By:
Corey Roberson, Director of Golf
The 19th playing of the Cordillera Cup came down to the wire — specifically down to the last two groups.
Before we go there — let’s start from the beginning …
The Cordillera Cup is an annual Ryder Cup-style match between Team Hill and Team Northington. Team Hill is captained by David Hill and Team Northington is captained by Mac Northington. These gentlemen have been close friends since their college days at the University of Texas and, as you can imagine, they’ve played a lot of golf together over the years. After college and later in their careers, Mac and David partnered together to develop Cordillera Ranch. In 2007, the Cordillera Cup was born and built on a foundation of competition and camaraderie with a little trash talking mixed-in for good measure.
Per tradition, we gather the players on Friday evening to unveil matches, enjoy a nice meal, and have a few cocktails. Every year, we try to come up with some type of entertainment for the guys but this year we pivoted a little. I asked the Captains to go through their history together, which meant David did all the talking and Mac chimed in at the end. For some of our newer members, it was really cool to hear a brief overview of over 50 years of friendship, competition and good times.
The matches officially started on Saturday where we introduced walk-up songs for each player. Players were encouraged to ‘recommend’ their own songs … we honored some recommendations while making a few calls of our own. As for the golf, each group played a fourball match on the front nine and a foursomes match on the back nine. When the dust settled on Saturday, the match was tied 15 to 15.
On Sunday, there was a lot of red on the leaderboard early but Team Hill made a charge halfway down the tee-sheet to keep things very close. There was a bunch of matches that flip/flopped coming down the stretch and it came down to the last two groups. The second to last group split — Team Hill won a point and Team Northington won a point, which put the focus squarely on the match between the Captains. After David hit an errant pitching wedge on the signature 16th hole, Mac walked off that green 2-up with 2 play, which secured the victory for Team Northington. This marks their 13th victory in the event to Team Hill’s 6.
The Team Northington flag will fly in the Champions Gallery for the next year!
Corey Roberson is the Director of Golf at The Clubs of Cordillera Ranch. He can be reached at croberson@cordilleraranch.com and 830.336.4653.
