By:
Jessica Marksbury
January 20, 2023
For S.H. Kim, the rub of the inexperienced was in full impact on Friday.
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Good and dangerous breaks — the “rub of the inexperienced” — are often a part of the enjoyable in a spherical of golf.
Gamers do the very best they will, however there are components of the sport — a lie, the way in which a ball bounces — that merely come right down to luck.
Normally, these conditions aren’t that outstanding, however often they imply an ideal deal — particularly on the skilled degree.
S.H. Kim skilled either side of the coin on Friday at The American Categorical, extremely, on back-to-back holes.
The wild sequence of occasions began with Kim’s 84-yard strategy (his third shot) on the par-5 sixteenth gap on PGA West’s Pete Dye Stadium Course. Kim hit a superb shot — so superb, in actual fact, that he hit the flagstick.
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And that’s the place the difficulty started. As a substitute of ricocheting off the pin and touchdown someplace on the inexperienced, Kim’s ball shot off the flagstick and ran off the entrance of the inexperienced. And sadly, it didn’t cease there. The ball continued to run all the way in which down down a slope right into a deep bunker, the place it in the end settled subsequent to a rake.
It was a brutal and expensive setback to make certain. Kim ended up making a triple-bogey 8 when he ought to have had a makeable have a look at birdie. Terrible!
However then, the great thing about the other aspect of golf’s unpredictable breaks shined by way of.
On the very subsequent gap, the par-3 seventeenth, Kim’s tee shot sailed simply left of the inexperienced, catching the rocks surrounding it, and bouncing excessive into the air. One other catastrophe appeared imminent, however considerably miraculously, Kim’s ball then appeared on the inexperienced, pin excessive, and 24 toes from the outlet.
Maybe much more amazingly, Kim transformed the putt for birdie.
Going from a nasty break to one, a triple-bogey to a birdie, on back-to-back holes? There should be a phrase for that …
…Oh yeah! Golf.
Golf.com Photographer
As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of feminine varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everybody on the masthead. She will out-hustle them within the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily chargeable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular initiatives, akin to GOLF’s inaugural Model Issue, which debuted in February 2018. Her original interview sequence, “A Spherical With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each within the journal and in video type on GOLF.com.