Purtzer, Hoch in good-day, bad-day tie at Sr. PGA
CLEVELAND - Tom Purtzer woke up with that feel-good feeling for the first round of the Senior PGA Championship, and a couple of good saves and a handful of birdies later, he was on top of the world at Canterbury Country Club. That is, tied for the lead at 4-under-par 66 with Scott Hoch, who, conversely, didn't feel so hot. Golfers hate it when they trash a good round at the end.“I hit a lot of good shots through 16 holes,” Hoch said. “I was six under and could have been a few more.”
Then came the last two holes and a pair of bogeys that took him out of a solo two-shot lead and left him tied.
Bernhard Langer, a two-time winner this year and No. 1 on the Champions Tour money list with nearly $1 million shot was solo third with 68, followed by a gang at 69, including Larry Mize and Joey Sindelar. Defending champion Jay Haas was at 1-over 71, tied for 23rd.
Purtzer, a four-time winner on the Champions Tour and still looking for his first major, had just one bogey. That was at the par-5 16th, where he was just 60 yards from the green and chunked his third shot.
But this didn't anger him. In fact, he was feeling rather perky. He'd started at the 10th, and with a fine save after driving into the rough and then holing a 6-footer for par. A tight pitching wedge and a neat chip got him birdies at the 14th and 15th, and after the bogey at the 16th, he birdied the 17th from the edge. His 3-wood set up birdies at the fifth and sixth (his 14th and 17th), and two putts from 45 feet saved his par-3 at his 18th (No. 9).
“It was great,” Purtzer said. “I felt good in the practice rounds, and I wouldn't say I had too many high expectations, but I kind of felt I was going to play well today. I just had a good feeling coming into today, and fortunately, it paid off. So, kind of nice.”
Hoch was going along swimmingly, with nifty iron play. He birdied the first two holes from 5 and 12 feet, then, with a good putter, No. 6 from 20. He birdied three holes in a four-hole span from the 13th, most notably the 616-yard, par-5 16th, with a wedge third from only 50 yards to 6 feet, and he was leading comfortably at 6 under.
Then came the carnival of errors.
At the par-3 17th: “I was in between clubs, I wasn't in between clubs. I didn't want to hit either one. So I just hit 3 [iron], tried to hit it hard, just didn't hit a good shot.”
At the par-4 18th: “My caddie and I were going back and forth on club selection, and back and forth and back and forth, and then ultimately I hit the wrong club.”
Hoch had 208 yards to the green, then hit his 4-iron 190. “It was just a brain cramp,” he said.
Langer was his regular steady self, with a one-bogey 68. “I hit a lot of fairways, hit a lot of greens and kept the ball in play, out of trouble,” Langer said. (That is, he hit 10 of 14 fairways and 13 greens in regulation.)
The way he salvaged his par at No. 1 would be enough to encourage anyone - a hybrid off the tee into the fairway, a sand wedge three yards behind the hole.
“And I thought, Well, if it comes back a little bit, it's perfect,” Langer said. “But about 10 seconds later, it's running off the green, 10 yards down the fairway, 20 yards down the fairway and into the rough.
“So I've just hit two as good a shots as I can hit and I'm 20 yards short of the green, 35 yards away from the pin, and facing a difficult chip. And I chipped it by about 14 feet and had to make a downhill putt to save par.”
Ho-hum. Another par, another dollar.
NOTES - Thirty-seven golfers made their senior major debuts in this Senior PGA, and three of them already had majors to their name -- Larry Mize (Masters), Tom Lehman (British Open) and Bob Tway (PGA Championship). One other, Steve Jones (U.S. Open) was also eligible to make his debut, but he scratched ... Not-so-trivial a question: What did Mize and Tway have in common? Answer - both harpooned Greg Norman with a last shot to win, Mize with the long chip-in at the 1987 Masters, and Tways, with the hole-out from a bunker in the 1986 PGA … Mize shot 69, Tway and Lehman 75 … Golf fans thought they were hearing double, with Britain's Gordon J. Brand, 53, and Gordon Brand Jr., 50 (not related), both in the field … they had one birdie between them, Gordon J.'s at No. 8 ... after that, the news was all bad - Gordon J. shot 81 (“It could have been 85 or 86, so I kept it respectable”), and Gordon Jr. shot 84 … James Blair, from Ogden, Utah, in his fourth Senior PGA, on the story that Canterbury is two different nines: “Well, I didn't really notice that. You got to hit the ball in play, and I didn't in my first nine and I shot 40, then I got it in play on my second nine and I shot 31”
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