Somehow I don't think the winds are down in Tulsa for the second round of the SemGroup Championship. Lorena Ochoa followed up yesterday's 73 with a birdie-free 74, but at +5 she is nowhere close to being out of the tournament--she's T26 as of this writing but almost certainly will be in the top 20 by the time the afternoon groups have completed their rounds. Other first-round leaders tumbled as well: Mi Hyun Kim followed up her 70 with a 77 to match Ochoa's 2-round total, Cristie Kerr followed up her 72 with a 78 (+7, T49 thus far), and Nancy Scranton followed up her 72 with an 84 to miss the cut. By the same token, even a decent round any other week moved you way up this leaderboard: despite failing to break 80 on Thursday, Jimin Kang's 70 on Friday has her at +10, 1 shot on the wrong side of the cut line right now, with a better than 75% chance of playing on the weekend; Na On Min's bogey-free 68 and Na Yeon Choi's 70 got them to +3 and T13 for now, with a 50-50 chance of being in the top 10 heading into moving day; and Jee Young Lee's 69 pulled her even with Hee Young Park at +2 and T7 for now, with an excellent chance of being in the top 5 at the end of the day. But the best indicator of how tough Cedar Ridge is playing is Paula Creamer's twin-bogey finish that dropped her from -3 on the tournament to -1 in her final 3 holes for the second consecutive day. The way this thing is looking, if you can make sure you break 75 each day and break 70 twice along the way, you, too, could be a SemGroup Champion!
[Update 1 (7:48 pm): Ji Young Oh was -2 with holes to play but bogeyed the 12th and 15th to fall 1 stroke behind Creamer. Despite their late-round troubles, Creamer and Oh are the only two golfers in the field to finish their first two rounds at par or better for the tournament. Brittany Lang had a chance to join them, but a bogey on her penultimate hole, the 8th, dropped her to +1, T4 with Leta Lindley. Ai Miyazato, by contrast, birdied the 8th and 9th to limit the damage on her day to a 73, good enough for +2 and T5 with Lee, Park, Angela Stanford, and Meena Lee. Just as I predicted, +3 was good enough for T10 and +5 for T20, while there's still a chance for the cut line to go as high as +11. Angela Park just needed a par on her final hole, the 9th, to be there and a birdie to assure that she'd be playing on the weekend, but a bogey assured instead that she'd miss the cut, along with Natalie Gulbis, Morgan Pressel, Momoko Ueda, Sun Young Yoo, and Sherri Steinhauer. That's only the 2nd missed cut of Park's career.]
[Update 2 (9:14 pm): My bad--Vicky Hurst tied Pat Hurst at +4, knocking Ochoa, Kim, and the rest at +5 to T21. Kerr and the rest at +8, by the way, ended up in the top 40. But the cut stayed at +10.]
[Update 3 (5/3/08, 4:15 am): Doug Ferguson's AP story tries to shoehorn the tournament into a Creamer-Ochoa showdown and while he includes some good details he misses stories the LPGA.com notes and interviews page picked up on. As usual, Hound Dog's recap and highlights give you a better sense of how the field played.]
1 comment:
Constructivist,
Ferguson doing his usual LPGA hack work. What's he doing in OK this week? Maybe Ochoa's streak is the reason. I thought Ferguson only goes to Tulsa if a tournament is being played at Southern Hills.
My gut feeling- The Seoul Sister drought will end this week. Not that the press has noticed. Randall Mell at the Sun-Sentinel made note of it last week after I told him about it.
Cheers,
Bill
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