For most folks Friday is a day to celebrate. The weekend is almost here, and we are looking forward to knocking off of work and having a couple of days to relax and have fun—maybe play some golf. For tournament golfers, though, Friday has an entirely different meaning—Friday is Cut Day.
They call Saturday “Moving Day”, the day when players put the pedal to the metal and try to move up the scoreboard to be in position to make a run at a win on Sunday, but to get to Moving Day you have to get past Cut Day.
While we recreational golfers pay to play, the pros play to get paid, and Friday is when it gets real. The field in most professional events—and USGA championships, too, though there are amateurs in the field—is around 150 to 156 players, and less than half of them get to play the weekend for a chance at a trophy and a paycheck (or just the trophy, in the case of the amateurs).
Friday is the day when you sink or swim. If you had a bad day on Thursday, in the first round, you had better step up on Friday; if you rocked the house in the first round, you better keep it up and stay in that Top-60-and-ties group.
Missing the cut was known as “trunk slamming” back in the days when Tour pros drove from tournament to tournament. I guess now they just slam the tailgate of the SUV courtesy car before they head to the airport—but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
There were few big moves on Cut Day at the Olympic Club for the 76th U.S. Women’s Open—mostly just a lot of hanging on grimly to a position above the cut line.
Less than half of the players who occupied the top 20 spots on the leaderboard after the second round improved their scores from Thursday to Friday, and with few exceptions they improved, if at all, by one or two strokes.
Sarah Burnham, a second-year pro out of Michigan State, orchestrated a ten-stroke turnaround. After carding a 5-over 76 in the first round she came back and hammered out a 5-under 66 in the second. She turned her first round birdie/bogey of 1/6 count on its head, carding six birdies against one bogey and turning a T-84 and a likely missed cut into T-12 and playing on the weekend.
A little outside the Top 20, NorCal player Yealimi Noh, the winner of the 2018 U.S. Girls’ Junior at the NCGA’s home course, Poppy Hills, also made a dramatic move, as she went from a 5-over 76 in the first round to a 2-under 69 in the second.
Noh’s seven-stroke turnaround came on the strength of five birdies against a bogey and a double, as opposed to her first-round count of three birdies against six bogeys and a double, floating her fifty-five spots up the leaderboard from T-84 to T-29.
San Francisco-born Danielle Kang made a four-stroke improvement from Round 1 to Round 2, obviously carrying no scar tissue from a triple-bogey 8—yes, the dreaded snowman—on the long par-five 16th hole in Round 1.
Between Danielle Kang at T-12 and Yealimi No at T-29, two more NorCal players made the cut. Lucy Li, the one-time girl wonder who qualified for the 2014 U.S. Women’s Open at age 11, posted 73-71–144 for T-20, tied with Monterey native daughter Mina Harigae with 71-72–144.
Harigae, whose round I followed today, missed a much higher finish by a cumulative 18 inches or so, based on the number of close-call putts that just didn’t drop for her today. If she figures out the mysteries of the Lake Course’s greens over the weekend she could well be a contender for the title.
In other second-round news, anyone who was waiting for the Megha Ganne bubble to burst was disappointed. The 17-year-old amateur, whose biggest success previous to this event was in Augusta National’s Drive, Pitch, and Putt competitions, matched three bogeys with three birdies to card an even-par 71 and hold on to her 4-under score. She was dropped out of her co-leading position when Yuka Saso of the Phillippines added a second-round 67 to her first round 69 to take over the lead, and Korea’s Jeongeun Lee6 moved to 5-under and solo second after posting 70-67–137.
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