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DALLAS — The prestigious Potentate Tournament will feature an age-old rivalry in a semifinal showdown.
It’s another round of Dallas against Lake-Lehman.
How fitting, that the Back Mountain’s biggest amateur golf tournament would bring together one of the area’s best high school battles when Dallas grad Scott Francis and his partner Lou Belgio face Lake-Lehman grad Robbie Michaels and his teammate Mike Lazevnick in a 7:50 a.m. championship flight showdown of the tournament’s Final Four today at Irem County Club.
“We’ve got a little Dallas-Lehman thing going on,” grinned Michaels, a former football running back at Lehman and a stalwart in the middle of the Black Knights’ baseball batting order before going on to play for Wilkes. “We’ve been playing against each other since we were kids.”
The teams of Jim Blinn and Brian Corbett and Brett Slocum and Jim Hoover will meet in the other semifinal at 8 a.m., with the finals to follow at 1:10 p.m.
It’ll be the third straight Potentate semifinals for Francis and Belgio, who won the tournament two years ago and lost on the final hole of the finals last year.
The pair avenged that defeat by taking out last year’s champs, Jim Breck and John Mulhern, in 16 holes of match play during Saturday’s quarterfinals – although Francis said payback was never on his mind.
“Honestly, no. They’re great guys,” said Francis, a former Dallas High School football and baseball standout who went on to pitch for Johns Hopkins and then in the lower levels of the minor leagues for the Atlanta Braves. “We’ve played them before. Any day, we can beat them or they can beat us.”
Michaels and Lazevnick beat both their opponents in 16 holes Saturday, starting with John and Kristopher Konick. Then the top-seeded duo defeated Chris Jones and Gary Neupauer – who happens to be Michaels’ boss – in the quarterfinals.
It was a tougher road to the semifinals for Francis and Belgio, who needed two extra holes to get past Jeff Hodorowski and Kevin Fisher before staving off the team of Breck and Mulhern. Now it’s on to another showdown between Francis and his long-time rival and good buddy Michaels.
“Robbie and I have battled since we were 15 years old,” Francis said. “We’re good friends. We play up here all the time together.”
In non-title play, Daniel Yursha scored his first hole-in-one on No. 17 of the fifth flight.