Mizuno Classic - 1st Round

Mayu Hattori and Miki Saiki, two JLPGA Tour members, lead the way after one round at the Mizuno Classic.  Another JLPGAer, Eun-A Lim and Ji-Yai Shin are tied for third place one shot behind while a crowd of nine others are tied for fifth, two behind.

In my preview I said the LPGA contingent wasn't the strongest but this is beyond surprising - the top four players are non-members as are six of the top 13, eight of the top 19 and 18 of the top 40.  Hattori, fresh off a J-Tour victory last week, played bogey-less en route to her 67.  Saiki bogeyed #2 (her 11^th hole) but ran off three straight birdies to tie for the lead.  The notable scores are after the jump:

69  Jee Young Lee, Ji Young Oh, Shiho Oyama, Shanshan Feng, Yuko Mitsuka

70  Na Yeon Choi, Mi Hyun Kim, Momoko Ueda, Bo Bae Song, Teresa Lu

71  Yuri Fudoh, Ai Miyazato, Louise Friberg, Young Kim, Jill McGill

72  Karrie Webb, In-Kyung Kim, Christina Kim, Nikki Campbell

73  Yani Tseng, Candie Kung, Miho Koga, Shinobu Moromizato

74  Inbee Park, Ji-Hee Lee, Akiko Fukushima

75  Morgan Pressel, Rachel Hetherington, Kim Hall, Rui Kitada

Those last two lines list scores that while they aren't so great, they are still only 7-8 shots out of the lead.  I point them out because - the four players at 75 are tied for last place!  I don't ever recall a round where nobody shot worse than 75, even at Samsung or ADT with their small elite fields.  The average score yesterday was 71.5, which is not an unusually low number.  Friday's scores were just more compressed top-to-bottom than I have ever seen.  Because of this compression, I would say that everyone in the field still has a chance to win.  Which in a 54-hole event is absolutely incredible.

During her post-round interview Hattori mentioned her coach, Ayako Okamoto.  Okamoto is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame who won 17 times on the LPGA Tour in the 1980s and was the 1987 Rolex Player of the Year.  Not a bad choice to be learning from.