Posted: July 10, 2015 5:25 pm

Ron Sirak has a dream gig for a golf nut, Senior Writer at Golf Digest and contributor to the Golf Channel.

The journey started at Franklin & Marshall College.

“F&M has meant everything to me,” Sirak, F&M Class of 1972, said Friday in the Media Center at Lancaster Country Club.

“My dad worked in the steel mills in Western Pa., and it got me out of that life.”

It got him into journalism, as a general assignment reporter for the Lancaster Independent Press, a weekly newspaper started by local academics with an antiwar bent, at age 19, as an F&M student.

Sirak was working on the Associated Press New York news desk in 1995 when AP’s national golf writer became ill. At the time, the job consisted of following the PGA Tour 40-plus weeks a year.

Sirak said he’d take it if it would include women, amateurs, the business and recreational sides of the game.

“At about the time we implemented the plan, Tiger Woods turned pro, in June of 1996,” Sirak said. “It looked like we were really smart.”’

Sirak covers all the big events in the game – your Masters, your British Opens, your Ryder Cups – but he admits to a particular affinity for the women’s game.

He’s been, for example, a guest as the weddings of Annika Sorenstam and Sofie Gufstason.

“They’re even more accessible and open than the men,” he said. “They let you get to know them.”

Sirak played Lancaster Country Club once or twice during college.

“I knew it was a hidden gem, and this is a perfect market for the LPGA,” he said. “If I was them, I’d be trying to find a title sponsor to come back to this area every year.”