Manu Elvira (PAR) will take a while to forget today’s round at the Majlis course of the Emirates Golf Club. Not so much because of the score (75 shots), which wasn’t good, nor for being too hard on himself, but almost out of disbelief. Several minutes had passed after signing his card, and he was still perplexed. In fact, jokingly and seriously, he wondered if there was a hidden camera on him during the second round of the Hero Dubai Desert Classic.
The absurdity started early. The second shot on the 10th. Impeccable drive and a ground-to-air-to-ground missile that overshot the target by about 50 metres. Strange shot. Manu composed himself and saved a commendable par after a bunker shot and putt. On the 12th hole, another very strange shot. He missed the drive to the right, and the second shot ended even further right. Desert. Strange, strange. This time he didn’t save par, but managed a bogey that wasn’t too bad. What a start. Strange things, but nothing even close to what was yet to come…
On the 13th hole, he made a sensational birdie. First, he hit a good drive and then placed it at pin height, on the collar, with an eagle chance. The start had been bizarre, but no damage was done. At par for the day four holes later. From there, he played high-level golf. Beyond the drive on the 16th hole, he practically didn’t miss a shot. He hit great shots on the 14th and 15th and made two very good birdies on the 17th and 18th. Golf to frame.
Everything remained more or less the same at the start of his second nine. Easy par on the 1st and a good birdie on the 2nd with a superb putt of about eight metres. He was at -5 overall, fully in the battle for everything. At that moment, he was in the top 5. But the hidden camera was still on…
On the 3rd hole, he missed a very good birdie chance from just under two metres and made a bogey on the 4th. Up to this point, everything was normal. Occupational hazards. He had just made a super putt on the 2nd and missed the one on the 3rd. One for the other. And the bogey on the 4th was just part of the game. The flag today was criminal, on the left side. It was the fifth most difficult hole of the day. The big stuff comes now…
Manu hit the drive on the 5th hole with the 3-wood. Impeccable. He drew it exactly as he wanted, taking it out to the left and opening it up. He picked up the tee and started walking, thinking about the second shot. It should be a short shot, so a birdie might even be possible. Why not? As he approached the position of his ball, he already saw something strange. The volunteers were looking up. What’s going on here? It seemed the ball was missing.
Manu asked the marshal, who said he heard a thud on the palm tree, and then nothing fell. There was no bounce. No one saw it. They searched. They searched. They kept searching. They didn’t trust it. Surely they were mistaken, and it was around there. But no. It didn’t appear anywhere. It was inexplicable. They looked up, but nothing was visible. He didn’t even have the option to pull a Patrick Reed on the 17th in 2023 (when he looked through binoculars at a palm tree and claimed the ball he saw was his when on TV it seemed his ball had hit another palm tree). He had to swallow the bitter pill.
Manu had to make a short run of 250 metres back to the tee to hit again. It was already his third shot. He couldn’t get the bad luck out of his head. His 3-wood had been perfect… “Nothing like this had ever happened to me as a professional,” he confessed later to Ten Golf. He composed himself and hit a magnificent fourth shot with the second ball. But the putt didn’t go in. The hidden camera.
It’s not easy to get something like that out of your head. From being -5 and with a clear chance to go -6, he went to -2 in half an hour and was looking at the cut. On the 6th, he hit a spectacular drive, but Murphy was lurking, and nothing went right. All that was missing was for him to shout “what is this,” “what is this,” like Matías Prats, when his second shot on this tough par 4 ended up just to the right and fell into the rough… Another bogey. He was at -1. And the cut was +1, but par was still not ruled out. And he had three very difficult holes left. Tension was an understatement.
With the pressure skyrocketing, he made two great putts from about 13 metres on the 7th and holed another crucial par putt on the 8th from about two metres. “On the 9th, I played for bogey, I swear. With everything that was happening… I missed the drive to the bunker and with the 9-iron, I hit it completely to the right. I didn’t want anything to do with the water. I chipped and two-putted,” he explained. A +5 partial in six fateful holes. Total par. Cut surpassed by one.
Manu couldn’t believe what he had experienced today at the Emirates, but he still had the coolness to make the positive reading: “thank goodness I had the margin I had to make the cut. And there are still 36 holes ahead, and the reality, except for that accident on the 5th, is that I’m playing very well,” he noted. He has two rounds ahead to laugh in front of the hidden camera or break it with a shot. It’s in his hands.
