Kevin Chappell stood 106 yards away from the pin on the 10th hole as he lined up his second shot, locked in a sudden-death playoff with Arizona’s Creighton Honeck for the Pac-10 Championship.
Earlier in his marathon day Wednesday, Chappell had stood in almost the exact same spot, pulled out a pitching wedge, and rocketed the ball 20 yards over the green, leading to a costly bogey on the 377-yard par 4.
“I just couldn’t get the earlier shot out of my head,” Chappell said.
Chappell, the star of the UCLA men’s golf team, was so worried about hitting the pitching wedge too far that he overcompensated and, this time, hit the ball 10 yards short of the green.
Honeck knocked a similar shot to within five feet of the pin, birdied the hole and won the title.
“He had to play it carefully,” UCLA coach Derek Freeman said of Chappell’s shot. “(Honeck) made a birdie on the first playoff hole; there’s just not much Kevin could do.”
Chappell had played solidly throughout the 72-hole event and entered the final round in first place. He shot a 72 Wednesday, his first round of the week over par, to finish in a first-place tie with Honeck. While many of his UCLA teammates struggled, Chappell was able to play well because of his consistent ability to hit greens in regulation.
The senior fired four excellent rounds ““ 70, 68, 71 and 72 ““ on the par-71 course, even though he struggled putting once he reached the Meadow Club’s tricky greens. Many of the pins were placed on the most sloped areas of the greens.
“I definitely didn’t feel like I deserved to win,” Chappell said. “It’s good to know that I can not play my best golf and still have a chance to win.”
The Bruin team didn’t have that chance.
After a disastrous Tuesday that saw UCLA shoot a 17-over par team score, the Bruins were essentially eliminated from contention on the tournament’s final day.
The team wasn’t able to handle the challenging conditions of the course ““ wind combined with the difficult pin placements ““ and finished four strokes behind Arizona State, which won the team title.
The course setup drew the ire of players on all 10 teams competing, but Freeman made no excuses for his team’s lackluster performance. He said he was “absolutely disappointed.”
“No matter how the course is set up, every team has to be on form,” Freeman said. “It doesn’t make any difference how tough it is. We just didn’t play very well.”
Of the six players UCLA brought to the event, only Chappell finished below par.
The Bruins got decent performances from junior Lucas Lee, who finished at 3-over, and freshman Philip Francis and senior Craig Leslie, who both finished at 4-over.
Junior Erik Flores and sophomore Jason Kang, the other two Bruins, struggled.
Flores finished at 15-over and Kang at 19-over.
“It was just very challenging,” Freeman said. “These guys haven’t played pins like this. This is what professional golf is like.”
Chappell said the Meadow Club course, located in Fairfax, Calif., is normally a track that can lead to low scores, but that it played much more difficult than normal because of the pin placements and wind conditions.
“The way the golf course was set up identified the team with the most patience,” Chappell said.
The final finish for UCLA, just four strokes behind champion Arizona State, was a bit of a surprise. USC had led the team competition at the beginning of the day Wednesday, at 4-over par.
But the Trojans played badly on the final 18 holes, with a team score of 11-over par.
“We’re very dissappointed as a team,” Chappell said. “Looking at it now, we only lost by four shots and we can all think of four shots individually that we would like to have back.”
UCLA, USC and Stanford were the favorites entering the tournament, and all three teams will surely contend for the NCAA Championships at the end of May. Chappell, the No. 4 player in the country according to the Golfweek ratings, could have a chance at the individual title.
The Bruins now have two weeks off before the NCAA regionals on May 15.
Unlike the Pac-10 format, the NCAA system consists of five-player teams instead of six. Freeman said that Chappell, Lee, Leslie, Flores and Francis would be the players on that five-man team.
“This team can contend at the NCAAs,” Freeman said. “We have signs of brilliance and then we just make mistakes that shouldn’t be made at this level.
“We just have a lot of work left to do.”