When it all goes wrong - how N&S players try to keep it together

125^th Men’s North & South Amateur Scoring

123^rd Women’s North & South Amateur Scoring

123^rd Women’s North & South Amateur Tee Times

125^th Men’s North & South Amateur Tee Times

By Alex Podlogar

A player walked away from the scoring area having mustered the proper fortitude to politely shake hands with tournament volunteers and offer his best attempt at a smile. His soiled visor pushed up from his forehead. It was damp, crumpled from being thrown to the ground and sporting some shade other than its intended white.

In step with his playing partners for the day, he longingly looked down at the first tee of Pinehurst No. 2 where another group was just getting its first round of the 125^th Men’s North & South Amateur under way. Their whole round and afternoon were ahead of them. The triumphs of a great day of golf still possible on a sweltering Tuesday in late June.

They weren’t far down the first fairway when the player let out a long sigh, and in a voice loud enough that one of the fairway-bound players turned back and looked, exasperatingly blurted, “This freaking game!”

“Yeah, but the course is awesome,” his playing partner said.

“Yeah,” said the first player, quieter and soundly defeated.

“I wasn’t. But it is.”

There were plenty of good scores on Pinehurst No. 2, where the men played their first round, and No. 7, where the women played theirs. The fields will switch on Wednesday before they are cut to the top 32, respectively, for match play.

There were also plenty of bad ones. Some players were merely meh, some managed to just hang on, and some got off to horrific starts. But all of them had to just. keep. going.

Pepperdine’s Luke Bailey got off to a great start. Four iron off the first tee, approach to 18 feet, buried putt for birdie. At that point, as the heat index was only in the low 90s or so at 7:31 a.m., Bailey could rightly say he led the tournament. “I was feeling pretty good to start,” he says.

Bailey is also working through a swing change, but spirits were high. “Things have been going left lately,” he reveals, his tone turning hushed and reserved.

He thought he hit his drive at the long par-4 2^nd hole onto Midland Road. He didn’t, and he found his ball.

But he had lost his game.

“So, first tee shot with the driver, the 2^nd hole, I hit it way left,” he says. “I mean, way left. Waaaaaaay left. Not sure if it’s in the road. Had to hit a provisional, and naturally, striped that.

“Chip out sideways, bad wedge shot, good bunker shot to 8 feet and miss the 8-footer.”

Double.

Bailey went to the short par-4 3^rd. Took out 3 wood.

“Overcompensated,” Bailey explains. “Sprayed it way right.”

Found the ball in a pine-scented jail.

“Punch out again. Another bad wedge. Had 100 in, but hit it in the bunker and don’t get up and down. At that point, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’”

After a bogey on 4 – “You know, just a hard hole,” Bailey says – he looked to his mother, who was following his group. Nothing evaporates in North Carolina humidity, unless you count Luke Bailey’s confidence in the early stages of the first round of the North & South Amateur on Pinehurst No. 2.

“On the first few holes it all felt lost,” Bailey says. “I told my mom, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve forgotten how to play golf.’ That’s exactly what I told her.

“I’ve been putting in the work, and you think, it’s got to show at some point.”

To Bailey’s credit, it did. A good drive on 5, a beauty of a 3 wood to the back of the green for the approach, and a nifty chip to a foot. Birdie. Then a bogey on the par-3 6^th. But then three straight pars. A birdie on 10, a bogey on 11, a bogey on 16, and a birdie on 18. All in all, a pretty gutsy round of golf to finish with a 4-over 74. At one point he was as low as tied for 103rd. By the end of play, he was 72nd and just three shots off the cut line.

“At least I’m not completely out of it,” he says. “I’ve given myself a chance tomorrow. Just going to try to keep the ball in the right spots and make a couple of putts. Maybe I can make a run in match play.”

That’s the thing with golf. One day you have it, another day…well, another day it’s like you’ve never played the game before.

“We’ve played hundreds of rounds of golf, thousands of rounds of golf,” says former Minnesota golfer and PGA Tour Live broadcaster Emma Carpenter, who played her first competitive round in 14 months on Tuesday. “One thing you learn – one round of golf never tells a person’s golf story. You can never judge how bad someone’s game is in one round, or how good someone’s game is. That’s what’s so crazy about this game.”

Carpenter’s round fit the crazy bill. A good practice round on Monday and a strong range session had Carpenter’s caddie in a good mood. “Your swing looks great,” he told her.

But then, real bullets.

“Once you’re in that competitive environment, you get nervous. It just happens,” Carpenter says. “You can’t replicate it in practice. Your hands get sweaty, your timing can get off and you’re emotional out there.”

Carpenter triple bogeyed her first hole. She made three 7s before she was done.

Was there a moment Carpenter thought, uh-oh, this might not go well today?

“The first tee?” she says, laughing.

“It was probably after the second real bad hole I had that I thought, ‘OK, come on, we’ve got to reel this in,’” she says. “You just have to keep stepping up to the next tee knowing that other players are going to make mistakes as well. There’s no such thing as a perfect round of golf.”

A few probably left the day feeling like they did have that perfect round. Tyler Watts, a U.S. National Team member who set a scoring record in winning the Sunnehanna Amateur a week ago, fired a 4-under 66 on No. 2 to share the lead with Oregon’s Eric Doyle. Pimchompoo Chaisilprungruang, who won the Southwestern Amateur earlier this month, shares the women’s lead after a 2-under 70 with Grace Kilcrease and Ava Merrill.

But for Bailey and Carpenter, they didn’t have their best stuff on Tuesday. That’s OK. Because there’s Wednesday. And the day after that. And the tournament after that.

“Really, at the end of the day, it’s not going to change my life if I go out there and shoot 85,” Bailey says. “It’s golf. I’m just trying to enjoy it and being on Pinehurst No. 2.”

“I could go out tomorrow and have the round of my life,” Carpenter says. “Or not. But I’m so grateful to be here this week. I’m so grateful to play. And what a place to play. There’s a lot worse places to be.

“I just love this game. It’s so fun. And it’s fun to play well. It’s not as fun to play poorly. But it’s just fun to be here, so go out there and give it all you got and don’t let any of the bad stuff that happened affect you.

“It’s just golf.”