September 2002
One of the great benefits of qualifying for the U.S. Open was that it got Ryan Moore a free pass directly into two other USGA championships this summer: the U.S. Amateur Public Links and the U.S. Amateur. Moore especially appreciated the fact that he didn't have to go through qualifying for either of those events in the month between the Open and the APL because, after battling Bethpage Black in June, he needed every one of the days for recuperation.
Moore called the experience of playing at Bethpage, with his father, Mike, as his caddie, the most memorable golf experience of his life, even though he missed the cut with scores of 76-79. But playing the brutal Black Course five straight days - and a week and a half after he had tied for eighth at the NCAA Championships - left Moore golfed out by the time he departed New York.
The 19-year-old returned home to the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup, Wash., and barely touched his clubs. In the month between the Open and the APL, Moore took part in one competitive round and that was a four-man scramble. (He was the A player.)
The Orchards Golf Club, a pretty Robert Trent Jones Jr. course in Washington, Mich., north of Detroit, where low scoring was plentiful, was just what Moore was looking for.
"After Bethpage," insisted Moore, a sophomore at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, "no course looks hard to me anymore."
Moore was almost flawless in coming within a whisker of matching the largest margin of victory in an APL final with his 10-and-9 crushing of Lee Williamson. After opening the 36-hole final with a bogey, Moore, last season's Mountain West Conference freshman of the year, reeled off 10 birdies over the next 17 holes for a score that was the equivalent of a 63. Comparing match play to a stroke-play score is sometimes a dicey matter, but in this case it's rather hard to dispute, considering that four of Moore's five conceded strokes were of the six- to eight-inch variety and the fifth was no more than 15 inches.
"I couldn't ask for anything more," beamed Moore, who is now 1-1 in championship finals while wearing one of his favorite shirts, a blue two-tone deal that he had on when he came up short in the 2000 U.S. Junior Amateur final at Pumpkin Ridge.
"I don't know where that came from," Moore kidded. "Actually, I do. From yesterday to today it was pretty much the same thing, except that I made a couple more putts this morning. I made every good opportunity I had."
Williamson, a two-time Indiana Amateur champion, was contrite. "I'm disappointed that I gave away the start of the day," he lamented, referring to his bogey-bogey start in the final. "I felt like I handed him a few holes. To make him feel that comfortable, and he really wasn't missing any shots, I regret that."
A par is usually a good score at a USGA championship, but birdies came from all directions at The Orchards, where the cut of 146 tied an APL record low. So it was a particularly bad start when Williamson, a fifth-year senior at Purdue University with no remaining playing eligibility, stumbled out of the gate in the final. After that, every time he had even a flicker of hope, Moore doused it. Williamson made five birdies in the morning 18, but he won only two of those holes as Moore countered with hole-halving birdies of his own at the third, eighth and 15th.
The last of those, in fact, only served to ignite a run that, for all intents and purposes, decided the match by the lunch break. Moore, 3 up at the time, blasted out of a greenside bunker to 15 inches for the first of four straight birdies, only to see Williamson first roll in a 10-foot birdie putt.
"That was a great putt at 15 to halve with me," Moore said, "and I just told my caddie, 'We're going to birdie these last three holes. I want to be 6 up.' "
Moore did just that, adding a dazzling exclamation point to his dominance when he hit his approach at the par-4, water-guarded 18th - out of a divot, no less - to three feet.
"Safe?" Moore questioned about hitting directly at a hole cut near the water's edge. "I didn't have that word in my head the last few days. I had to go for it. I figured, Why not? Because we have another 18 holes. If I knock it in the water I'm, what, 4 up then? Which was still a good position. But 6 up is huge going into the afternoon."
Moore's sterling match play - he amassed 26 birdies against just one bogey from the quarterfinals on - was in sharp contrast to his effort in the two days of stroke play, when he three-putted five times en route to scores of 72-70, nine strokes off medalist Isaac Jeminson's 11-under-par 133.
"I could hardly wish the ball into the hole," Moore admitted after his quarterfinal win against Lamar University junior Chris Stroud. He credited the turnaround to a suggestion he had received in a phone call home to his father the night before. Moore birdied the first hole of his semifinal from 30 feet and, after that, he was off to the races.
As though Moore needed more assistance, he got just that in the midst of his quarterfinal match Friday morning when Mark Soldan wandered out of the gallery and asked Moore why he didn't have a caddie.
"I don't have any friends here," Moore responded, which, in turn, prompted Soldan, a 30-year-old assembly line worker at Ford Motor Co., to volunteer to carry the bag for the remainder of Moore's matches.
Moore conceded that the benefit of Soldan's presence went beyond not having to lug his own bag through the 90-plus-degree heat. "We just clicked," he explained. "He wasn't reading greens, but just to have someone who backed up what you were thinking, that was nice to have."
And Soldan, no doubt, thought it was nice to have a player who was motoring along the way Moore did over his final 63 holes, a span in which, by Moore's count, he was 25 under par.
And - on two fronts - well rested.
