While grinding on the driving range Tuesday morning, seeking answers to the questions bedeviling his golf game, Scott Piercy reached a personal crossroads. Two choices confronted him: give up or tee it up Thursday.
Really. The Shell Houston Open’s first-round leader, a man who would go on to bank as good a score as anybody ever has in a tournament round played at the Golf Club of Houston, thought his best option might be “to go home and not waste my time.”
nstead, Piercy put his head down and kept working – for, he said, “12, 13 hours.” And, lo, “in the 13th hour … something kind of clicked and I kind of figured it out. On Wednesday, I kind of engrained it, kept working and got pretty good.”
Straight away, Piercy birdied No. 10, his first hole. He also birdied his last hole, No. 9, with a 30-foot putt. In between, he also delivered a stretch of five birdies in a row. The card he signed at the end of his work day (a mere 4½ hours long this time) had a 63 on it. That’s nine swings better than par. There had only been four 63s by anybody in the dozen previous springs since Houston’s PGA stop put down new roots in greater Humble in 2003.
Two of them, by Johnson Wagner in 2008 and Phil Mickelson in 2011, wound up on the winning card Sunday.
But on a partly sunny, windy day, the course proved relatively defenseless and Piercy wouldn’t exactly lap the field. Late finisher Alex Cejka squeezed four birdies out of his back nine – the course’s front nine – by rolling in a couple of long-distance putts of his own and, despite a bogey on his last hole, No. 9, posted a 65.
“It was not all that easy, you know,” Cejka protested, citing the swirling breezes. “But if you make a couple 30-footers and 40-footers, that helps.”
J.B. Holmes, who also teed off after lunch on the back side and promptly eagled the first hole, came in at 65, too. Holmes’ lone stumble came after he got to 8-under with four holes left when his tee shot on No. 6 found a fairway bunker and his approach nearly sailed out of bounds. He scrambled to save a bogey, then laid down four pars, staying safely in the hunt.
Mickelson, Luke Guthrie, Charles Howell III and Baytown’s Shawn Stefani are tied for fourth with 66s. Houston’s best resident golfer, Patrick Reed, was in a crowd at 68.
Coming off a desultory finish at the Valero Texas Open in San Antonio, Mickelson titillated the early arriving spectators by birdieing three of his first four holes and later got as low as 7-under before making bogey on his last hole.
“The course is in pristine condition,” he said. “The greens being soft are going to allow us to get more aggressive (aiming for) the pins and make some more birdies. The scores are going to be low. I’m just glad I was one of them.”
The three-time Masters champion will be one of at least 36 players in the SHO field heading from here to Augusta National for the season’s first major next week. Piersy could increase the number to 37, although he admitted he’d best temper his enthusiasm.
“It’s the first round,” he said. “If I’m sitting here Sunday, then I’ll be super-excited. If I (keep playing) like I did today, I would say there’s a pretty good chance of that.”
The 36-year-old Las Vegas pro owns only two Tour victories, but the first one, in the Reno-Tahoe Open in 2011, included a sizzling 61. He also took home the first-place check in the Canadian Open in 2012. By the spring of 2013, however, he began experiencing “an explosion in my right elbow every time I swung the club.”
Not good. Although he’s left-handed, he plays right-handed. But, by taking cortisone shots, he tried to keep going until a sophisticated imagining test using colored dyes revealed that a muscle had torn loose from the bone in his elbow.
“I was playing with one arm,” he said. “Golf was not a lot of fun then.”
But, on Thursday, golf couldn’t have been more fun.
“It’s been two years since I put a club face on a ball like how I feel I should,” Piercy said. “I’ve kind of been faking it. I’ve had some good tournaments (including a second place in the Sony Open in January), but I haven’t had a day or a week or weeks where I flushed it and really knew where my ball was going like today.”
He missed only one green in regulation and needed just 26 putts. All things considered, he judged it his best “ball-striking” round ever, that 61 notwithstanding.
“If I putted it (even) if I didn’t make it, I was looking it out or misreading it by an inch,” Piercy said. “Today was totally awesome.”