Six standouts to join Dayton Amateur Golf Hall of Fame

Six new members will be welcomed into the Dayton Amateur Golf Hall of Fame on Sept. 25.

John Fisher Jr., Brian Fogt, Bob Jones, Randy Leen, Daryl Nels and Robert Wylie will be inducted in ceremonies at the Kittyhawk Golf Center Pavilion at 5 p.m., following a golf scramble, a reception and dinner.

Their names eventually will be displayed with those of 53 previous inductees on a wall in a courtyard at Kittyhawk.

Fisher was one of Dayton’s best amateur players for many years. He won the City Championship in 1970 and won 11 club titles — two at Dayton Country Club and nine at Moraine Country Club.

He played in the North-South Amateur Championship 13 times, qualifying for match play nine times. He qualified for 13 Ohio Amateurs from 1970-1982 and made the cut in 10.

Fogt, a native of Vandalia and a graduate of Miami University, was an outstanding teenage golfer who won the Ohio Junior World at NCR Country Club.

He won the Ohio Amateur Championship at Miami Valley Golf Club in 1981 and qualified for the U.S. Open four times. After turning professional in 1983, he finished eighth in the 1987 Western Open in Chicago.

Jones, an attorney from Centerville, has been an outstanding player for 25 years. He has been equally effective in medal and stroke play.

He won the City Men’s Amateur Medal Play Championship in 1991, 1993, 1994 and 2001 and was the Dayton match play champion in 1994 and 1995.

He won Metropolitan Championship in 2005 and qualified for the U.S. Mid-Amateur in 1993, 1994, 2005 and 2009. Then he won three Senior Metro titles.

No player in Dayton ever had a better amateur career than Leen, who led Alter High School to a state championship in 1992 and was a three-time Big Ten Player of the Year at Indiana University.

He advanced to the Final 16 in the 1996 U.S. Amateur and reached the semifinals in 1997 before losing to eventual champion Matt Kuchar. He was low amateur in the 1996 U.S. Open Championship, finishing ahead of Tiger Woods. In August 1997 he played on the victorious U.S. Walker Cup team.

Nels has played in the women’s amateur match play championship for 34 consecutive years, winning her first title at the age of 47 and winning again in 2003, 2005 and 2006. She qualified for the U.S. Senior Women’s Amateur three times and won a match in 2009. She won the Ohio State Senior Women’s Golf Association Invitational in 2003 and the Women’s Ohio State Golf Association Senior Championship in 2009.

Wylie has been an active inner-city junior golf advocate for more than two decades.

While serving as president of the Fairway Golf Club, he and Charles “Ben” Jones collaborated to start a junior golf group in Dayton. Wylie was one of the five founding members of the Greater Dayton Youth Golf Academy in 1989.

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