It’s Friday, cut day at the ISPS Handa Australian Open. Ángel Ayora, who at 19 is playing his first tournament on the DP World Tour as a professional, hits the drive off the tee on hole 18 of the The Australian Golf Club. It’s a 486-meter par 5. He’s just made a saving birdie on 16 and recovered sensationally from the bunker on 17 to secure par. He’s at -2. There’s still a lot of golf to be played, as he teed off in the morning, but José María Zamora, tournament director, assures Juan Ochoa, Ángel’s caddie and coach, that the cut will definitely be at -2. Conclusion: he needs par to play the weekend.
Ayora’s drive has gone a bit to the right, but no more. It must be in the rough. It’s a par 5 and they shouldn’t have too many problems getting par. Mistake. Things start to get complicated when they get to the ball. The bounce and roll didn’t help at all. “We get to the ball and it had just gone to the sandy area where the spectators walk, with the bad luck that it stays in the heel of a footprint and with a root in front. Unsmokable,” confesses Juan Ochoa to Ten Golf. Well, par is no longer as simple a task as it seemed.
They plan a survival shot. Hit as hard as you can and see if you can advance about 40-50 meters to the fairway with a ball that is sure to come out capped due to its position with the root. “Ángel hits it with everything and moves it six meters in flight for a total of about fifteen. The big problem is that he’s still in the rough, 198 meters from the flag, to hit the third shot and forced to play a slice (pronounced left to right effect) with the 5 iron and water on the right,” explains Juan. A terrifying scenario.
The ball doesn’t do the desired effect. It goes straight and ends up in a short green bunker on the left, about 40 meters from the hole. He hits the fourth shot. “He hits it a bit too heavy, it doesn’t fly enough and goes into the next bunker, just before the green”. No more. Either he puts it in from the sand or he goes home…
And he puts it in. “With two co…… From the palm slap we gave each other, my hand has been hurting for about 15 minutes,” the coach happily recounts. The crowd, understandably, went crazy. “It must be that Seve gave him a hand with the bunkers today,” says Juan.
Here is the graphic of how the decisive hole to make the cut for Ayora went:
Interestingly, the day before the young Andalusian golfer had been practicing an exercise that consisted of putting balls into a basket from the bunker… Who would have told him at that time what would happen the next day.
So, Ayora will be playing the weekend at the Australian Open, eager to get the thorn out of that The Australian Golf Club that he couldn’t beat today, although he ended up leaving one of the most exciting moments of the day.
