Reed leaves his mark
Patrick at the US Open at Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. — AP
IT took two mighty swings on a 621-yard hole at Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania for Patrick Reed to make history with just the fourth albatross on record at a US Open championship.
Reed raised his hands to the sky, wondering what happened when he unleashed a 3-wood from 286 yards in the fairway of the par-5 4th hole at the third major of the season.
It was a beauty. The ball bounced three times then rolled towards the hole and into the cup.
The so-called albatross is considered the rarest shot in golf, with only a few hundred dropping a year, compared to more than 30,000 holes-in-one.
Reed said the best albatross he hit came at a tournament in Germany, when he came out in the morning to finish the last four holes after getting rained out the night before. He had two par-5s left and his wife, Justine, was urging him to attack those and get to 3-under.
He parred the first, then made an albatross, sometimes referred as a double eagle, to close.
The only one Reed saw came at Dominion Country Club in San Antonio when he was a kid. He hit driver off the deck onto the green while the group in front of him was still putting.
'They turned around and looked at me, then they all started jumping because they watched the ball roll right past them and disappear,' Reed said. 'I didn't know I could get there.'
Reed's achievement in Thursday's opening round marks only the fourth albatross at the US Open since the event started keeping such records in 1983.
The 2018 Masters champion joins T.C. Chen (1985 at Oakland Hills), Shaun Micheel (2010 at Pebble Beach) and Nick Watney (2012 at Olympic) as the players who managed it.
Despite the two, Reed finished at 3-over 73 after finishing with triple bogey on No. 18.
'I was doing pretty well there until that last hole,' Reed said.
But Reed was not only one who might have felt a little down. Loads of players got that sinking feeling – straight down into the rough at a brutal and punihsing Oakmont.
Gary Woodland, the 2019 US Open champion, waved the rules official over. Certainly, a ball buried that deep in the rough had to have embedded into the soft turf below when his off-line drive on the 12th hole landed with a thunk.
No such luck, the official told him. The rough at Oakmont is just deep – and thick and hard to escape.
Instead of taking a free drop for an embedded ball, Woodland had to replace it where he found it, get out his wedge, take a hack and pray.
That resulted in Woodland's first blemish on a back nine of 6-over 41 on the opening day. It turned a promising round that began with three birdies into a 3-over 73 slog.
Woodland's was one of dozens of tales from the rough – gnarly, thick and sometimes downright impossible – that make an Open at Oakmont as tough as they come.
'I can't get out of it (the rough) some of the times, depending on the lie,' said defending champion Bryson DeChambeau, who makes a living on overpowering golf courses and gouging out of the thick stuff. 'It was tough. It was a brutal test of golf.'
Scotland's Robert MacIntyre said: 'If you miss the green, you miss it by too much, you then try to play an 8-yard pitch over the rough onto a green that's brick hard running away from you.'
Punishing the best in the world is exactly how the superintendents at what might be America's toughest golf course planned.
For the record, they do mow this rough. If they didn't, there's a chance some of the grass would lay over itself, allowing the ball to perch up instead of sink down.
The mowers here have blades that use suction to pull the grass upward as they cut, helping the grass stand up straight and creating the physics that allow the ball to sink to the bottom.
Which is exactly where Rory McIlroy found his second shot, then his third, after failing to gouge his drive out of the lush green fescue located right of all that 'regular' rough on the par-4 fourth. He made 6 there on his way to 74.
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