Blakley wraps up summer with Junior Boys Amateur win

For Brad Blakley, it was the perfect way to drop the curtain on a long, hot summer.

“It’s pretty cool,” the 17-year-old senior-to-be at Gonzaga Prep said Friday afternoon, shortly after beating Issaquah’s John Wise 3 and 2 in the 36-hole finals of the Pacific Northwest Golf Association’s Junior Boys Amateur Championship at Spokane Country Club.

“To win the last tournament of the summer on your home course, it just doesn’t get much better than that.”

And it helped, too, that Blakley, the son of Spokane Country Club head professional Les Blakley, authored the most important victory of his young career in front of a small gallery comprised mainly of club members who came out to support his efforts.

After the match, which ended when Blakley drained a 15-foot putt for birdie on the par-5 16th hole, most of those who had watched walked up to offer their congratulations.

But despite playing on his home course in front of a friendly crowd, the win did not come easily – mainly because of the feisty nature of Wise, who refused to roll over, despite finding himself 4 down following the morning round.

The 17-year-old Wise, who will be a senior at Skyline High School in Snohomish, took advantage of a short lunch break to readjust his mindset and then went out and birdied four of the first six holes in the afternoon to put some drama back in the match.

Wise squared things with a par on the 187-yard, par-3 9th , where Blakley made bogey after burying his tee shot in the bunker just right of the green. But he gave back the tee box two holes later on the par-3 11th when he failed to get up and down from a bunker just left of the green.

And Blakley never let him back in the match, halving the next three holes before making birdie on the par-4 15th to go 2 up.

The match ended on the next hole, but not before Wise – after fanning his drive right into the trees and having to take a drop from behind a rock – hit a huge cut with a 3-iron and ended up on the front fringe of the green in three.

Blakley, who had banged a fairway wood to the corner of the dogleg off the tee, left his second shot in a tough position short of the green and was faced with a difficult third that had to carry a bunker to a short-sided pin. His testy chip ran well past the hole, but after Wise’s putt for birdie from the fringe missed, Blakley calmly rolled in his birdie putt to end the match.

“Before John’s (3-iron) shot from the trees, I was feeling pretty good,” Blakley admitted. “Then I see that shot and I think, ‘Man, now I’ve got to make a putt.’

“I was little shaky over that last 15-footer, but it fell, so … “

Wise, who seemed to play himself out of the match during the morning round, made the most of his lunch break.

“I just played awful in the morning,” he said. “But I regrouped and went out in the afternoon thinking, ‘Four down, nothing to lose – I might as well just start firing right at the pins,’ and I got a little momentum going and squared it up after nine.”

Blakley kept the pressure on by hitting a gap wedge from 125 yards out to within 18 inches of the hole to match Wise’s birdie on the 554-yard, par-5 12th, and then went to the gap wedge again on 15, where he hit a sensational knock-down shot that checked up 4 inches from the cup.

“Earlier this morning, I was in that exact same spot and hit it 10 feet long,” Blakley explained, “so I knew I needed to choke down a little bit this time.

“The last three days, I’ve been hitting that gap wedge inside of 4 or 5 feet all the time.”

Wise called Blakley’s wedge play “phenomenal.”

“He played solid all day,” Wise said. “He’s just a great player. I gave him all I had, but he pulled through in the clutch by hitting a couple of great wedge shots there toward the end.”