We teed off at 6:41, the sun still low and the air at 59 with the humidity sitting heavy the way it does at Rancho Bernardo before a Sunday warms up. Ian, Dav, and Rick. You opened with a drive into the right rough on 1 — fine, playable — but the wedge from 80 leaked a touch and the 9-footer for par slid by. A bogey to start, and from a 9-footer that's one we'd usually expect to hear drop. Nothing to do but reset.
The reset took. You stuck the tee shot on 2, got up-and-down from 13 yards, and rolled in a 3-footer for the first par. From there the front settled into a quiet rhythm — pars from 2 through 6, the swing tracking, nothing dramatic. You found fairways on 3 and 5, hit greens, gave yourself looks. The putts didn't fall, but the strikes were honest. On 6 you holed out from 33 feet for the par after a 2-hybrid off the tee — a nice piece of housekeeping.
Then 7 — driver flushed, 264 down the middle, and from 142 the 9-iron sailed the green into the rough. The pitch and the 16-footer both came up short. Bogey. The miss was the 9-iron, not anything else. You closed the front pars on 8 and 9, the 8-iron on 9 plain solid, and made the turn at +2. Around there you tagged a Moment — *hitting great shots, hitting great putts too, just nothing falling.* That was the round so far, said better than I could.
The back nine started the same way the front had hoped to. Drive in the fairway on 10, 54 to inside three feet, putt holed — the first of two one-putts on the back. On 11 you stuck another 8-iron tee shot, this time inside fifteen. On 12 we caught the bunker off the tee — that's a stretch for a 470-yard par 5 — and you played the recovery sensibly, two-putted from fifty-four feet for the par. On 13, where you stopped to photograph the rabbits, you wedged a 54 to a tap-in and walked off with a one-putt three.
Then 14 — *huge drive,* you said, and you weren't wrong. 279 down the middle, the swing of the day. The 50 from 114 leaked a hair left, the 18-footer didn't drop, and that was the pattern of the round in miniature: the ball-striking was there, the par was the par, but the birdies stayed on the lip. Three holes in a row on the back you holed putts inside three feet for par after grinding out the work — 15, 16, all clean.
17 and 18 leaked. On 17 the wedge from 119 came out long into the rough, and the 54 from there came up five short of the green — that's the one that cost us, an up-and-down we usually convert. Bogey. On 18 the drive found the rough, the 8-iron from 242 stayed in the rough, and the 54 from 85 was the one that hurt — chunked left, well short, more than a stroke given back from a yardage you live in. Another bogey to close. Two finishing bogeys on what was otherwise a clean back.
We walked off 18 at 10:43, 76, four over, the sun high now and the round honest. The strikes were there all morning. The putter was the only thing that didn't show up — 33 putts on a day when the swing deserved better. Still: 38-38, eleven greens, nine fairways, and your own words from the 9th hole holding up to the finish.
Hole 14"Huge drive!"