All Right Then!

T-14 for Ai Miyazato at the ANZ Ladies Masters--not half bad. Basically the leaders pulled away from her (except for the young 'uns who blew up--Ya Ni Tseng with a 79? say it ain't so!), with Lisa Hall avoiding a playoff thanks to a Hyun Ju Shin bogey on the 18th hole (continuing the snake-bit Seoul Sisters trend that's been going on for far too long).

Can't tell from the stats if the course was drying out and giving them more roll so her 3-wood was going further or if Ai-chan was pulling out the driver more often today, but she averaged 249 yards off the tee while hitting more fairways than in previous rounds, so either way it's a positive sign. She still couldn't hit enough greens (10/18) to give herself a lot of good birdie chances, though, and her PPGIR (1.80) suffered for it. So she held steady at -1 Sunday to finish at -6, while getting passed by Sakura Yokomine for low Japanese honors and falling further behind Louise Stahle (-11) and Karin Sjodin (-9) for low Class of '06 honors. That said, she was within 4 of Karrie Webb, 3 of Ji-Yai Shin, and 2 of Laura Davies, while finishing ahead of Rachel Hetherington (-4) and the rest of her rookie class. Her final stats from the tournament were almost an exact match of her 2007 stats, except that she putted much better this week, so she averaged under par on the par 3s, par 4s, and par 5s, something very few in the field can boast of. Too bad she couldn't keep up the putting magic of the first two rounds today, but like I said yesterday, I'm happy with this result (and telling myself that I'm an idiot to be disappointed that it wasn't better). Rome wasn't built in a day, &c.

Ai-chan is on the comeback trail. Here's hoping Valentine's Day is kind to her!