By Ron Green Sr.
rgreensr@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Thursday, Apr. 29, 2010
You walk around the picture perfect Quail Hollow Club with the sun on your shoulders and a light breeze washing around you and you think, there may be a better way to make a living than playing professional golf but none comes to mind.
All you need to play in the Wells Fargo Championship this week is a set of clubs, somebody to carry those clubs, a few golf balls, some golf garb, a glove, nerves that know when to shut up and a generous allotment of heavenly talent.
You don’t need a helmet or shoulder pads. Big, hairy guys don’t run into you with malice aforethought. The ball doesn’t move until you hit it.
You don’t have to bring a million dollars worth of equipment and a small army to the track and drive 200 miles an hour for a prize one-third of what a golf pro can win in four rounds of golf.
You walk around Thursday, watching Bo Van Pelt make shooting 65 look easy and Nick Watney making an eagle 2 on the wicked 12th hole and Angel Cabrera slashing a 70 out of a lot of shady places.
You see drives going forever and iron shots dancing a ballet and putts creeping across the flawless greens and diving out of sight. Ah, to be young and standing on the first tee, paired with a couple of other superstars, birdies beckoning sweetly.
And then you check some scores and you are reminded of the classic assessment of the great old sportswriter Jim Murray, who told us, “Life is rough but golf is ridiculous.”
It will slap your face. Ask Brian Stuard. He was cruising at five under and bogeyed three holes in a row. Watney followed that eagle with a double bogey on the 18th. Everybody’s pal Freddie Couples struggled to a 76. Nobody got slapped harder than Parker McLachlin.
Amid all that grandeur out there Thursday, McLachlin took 12 shots on the par-5 seventh hole. An even dozen.
Since the PGA Tour began keeping statistics on such matters in 1983, there have been only 12 higher scores on a hole, two of them by you know who, John Daly, the king of give-up with an 18 to his credit. Or discredit.
Not a lot of us were out there watching McLachlin suffer. We had to ask. Inquiring minds wanted to know how he made his 12, but he politely declined to discuss it, and who could blame him? The people who officially measure every shot hit in a tournament looked it up, though, and said he had hit four drives onto the property adjacent to the fairway, a showplace of big homes but an ugly place called out of bounds.
McLachlin, who shot a 62 in winning the Legends Reno-Tahoe Open in 2008, wound up shooting 88, which left him 23 shots out of the lead after one round, a terrible thing to happen to a man who by all accounts is a good guy. Or even to a not so good guy.
Tiger Woods can shrug at his shaky 1-over-par 73, and say, “I just didn’t have it today.” But what can Parker McLachlin say about his round? “I just didn’t have it today” wouldn’t quite cover the highest score shot on the PGA Tour this year.
Yeah, it’s a beautiful game, a glamorous game, but it has its dark side. Like today. When the field is cut after today’s round, more than half of the players, McLachlin among them, will leave without a cent in prize money and with a weekend off to ponder what went wrong. They’ll trade all those lovely fairways for highways or airways.
Still want to be a pro? Yeah. Even when it treats you like gum on its shoe, even when it breaks your heart, it beats whatever’s second.