Champion Pat O'Donnell (OGA photo)

The two players began the match by each making birdie on the first hole. They then matched each other all through the front nine, with O’Donnell winning the seventh hole and Zupan responding quickly by winning the eighth. They entered the picturesque back nine all square, before O’Donnell began to hit his stride. O’Donnell won the tenth hole with a birdie and then claimed the twelfth with a par to take a two-up lead. Zupan was not able to reverse the momentum, and after bogeying the 14th hole to fall three-down, O’Donnell finished off the match with a birdie on the par-three 15th to win 4 and 3.

The match didn’t extend far enough to play Salishan’s three finishing holes, but O’Donnell applauded Zupan’s fight. “Tom’s got a good game, a good short game,” he said. “I’ve been playing the backside pretty good [all week] so I thought, well, hopefully that’ll carry through, and that’s what happened.”

The win earned O’Donnell the honor of being only the third player in Oregon Senior Amateur history to win three in a row, and his five total titles is the most by any male player. So how does that feel? “They always feel good,” O’Donnell chimed. “It’s a hard battle all the time, you gotta just keep playing, everybody is kind of gunning for [me] now.”

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