No place to hide in lower ranks
For all the highs and joys that it offers, golf can be a cruel game. This year alone, Rory McIlroy has lost a major championship and his national open in crushing fashion.
At the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 in June, he slid a four-footer for par by the cup on the 18th hole after missing an even shorter putt on 16. Those two errors opened the door for Bryson DeChambeau’s bunker heroics to claim the crown.
And McIlroy let go of a four-shot lead in the final round of the Irish Open last weekend, contested at Royal County Down in his home of Northern Ireland. Leading all week, a three-putt on the penultimate hole essentially did him in with Rasmus Højgaard racing by him to win. “I am getting used to it, unfortunately, this year,” McIlroy said after the latest loss.
Such mistakes happen routinely, but at golf’s lower levels they affect livelihoods, not legacy.
I was contemplating this after attending the Fortinet Cup Championship earlier this month. That’s the season-ending event on PGA Tour Americas, the circuit two rungs below the PGA Tour. The tournament took place on the North Course at TPC Toronto, host of next year’s RBC Canadian Open.
On Thursday I followed Noah Steele. He won the 2021 Osprey Valley Open at TPC Toronto as an amateur and turned pro later that year. He’s spent the last few seasons trying to move up golf’s ladder, a tough task even for accomplished players.
He began with a birdie on the par-5 opening hole despite an errant drive. But on the par-4 second, his tee shot found the right edge of a fairway bunker, forcing the lefthander into an awkward stance with one foot in the hazard and one foot out. From 175 yards, Steele’s ball hit the bunker’s front lip, picked up spin and speed, and sailed right of an elevated green, ricocheting off a steep bank into dense trees. After finding his ball deep in the woods and determining that taking relief from an unplayable lie wouldn’t get him out of trouble, Steele had to retreat to the bunker from where he had hit. Only this time he had to drop in the sand, which resulted in a buried lie. He blasted out as far as he could, left his fifth shot well short of the hole and three-putted for a quadruple-bogey eight.
What made the situation worse was that his two playing partners had already moved to the next tee deck to keep pace and the three golfers behind Steele were waiting in the fairway, hands on hips watching his nightmare play out. He must feel like the loneliest golfer in the world right now, I thought.
“Once I had to go back to the bunker and drop, I was pretty rattled,” Steele said Tuesday. “Not that I would want to admit it, but I was pretty rattled even when it was time to hit that wedge shot because there was still some room for error, to make things worse. The focus there was trying to forget what just happened, but it was so shocking that it was pretty difficult. ”
A task easier said than done, with
Steele admitting he was worried about putting his group behind.
We followed Steele to the third hole. There, he wrote a message to himself on his pin sheet. “Fresh start, reset, next shot.” Then he bombed his ball down the middle of the fairway, hit a perfect approach shot to just the below the hole, and rolled in his putt. The old birdiequad-birdie start.
“I told myself, ‘You’re OK,’” Steele said. “I knocked that in and it was a sigh of a relief to be able to bounce back quickly. I think my plan on the third tee worked. I just wanted to gather myself and not have it affect the next hole or the remainder of the round. Because even though I put a pretty big hole in my foot, I didn’t blow the foot off completely.”
Steele is polite and affable. He thanked me for showing interest in his play, even though I was calling primarily to discuss a disaster. I reasoned it’s an area of the game that is overlooked. A pro golfer can’t be benched or pulled from the mound. Make an eight out of the gate and he or she must play on.
“It was not fun and really that kind of robbed my week,” said Steele, who ultimately missed the cut to end a tough season. “It’s no fun but I’m happy to chat about it and I appreciate you shedding some light on it. Hopefully some good things ahead.”