a couple of times in the 43 years he has been chasing one.

He had a particularly strong season in 2018, when he finished second in the senior men’s match play championship and seventh in the championship flight of the Alaska state amateur.

His resume also includes a couple of match-play victories over Anchorage’s Greg Sanders, one of the winningest golfers in Alaska history. Sanders added to his long list of state championships last week in Palmer by winning the men’s title and raising his number of state championships to 12 — five match play titles and seven state amateur victories.

McMahan’s championship — which he celebrated with takeout pizza — came in the senior division. He shot 76 in the qualifying round to tie for the third-best score among seniors, making him the top seed in his four-man playoff pod.

He won all three matches, beating Eric Jensen 5 and 4, Brad Wilson 7 and 6 and Rick Boyles 1-up, to advance to the semifinals, where he defeated top-seeded Bill Arnold 5 and 4.

McMahan dispatched Frost 4 and 3 in the finals. He took an early lead to put the pressure on his opponent, but as he came closer and closer to winning that elusive state title, McMahan dealt with pressure too.

“I was a little bit (nervous), but I kept telling myself to be patient, don’t get ahead of yourself — as long as I play steady, he has to come and get me,” he said.

McMahan said he likes match play golf because one disastrous hole doesn’t doom an entire round. If you have the bad fortune to open with a 10 while your opponent shoots a 3, you trail by one hole, not seven strokes.

“If you have a bad hole, it’s eliminated,” McMahan said. On the other hand, if you get down a couple of holes, “you start thinking about it,” he said. “You start to press.”

Ante is new to the pressures of tournament golf. Though she has played in a couple of small events with her dad, she had never before entered a state tournament.

She was the surprise of the championships. She shot an 89 in qualifying to earn the No. 4 seed going into the top bracket for round-robin play, where she defeated top-seeded Teresa Fisher 3 and 2, lost to second-seeded Tonnette Jackson 2-up and beat third-seeded Toyoko Hawkins 4-and-3.

Ante’s win over Hawkins gave her a 2-1 record and clinched the championship. Fisher and Jackson both finished with 1-1-1 records and Hawkins finished 1-2.

Ante, who will be a sophomore at South High, started playing eight years ago when her dad signed her up for a lesson.

“I was not good, but I guess the people I was taking the lesson from kept me with it,” she said.

She has a fuzzy purple unicorn for a club head cover and a pink stripe running through her hair, but Ante is all business on the golf course.

A couple of days after winning her state title, she played a round at Anchorage Golf Course with three men. On the par-4 first hole, Ante outdrove two of them with a tee shot that went right up the middle of the fairway. Her second shot put her on the green, about 15 feet from the cup. She missed a birdie putt by one or two inches and tapped in for par.

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“The driving is just fun for me,” Ante said. “The putting is super nerve-wracking."

She’s a lefty, which makes her a big Bubba Watson fan but makes life as a young golfer a bit challenging.

“It’s hard to find clubs that fit me,” she said, “and most of my teachers are right-handed.”

Ante makes daily visits to the driving range, practices chip shots by hitting balls into a bucket and tries to play 18 holes every day. She’ll test herself again in a few days at the July 11-12 women’s state amateur at Anchorage Golf Course.

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Beth Bragg

Beth Bragg wrote about sports and other topics for the ADN for more than 35 years, much of it as sports editor. She retired in October 2021. She's contributing coverage of Alaskans involved in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

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