Duffers show they’re not chumps
By Daily Bruin Staff
April 23, 2001 9:00 p.m.
Arizona 837 Arizona State 852 UCLA 858
By Pauline Vu
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Last Friday started out badly for the UCLA men’s golf
team.
First, when the team showed up at Stanford Golf Course for their
practice time, they learned the U.S. Intercollegiates tournament
gave them a 1:40 p.m. start time, the very latest start time in the
tournament.
Then the Bruins found out they would be paired with Washington
State (the Pac-10’s last-place team), Santa Clara (one of the
lowest-ranked teams in the district) and golfers competing as
individuals.
“They were basically the three worst (groups of) people
that we could be paired with,” junior Parker McLachlin
said.
The final straw was the directions. UCLA Coach Brad Sherfy asked
the Stanford coach for directions back to the hotel, and through
some misunderstanding, the team ended up turning left on El Camino
Real when they should’ve turned right. A 20-minute trip took
an hour and a half.
By the time they got to Stanford Golf Course for real
competition on Saturday, the UCLA men’s golf team was
fuming.
“We wanted to show these people that we weren’t
chumps,” McLachlin said.
“We thought that everybody at Stanford was just showing us
no respect, so we went out and tried to gain our respect
back,” he continued.
And the Bruins did that, coming up with their best performance
of the year, a third-place finish out of 18 teams with a score of
858.
Only No. 9 Arizona (837) and No. 6 Arizona State (852) beat UCLA
(ranked 41st in the Golfweek poll). The Bruins, meanwhile, beat No.
14 USC by just one stroke.
“I’m just glad we beat ‘SC. They’ve been
beating us every single tournament this year,” McLachlin
said.
It was the team’s breakout performance. All year
they’ve been dissatisfied with mediocre finishes. This time,
things were different.
“We hadn’t gotten off to a good start the whole
year,” sophomore J.T. Kohut said. “We dig ourselves in
a hole and we have to dig ourselves out of it. (At this tournament)
we played the last two rounds to our potential.”
Another difference was that the Bruins got a lot of strength
from the bottom half of their lineup. Kohut, usually the
team’s No. 5 player, was the team’s second finisher,
tying at 11th place with a score of 213.
“It’s really encouraging to see the bottom of our
lineup being just as strong as the top of our lineup,”
McLachlin said.
McLachlin led the Bruins with an eighth-place finish (212
strokes). Sophomore Travis Johnson (26th, 217) and freshmen Steve
Conway (33rd, 218) and John Merrick (38th, 219) rounded out the
team.
The finish guarantees the men a place in the NCAA West
Regionals. Only the top 12 teams in District 8 make the cut, and
for weeks the Bruins had been hanging around 10th place.
After this finish, their ranking should be high enough that even
a poor performance at this weekend’s Pac-10 Championships
won’t matter. UCLA has a spot at Regionals.
“It’s just a load off of our minds,” McLachlin
said.
Now that it’s the end of the season the Bruins are finally
playing to the best of their ability.
“All of us are starting to come together as a team,”
Merrick said.
“We know that we’re good,” he said.
“We’re finally starting to show it.”
And it helps when they want to prove they’re not
chumps.
