GREENSBORO, N.C. – Peter Uihlein made a 10 on the ninth hole of Forest Oaks Country Club today in the first round of the FootJoy Boys Invitational, where all day things just didn’t seem right.
Not a 10-footer.
A 10. As in, “Hey, what’d you make there, eight or nine?”
“Ten.”
The first thing Uihlein said to me after his round before he sat down in the scoring tent was, “Hey, did you hear about what I did on No. 9?”
I had.
“Tough hole?”
Uihlein, whose sense of humor is only one reason why you shouldn’t count him out of this tournament, hit his drive on No. 9 a bit right into both the Forest and the Oaks.
“I tried to chip it out the first time, it didn’t work,” he said.
His next chip hit a tree limb and bounced straight back, hitting the irons in his golf bag. According to my Rules of Golf One-A-Day Calendar, that’s a two-shot penalty.
“I finally got it out, hooked the crap out of a 3-wood and didn’t get up and down,” he said.
“That’s how you make a 10.”
Wierd. Uihlein, who birdied the next hole, still shot 73. He hit 16 fairways and almost as many greens on his way to four birdies, 13 pars, and a ...
“I think that’s the highest score in AJGA history,” said Uihlein, who figured he’d only gone as high as eight before. “I don’t think anybody’s made an 11 in an invitational.”
Wrong.
Last year at the HP Boys Junior Championship, Tom Lo made 11 on the par-5 fourth hole at the Bay Hill Club & Lodge.
A couple AJGA staffers were trying to help me figure out if that was a record when it came over the radios that Niko Bain had made a 12 on No. 6.
Crazy.
What’s going on here?
I told someone earlier today that by covering my first FootJoy this week, I had officially completed the AJGA Invitational slam. It was a horrible and embarassing joke, only made worse after realizing I hadn’t covered the Ping Invitational, which the AJGA added last year.
I’ve still been to enough of these to know something isn’t right here in Greensboro.
“It’s wierd, I don’t know,” said Cody Gribble, your first-round leader after a 7-under 65 that included a bogey at 17. “It almost feels like the field is weaker.”
Bingo.
Since when do AJGA majors include only three of the top 10 in the
Golfweek/Titleist Junior Rankings?
Every time Uihlein makes a 10.
Phil Francis,
Golfweek’s top-ranked junior for most of the last two years, has dropped out of the rankings for good. He only played May’s Thunderbird International Junior to prepare for last week’s Stanford St. Jude Championship and stayed home this week to play in the Southwestern Amateur.
Rickie Fowler, who recently took over the top spot, won the Sunnehanna Amateur last week and is set on making the U.S. Walker Cup team. He will likely never play a junior golf tournament with the No. 1 ranking.
Richard Lee is at the U.S. Open, where Oakmont will do its best to change his mind about turning professional in the coming weeks.
Kevin Tway, Ji Moon, Sihwan Kim and Bud Cauley also passed, while defending champion Andrew Yun’s father called Sunday to say his son was too sick to make the trip. (Yun has been sick ever since the Thunderbird, and is still trying to figure out what’s wrong.)
“It didn’t really feel like a major this year because I really didn’t know anyone here,” said Uihlein. “It’s just a lot different.”
Uihlein finished second to Fowler last week at the Sunnehanna. Cauley finished third. Tway finished tied for fifth.
It had all the markings of a typical AJGA invitational from the last two years, which is to say nothing about the talent at FootJoy this week.
There just seems to be a little extra room at the top.
“It’s definitley a little relieving about not seeing Rickie Fowler and Phil Francis and all of them,” said Gribble, who joins Uihlein this week in search of AJGA invitational victory No. 1.
Let's just all take a second to get used to it.
“It’s gonna be a different year,” Uihlein said, “you can say that.”
Posted: 6/12/2007
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