The Spanish Samuel Espinosa (+1) has just made the cut at the PNG Open, the first tournament of the season on the PGA Tour of Australasia played at the Royal Port of Moresby in Papua New Guinea. Between the venue for this event and Pedreña, Samuel’s hometown, there are more than 15,000 kilometres of distance, roughly the same as between Madrid and Tokyo. Papua New Guinea is a large island located in a region known as Melanesia, north of Australia, east of Indonesia, which owns the western half of the island, and west of Tonga, Fiji and the Solomon Islands.
The story of Samuel is the living example of putting in every possible means and effort to make a dream come true. Whatever it takes. And we are not just talking about money. The Cantabrian golfer already played on the PGA Tour of Australasia last year, it did not go very well for him, but he decided to try again and therefore attended the final stage of qualifying school held in Georgia last July. He did not earn a full card, but he did secure conditional status. In Papua New Guinea he is playing with an invitation and the obligation to play well in order to gain access to a fuller schedule with the upcoming rerankings.
The start of his second experience on the Australasian circuit has been an odyssey. This cut in Papua New Guinea is not just another to add to his career. He will remember it for the rest of his life, and it is that nothing more could have gone wrong in the hours beforehand. He left Charlotte last Saturday bound for Fiji with a stopover in Dallas. In Fiji his flight to Papua New Guinea was cancelled and he had to stay in Vijay Singh’s country for around 25 hours until the next plane departed. The idea that his clubs and luggage would be lost was hardly even worth mentioning…
On Tuesday he played three holes with clubs borrowed from a club member. A senior bag, with the huge differences that exist compared to a professional’s. He did what he could. It was virtually impossible to control those shafts. At least the following day the clubs his caddie had brought arrived — a 48-year-old friend from his club in the United States called Dan Sanders. He is a well-placed businessman who offered Samuel a few weeks ago that he accompany him as caddie in these early tournaments. It was his dream and the Spaniard accepted.
Well, it turns out Sanders had decided to bring a small bag of clubs to be able to play a little if he had time and even to test the greens and the short game and thus help Samuel a bit more. He is an amateur, but he is taking his job very seriously and is helping his professional a lot. He already accompanied him at the qualifying school in Georgia.
Sanders’s bag contained only eight clubs. Less is better than nothing, Samuel thought. On Wednesday he spent practically the whole day hitting balls with those clubs on the practice range with the Flightscope to try to adapt. They were somewhat better than the club member’s, but still a world away from Samuel’s, especially the shafts. He worked to find a way to hit the ball with some consistency, without getting into too much trouble. In other words, trying to make it go as straight as possible and avoid big mistakes. All of this in five hours on the range. He preferred to do this work rather than play the course and it proved to be the right decision.
On Thursday, in the first round, he went out with a bag that contained two wedges of 54° and 52°, a pitching wedge, an 8-iron, a 7, a 5 and a driver, and he borrowed a putter and another 60° wedge from a member. With that he played the opening round of the season on the PGA Tour of Australasia. Well, with that bag, with shafts that were not his, and in a round with poor weather, plenty of wind and rain, Espinosa was able to make par (72 strokes). If this is not epic, it comes very close. He made a bogey, a birdie and 16 pars. Damage-control golf.
Obviously, since he arrived in Papua New Guinea without his clubs, Samuel has moved heaven and earth to get them to him as soon as possible. There was no way to get them out of Los Angeles until, by chance, he met one of the region heads of DHL at the Port Moresby course, the country’s capital. He took care of everything and on Friday morning the clubs were at the Papua airport via Manila. He went to collect them and returned to the course with just enough time to go out and play the second round.
Needless to say, going from his caddie’s clubs to his own, however much they are his, is not like flicking a switch. Samuel felt very strange today after all the work he did on Wednesday to adapt to the other clubs, hitting shots he had never attempted in competition. On top of that, the wind was blowing at over 40 kilometres per hour. It was a battle, a struggle to get the round home.
In the end, he shot 73, a total of +1, with three birdies, two bogeys and a double bogey. He made the cut by two strokes. He did what he could, but above all he is very proud of how he fought. Making the cut was important to add points with the aim of earning a fuller schedule and, above all, with the main objective of being able to qualify for the Australian Open and the BMW PGA Australian Open on the DP World Tour that will be played at the end of the year.
It is about knocking on every possible door to play on a big tour and be able to make a living from golf. In two weeks he will play the DP World Tour qualifying school in Europe. Whatever it takes, whenever it takes and wherever it takes. A lot of credit.
We will see how the Papua New Guinea tournament ends. He has two rounds left. In any case, no one can take away the experience and the story he will be able to tell his grandchildren. And as for Sanders, his caddie, there is something very good: “It’s impossible for us to have a worse trip than this one, from here on everything has to get better”