STILLWATER, Okla. “”mdash; UCLA’s title hopes at the NCAA
Men’s Golf Championship melted away under the 106-degree
Oklahoma sun at Karsten Creek Golf Club.
The Bruins shot 10-over par in the final round, their second
lowest round of the championship, and finished alone in third place
at 45-over par.
The Clemson Tigers held off a gutsy Oklahoma State team to win
their first men’s golf championship in school
history.Â
Although the Bruins played well enough to post a lower score in
the final round than frontrunners Clemson and Oklahoma State, they
never mustered a serious charge toward the top of the
leaderboard.
“We’re disappointed we didn’t win the
tournament,” UCLA head coach O.D. Vincent said. “We
have a team that could win the tournament, but we just didn’t
play as well as we could have this week. You have to take your hats
off to Clemson.”
The Tigers shot 39-over par for the tournament, defeating the
OSU Cowboys by two shots.
“We got off to a horrible start again,” Clemson head
coach Larry Penley said of his team’s start to the fourth
round.
“Then we got to the (ninth hole), made four birdies, and
it kind of turned things around a little bit. Then Oklahoma
State started making boo-boos, and we were just trying to hang on.
It was really just a survival day.”
While Clemson took home the team championship, Arizona
State’s Alejandro Canizares claimed the individual crown by
shooting one-under par for the tournament, the only player to
survive Karsten Creek in red figures.
UCLA got itself into serious trouble at the end of its third
round, stumbling into the clubhouse shooting nine-over par over the
last four holes of play.
“As a team, I think we had a sub-par tournament,”
junior Roy Moon said. We had two bad rounds that really cost us,
especially (the third round) when we went nine-over on the last
four holes. It didn’t put us out of the tournament but dug us
a big hole that we tried to fill back up.”
Unfortunately for the Bruins, they couldn’t claw
themselves out of the hole.
Moon’s even-par 72 in the final round was one of
UCLA’s best rounds of the championship, considering
Friday’s devilish pin placements. The junior finished his
round in style, birdying the extremely challenging 17th hole and
the water-lined 18th hole. Moon, along with teammate Steve Conway,
finished the tournament at 13-over par and in a tie for 31st
place.
Junior John Merrick shot a one-over 73 in his final round to
shoot nine-over for the championship. Individually, Merrick was the
highest-ranking Bruin at Karsten Creek, finishing tied for
16th.
Junior Travis Johnson, playing in front of the largest gallery
on the course and with the No. 1-ranked player in the country,
Oklahoma State’s Hunter Mahan, held his own under pressure to
shoot a four-over 76 in the final round to finish the tournament at
10-over par. Johnson finished tied for 19th.
Although they finished in third place and came a little short of
achieving their ultimate goal of winning the championship, the
Bruins were upbeat.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Conway said.
“I’m happy (with our finish), I’m already looking
forward to next year. We’re not graduating anybody, and we
got the same crew coming back next year. I know we can do
it.”Â
With the senior-laden lineup of Conway, Johnson, Merrick and
Moon expected to compete in 2004, Vincent knows next year’s
main challenge is going to be keeping his seniors focused on their
golf games, and not on the plethora of distractions certain to
surround them.
“The challenge for us next year with four seniors is to
get the best year out of them, which is hard for seniors to do
because there are a lot of distractions for them,” Vincent
said.
“We need to change some things, we need to improve some of
the ways we go about things, so next year, when we’re here,
we’re better than we are now.”