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Park’s Quest for 4th Major Ends in Round 3

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The weather appears to have conspired against Inbee Park at St. Andrews.

The three-time major champion of 2013 was 1-under through four holes of her third round when play was suspended for what turned out to be 18 hours. Just past noon on Saturday, as Park was set to tee off on No. 5, play was called off, ultimately forcing a 36-hole finish (for some) on Sunday.

When Park returned to the course at Sunday’s dawn, no birdies were left in her bag. She posted three bogies and 11 pars the rest of the way, on a day when the field came back. The lead, at 10-under after two rounds, was 9-under after three, but Park was effectively out of the running for a fourth consecutive major championship.

Gusts were recorded as high as 50 mph on the Old Course, with balls at rest on the 10th green suddenly awakening and taking flight. With circumstances like those, the Royal and Ancient and the Ladies European Tour made the proper decision to halt the competition.

Weather or not, this is not the same Inbee Park that has dominated important competition throughout the 2013 LPGA Tour. After her second round concluded, Park addressed the question on fixing her wayward shots:

“Well, not perfectly fix it, but I didn’t miss that many shots to the right today, mostly to the left. I would say I fixed it a little bit because it’s going the other way, but I’m trying to get that straight the next two days…”

Although the fix might have been in on Saturday, it had left her by re-start time on Sunday morning.

Returning to the wind, it had clearly affected Park though the first two rounds. None of the previous three major championships (U.S. Open, U.S. PGA, Nabisco) had been visited by such gusts, and Park took note of required changes in club selection:

“Yeah, especially coming in holes from 13 to 17, it is playing really long with the wind and everything blowing sideways, it’s tough to hit it right at the pin. You have to really aim far away from the pin, so that’s the tough part. Yeah, I mean, the course was playing a bit long for me, and on the back nine, I was hitting like rescues, 5 woods, 3 woods.”

No. 17, known by all as the Road Hole, has been a particular thorn in Park’s side all week. She has bogied the par 4 each day. The hole played as a par 5 when Lorena Ochoa won the Open in 2007. Adding to Park’s frustration was her early Sunday bogey on No. 6, to return to even par for the day and the tournament. The top-ranked player in the world had birdied it in each of the previous two rounds.

Presuming that Park’s Sunday will be nothing more than a glorious salute to her achievements to date, the addition of the Evian Masters to the major championship pile in 2013 begs the question: What will a win there mean? If Inbee Park wins four of five women’s major championships, what name shall we give it? From Park’s perspective, it should be just another tournament:

“When you experience something big like this, some kind of big pressure like this, you’re just really not afraid of any kind of pressure. How can this get bigger than this? If you experience something like this, you’re just ready to go and ready to experience something? Anything’s going to be less than this.”

It will be left to Morgan Pressel, Na Yeon Choi, Stacy Lewis, Suzann Pettersen and others to determine the name to be inscribed on the championship trophy. Regarding Inbee Park, she drew the sporting world’s attention to a town along the Scottish North Sea as she strove valiantly to attain the previously unimaginable. If not for the luck of the draw, she might have contended to the end.

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Ronald Montesano writes for GolfWRX.com from western New York. He dabbles in coaching golf and teaching Spanish, in addition to scribbling columns on all aspects of golf, from apparel to architecture, from equipment to travel. Follow Ronald on Twitter at @buffalogolfer.

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