CVS/pharmacy - Epilogue

Beatriz Recari's win was about as unexpected as you can get.  In 14 prior starts this season, she had only made the cut in four of them.  On the plus side, two of those four wound up as Top 10 finishes - T9 at the Sybase Match Play (lost in third round) and T10 at Farr.  Beatriz finished T29 at Arkansas, so she was on a slight up-swing coming in although she was nowhere near my Hot 20.  Of the 208 players I have in my Player Rankings spreadsheet, Recari ranked at #157 coming into CVS.  The win should just barely nudge her into my Top 70.  Without question, Beatriz Recari is this week's Big Surprise Award winner.

How did she do it?  What part of Bea's game improved so much that she was able to win?  Recari's strong suit is her accuracy off the tee and this week she hit 47 of 52 fairways (five par-3s at Blackhawk CC account for the smaller sample size), an amazing .904 rate.  She also reached the green in regulation at a .750 rate, quite a bit higher than her .674 rate coming.  113 putts over four rounds - 23.25 per - is an outstanding number given the good GIR rate.  Considering all of her prior numbers, Recari won primarily because she putted extremely well.

It was kind of weird to be referring to Recari and Gwladys Nocera as rookies contending for their "first wins" yesterday, as both have played multiple seasons on the LET.  Bea spent the last four seasons playing in Europe and won the Finnish Masters just last year.  Nocera has ten LET victories (eleven worldwide) over seven seasons and was that tour's leading money winner in 2008.  With Karine Icher also among the Sunday contenders, the CVS had a decidedly European flavor.

After three days of beautiful weather, Sunday greeted the players coldly and wetly.  A steady rain was falling until the final couple of holes.  For some reason, nearly every player on the GC telecast was wearing dark blue rain pants with a dark blue slicker.  For a minute, I thought I was watching Solheim with a dozen unidentifiable players all wearing the same colors.  Did the foul weather catch everyone off guard and force them to all buy rain gear from the same source?

Twice now in the last 13 months, Michele Redman has come within a stroke or two of collecting her first win since 2000.  The GC folks told us that Michele was considering retirement earlier this year and even applied for the golf coaching job at the University of Minnesota.  I'd say as long as she keeps making that yearly push, she ought to put off looking for employment elsewhere.

Even though I didn't post about it (I was out of town until Sunday afternoon), I did hear about Brittany Lincicome's opening 61 and subsequent 76.  The TV folks are always telling us that those extremely low rounds are very hard to follow up so I thought I'd take a closer look.  I've listed the fourteen rounds where a player has shot 61 or better.  The second number is the player's score in her next competitive round (asterisk denotes the follow-up round was in another event).

Only one other player besides Lincicome followed up her great round by shooting over par and Acker-Macosko only exceeded it by one.  It's very surprising to me that nobody had ever followed up one of these great rounds with a score more than twelve shots worse before Friday.  Maybe some of the 62s or 63s did.  Back to the list, four of the players continued to shoot lights out while most regressed to the 68-70 range.  The average follow-up score is 68.9 - a few strokes higher of course, but nowhere near an "average" or "poor" score - and I think most players would take that scoring average week-in week-out.

Brittany was surely disappointed that her 61 didn't translate into a victory but she's not this week's Big Disappointment.  I pegged Azahara Munoz for a Top 10 finish in this less-than-stellar field but she wound up missing the cut by one.  If you had told me a rookie was going to win this week, I'd have put money on Aza...good thing you didn't tell me that.