By Tim Rogers
NOPGA Media
May 29, 2025
AKRON: Wait. What?
This can’t be the Ohio Senior Open.
First, it’s not raining, and the sun actually shone over Firestone Country Club’s Fazio Course for more than 60 seconds and the wind wasn’t blowing hard enough to make the giant water tower across Warner Road sway like a backporch swing.
Conditions such as those limited the tournament to just 18 holes in 2024 and were prevalent during the first round in 2025.
Players were in shirt sleeves – and some players wore shorts — instead of layers of wind shirts or rain suits. Umbrellas were nowhere in sight. Towels were not hanging off golf carts in hopes they would dry in the air.
We even saw players applying sunscreen instead of pulling on knit caps. Coffee and hot tea might have been the most popular items in the player’s dining room on Wednesday but were replaced with a chopped salad or hamburger and a power drink when the 40th Ohio Senior Open concluded on Thursday.
If Wednesday was perdition then Thursday was paradise.
Then we realized Bob Sowards was in contention and, indeed, this was the Ohio Senior Open and the 57-year-old professional from Dublin was the one constant, the one true stable – or is it staple? — that has punctuated so many Senior Opens of the past.
Sowards and Fairlawn amateur and first-round leader Howard Clendenin staged a two-man battle for most of the final round before the machine-like and seemingly flawless Sowards pulled away over the final six holes to win his record-setting sixth Senior Open title in the last seven years.
Sowards put together back-to-back rounds of bogey-free 4-under 66 and finished at 8-under 132 to edge Clendenin by two strokes in a tournament that took on a match-play feeling as other contenders fell out of the picture.
It marked the second time that Clendenin, a Firestone member, finished second to Sowards in this event. Clendenin closed with a 69 to finish at six-under 134. He was second in 2020.
Sam Arnold, General Manager of The Vineyard Golf Course in Cincinnati, matched Sowards’ 66 with seven birdies to finish in a tie for third with Belmont Country Club assistant professional Mike Stone, both four shots back at 136.
Sowards’ 132 matched his lowest 36-hole total in the Senior Open, which he shot in winning in 2019 with rounds of 69-63.
Clendenin and the rest of the field can take solace in knowing that Sowards considered his performance one of his best – if not the best — of all time in his illustrious career.
“I think this was the two best ball-striking days I have ever put together in any event,” said Sowards, who has played in many high-powered national events, including this year’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow and the Senior PGA Championship at Congressional. “It’s kind of cool watching the ball go where you are aiming every time. I don’t think I have ever put back-to-back bogey-free rounds together in my life. I mean I didn’t come close to a bogey today and there were only a few holes on Wednesday.”
Sowards began the day one shot behind Clendenin and the two were tied at 6-under until Sowards took the lead for good with a birdie on the 478-yard 13th hole to go to 7-under and Clendenin’s birdie attempt lipped out from about 10 feet.
His lead increased to three on the 452-yard 15th when Clendenin’s second shot from the left-hand rough trickled into the green-side bunker, producing stance with the ball in the sand and Clendenin standing outside with his feet above the ball. That led to another bogey and Sowards piled on with a birdie to go to 8-under.
“Howard hung in there and he never gave up,” Sowards said. “But that two-shot swing on 15 was really important.”
Stow amateur Mark Borlin came from four shots behind first-round leaders Allen Freeman, Tim Krapfel, and Marc Fried, to win the Senior Plus Division with a two-day total of 75-67=142. Borlin’s 3-under 67 on Thursday was the lowest round shot anyone in the 60-and-over age bracket over the 36 holes and more than made up for his opening round.
Cleveland amateur David Games shot 73-70=143 to finish second and Tim Krapfel, a teaching professional from Galloway, was third at 71=73=144.
Borlin had three birdies and no bogeys over his final nine holes and after making bogey on the first hole went 17 straight holes without making another.
Sowards is one of seven players ever to win both the Ohio Senior Open and the Ohio Open, which he won in 2002, 2004 and 2010. No one has ever won both in the same season.
“I am looking forward to coming back for the Ohio Open,” he said. “I play well here on the Fazio Course. It fits my game and I like the sight lines. I have played a number of times on the South but have never played the North.”
That will change when Sowards takes on the North during the Ohio Open Pro-Am on June 29, an event he volunteered to play in for the sole purpose of getting a look on the unheralded North.
And, that’s probably not what other hopefuls want to hear.