A STRONG field containinging four of the last seven Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Channel Islands Amateur Champions will contest the 42nd Stoneham Trophy on Saturday, as the county’s Order of Merit winds up towards next month’s finale.
Stoneham’s James Freeman, who claimed the county championship at his home club two years ago, is one of the favourites to land arguably the top 36-hole club open in Hampshire, before the action switches to Brokenhurst Manor, on Sunday, when the New Forest Club hosts the Mike Smith Memorial Trophy.
The player with the leading 72-hole score will win the Solent Salver, a trophy that has been won by Stoneham’s recently crowned double US Seniors Major winner Richard Bland, who hoisted the trophy back in 1995, after winning the Mike Smith.
In doing so, the two-time county champion, who began his career at Dibden, denied North Hants’ future Ryder Cup star Justin Rose, who had lifted the Stoneham Trophy on the Saturday.
Liphook’s Darren Walkley, last year’s winner of the Cullen Quaich after topping the Order of Merit standings for the third time since the competition was created back in 2014, admitted he was playing poorly last weekend after turning out for Hampshire as they retained their South Division title by drawing with Surrey, to book their place in October’s South East League Final.
After his success in 2014 and 2015 when he defended his Quaich crown – winning the county championship at Brokenhurst Manor before turning pro the following summer – Walkley did not win either event that makes up the Solent Salver during that two year stranglehold on the Order of Merit.
But he showed his class last summer shooting a supberb 65 in the second round to claim the Mike Smith, showing why he had played on both the European Challenge Tour, the EuroPro Tour and against some of Europe’s best emerging talent on the German Pro Tour.
Walkley’s team-mate Joe Buenfeld has been a member at Stoneham since his junior days, while keeping his handicap at Bramshaw, where he made his name as a promising junior.
Last year’s Stoneham Trophy winner Joe Buenfeld (left) and Solent Salver winner Alex Talbot (right). Picture by ANDREW GRIFFIN / AMG PICTURES
The Texas-based US college golfer has switched that arrangement this year and will defend the Stoneham Trophy he claimed by holding off 2016 Hampshire Junior Champion Alex Talbot, who has not found life in the States as fulfilling as Buenfeld, who also spent time at Hartpury College, on their golf programme, alongside his best friend Freeman.
Those two contested the final of the 2022 Hampshire, Isle of Wight and Channel Islands Amateur Championship and Blackmoor’s Sam Parsons – the current holder of the Sloane-Stanley Challlenge Cup – will be keen to pick up another big win on the Order of Merit, having won the Blackmoor Bowl last summer.
Parsons is back in the county first-team having played alongside Stoneham’s Mat and Eliott Thomas in the Challenge League last year.
But Hampshire’s two veteran first-team stalwarts – Brokenhurst Manor’s Martin Young and Stoneham’s Ryan Henley – are both missing from the field, for the first time in many years.
Young and Henley have both won the Stoneham Trophy five teams each – three more apiece than the other most successful entrants.
The latter includes two-time winners, Scott Gregory, the 2016 Amateur Champion, England Amateur and Hampshire county champion Kevin Weeks, and Richardson, who played in the 1991 Ryder Cup after claiming the English Amateur Championship crown two years earlier.
Indeed in 1989, Richardson played some nine rounds in seven days at Royal St George’s including the 36-hole against Guernsey’s Bobb Eggo, before arriving at Stoneham less than a week later to win that event for a second time in three years, while Weeks won back to back in 1984 and 1985.
Buenfeld will draw hope from the fact that six players have defended the Stoneham Trophy since it was first played for back in 1982. Four Walker Cup players have claimed the title – Rose, Sam Hutsby (Lee-on-the-Solent) and Neil Raymond and Gregory, from Corhampton.
Hampshire captain Toby Burden, who won the Order of Merit in 2021 and 2022, won at Stoneham in 2009, when he had already lost in the county final for a second time, and is teeing it up this weekend.
Brokenhurst Manor’s Martin Young won the Mike Smith for a sixth time in 2015. Picture by ANDREW GRIFIFN / AMG PICTURES
On Sunday, Young goes in search of his seventh Mike Smith Memorial win – his first was back in 2000, the year he won the Hampshire Salver.
Henley, whose two wins in the Mike Smith came four years apart in 2003 and 2007, also makes the journey down the M27 from his Southampton home, having been a member of Hampshire team that beat Sussex 10-2 at Brokenhurst, in June.
The main threat will come again from his Hampshire team-mates, in the shape of Buenfeld, Burden, Walkley, Parsons, Saunders and Freeman, although North Hants’ James Atkins, who reached the last four of the county championship in June, will look to improve on his second place behind Stuart Arhibald.
The Test Valley man won the event which was reduced to just one round by heav rain in 2021, before going on to win the English Mid-Amateur crown in 2022 – 16 years after he lifted the Sloane-Stanley by beating Burden in the county final at Hayling.
Among the notables on the Mike Smith honours board, are Weeks, who won the second ever running of the tournament that took the place of the Brokenhurst Bowl, as the Manor’s 36-hole open, following the tragic death of the club’s former British Youths Champion, who was killed in a car crash in 1990.
Weeks won again two years later, followed by Bland, Rose and Matt Blackey, who went on to play on the European Tour alongside the two previous winners.
Brokenhurst’s Martin Le Mesurier was the second Brokenhurst member to claim the trophy with his win in 1999, when he became the first player to compete a clean sweep of winning all three trophies over the weekend.
The only other players to complete the hat-trick were Young in 2005 – he also became the first player to successfully defend the Mike Smith crown in that year, in what was his fourth win in the competition.
The other Brok winner was Jon Watt in 2009, when he also became third player from the New Forest club to win the Solent Salver.
Rowlands Castle’s Tom Robson was the third and last player to complete the treble in 2018, when the Solent Salver celebrated its 25th anniversary – although he was pipped to the Hampshire Order of Merit that year by county captain Colin Roope, from Blackmoor.
•To see the full Stoneham Trophy field click here. Mike Smith Memorial start sheet.