Leave to the LPGA to find a way to mess up a perfectly good playoff.
The ladies who play professional golf were in Dallas this past week at the Volunteers Of America event and one thing they didn’t volunteer for were the fierce winds that showed up at Las Colinas on Sunday.
The women were basically blown away. Inbee Park, one of their best, shot 80. Many didn’t fare much better and in the end, only three players in the field finished in red numbers.
The winds were constant at 25 miles per hour up to 30.
Haru Nomura had things pretty much in hand after nine holes but then she hit the back nine and turned into a 16-handicapper. Bogeys at 10, 11, 14 and 16 reduced her lead to one shot then a double at the 17th left her a shot behind Cristie Kerr going into the poorly-designed par five 18th.
Kerr had a chance to get to four-under, she was just short of the green in two but couldn’t get up-and-down, leaving the door open for Nomura to tie her with a birdie and that’s exactly what happened.
Give Nomura credit for holing a nine-footer for double at 17 then making another nine-footer to force a playoff. Both finished the ordeal at three-under par.
That’s when things got ugly.
In all its vast creativity, the LPGA folks decided that the ladies should play that bozo of a hole, the twisting 18th, until someone won. It’s a hole that had a tilted fairway that forces drives into the right rough or worse. Add an incredibly strong left-to-right wind and you have all the makings of a boring playoff.
That’s exactly what they got.
And it took forever — two hours to play six holes, which led Hall of Famer Judy Rankin to declare: “It looks like Cristie (Kerr) is slow-playing her (Nomura).”
That’s exactly what Kerr was doing. The normally fast decisive Kerr, was a turtle in the playoff.
On the sixth go-round, Nomura finally came up with an incredible second shot that stopped just 12 feet from the hole. When Kerr missed a 14-footer for birdie, it was over. Kerr missed out on getting her 20th win and Nomura got her third.
Hopefully the LPGA learned a lesson — go to another hole rather than playing a bad hole over, and over, and over, and over, and over and over again. Maybe next time they can make it sudden-death rather than a slow-death playoff.
