South Greensburg Mayor Kevin Fajt, one of the area’s top amateur golfers, insists on the value of his relationships with others more than just about anything else.
Even a round on the links.
While Fajt managed to capture his seventh title Sunday at the Westmoreland County Golf Association Amateur Championship and fourth in the past five years, he needed to battle his emotions down the stretch at Greensburg Country Club before finishing 1-under-par 139 during the two-day event.
Good friend Ronald DeNunzio, who was playing in the final group with Fajt and Nixon Erdely, was struck on the head while waiting on No. 12 by an errant golf ball from a group unaffiliated with the tournament that was playing on the adjacent No. 9.
DeNunzio was forced to withdraw from the tournament and go to a hospital, leaving Fajt and Erdely stunned.
“He was holding a yellow towel on top of his head, and it was red,” Fajt said. “There was blood down the side of his face. We tried to call 911, but none of us could remember what the name of the road was. It’s North Greengate Road. I don’t know how we couldn’t remember.”
Perhaps it was the sizable gash on DeNunzio’s head that left the golfers tongue-tied.
“He kept saying, ‘I feel fine,’ ” Fajt said. “I’m like, ‘Sit down. You’re losing a lot of blood. Just relax.’ ”
Fajt followed a 3-under 67 on Saturday with a 2-over 72 on Sunday to win by five strokes over Nicholas Turowski, who shot even-par 70 on Sunday after a 4-over 74 on Saturday, giving him a total of 144.
DeNunzio’s twin brother David, who was part of a group several holes ahead of Ronald, said he received a text from his injured sibling, notifying him of what had transpired just moments earlier.
David DeNunzio, who shot 70 on Sunday to finished third overall at 146, said he texted back to brother: “What should I do? Stop playing? What do you need me to do?”
Eventually, Ronald DeNunzio was taken to AHN Hempfield Neighborhood Hospital, where he underwent a CT scan, which was negative, and received three staples to close the wound before being released.
“If I wasn’t bleeding like that, I would’ve wanted to finish playing,” Ronald DeNunzio said. “But I was bleeding profusely.”
He said he didn’t realize what had hit him, when he was sitting near some trees dividing Nos. 9 and 12.
“As soon as I got hit, I thought it was an acorn or a tree branch,” he said. “I didn’t even know where the ball ended up.”
Erdely finished another stroke in back of David DeNunzio to end with a 7-over 147. Danny Remaley, Jack Sacriponte and Ryan Sikora all finished at 9-over 149.
Turowski, a Penn-Trafford product and rising sophomore at West Virginia, is coming off a victory in the R. Jay Sigel Amateur Match Play Championship at Rolling Green Golf Club in suburban Philadelphia.
He used the Westmoreland tournament as a tune-up for a trip next week to the play at the U.S. Amateur at The Olympic Club in San Francisco.
“The practice, getting in the gym and working out, eating right and the daily process of things you have to do, that’s the hard part,” said Turowski, whose match play victory earned him a spot in next year’s prestigious Sunnehanna Amateur in Johnstown. “Coming out here and playing in tournaments and trying to qualify for tournaments, that’s the fun part.”
Defending Westmoreland Amateur champion Palmer Jackson wasn’t entered this year.
Fajt said that when he was younger, he always wondered what playing golf at the professional level would take. But he found out soon enough.
“Those guys are at another level,” he said. “The distance, the chipping, the putting. You really have to be good at all of it. There’s only so many guys who can do it like that.”
With all the victories he’s piled up, locally, over the years, Fajt does it pretty well, too.
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