After taking the third-round lead in the U.S. Open by two shots over Julie Larsen and one over Rosie Jones, Meg Mallon said Saturday it would be an honor to win the USGA’s 50th national championship for women.
Mallon, who won the 1991 Open, would have liked nothing better than to join the club, to become only the 11th player to win more than one Open.
Especially, she said, with former Open champions Patty Berg, who won the first in 1946, four-time winner Betsy Rawls (1951, ’53, ’57, ’60) and two-time champion Louise Suggs (’49, ’62) on hand this week to cheer the competitors and lend class to a benchmark event in women’s golf.
“I saw Louise out on the fourth tee today,” Mallon said Saturday. “Three-quarters of the public doesn’t know who she is.”
For Mallon, though, it wasn’t to be. A bogey at No. 3 and a triple bogey at No. 4 lost her the lead.
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After that she didn’t collapse, but she didn’t charge, either.
“I never felt I was out of the golf tournament,” Mallon said. “I had one triple this week. That is what comes back to haunt you, but there were a few shots I hit today that I thought I hit good that careened over the green and put me in some bad positions. The greens were firmer, and I got penalized for going at the flags a little bit. That is where a couple of my bogeys came from.”
Stats of the week: Only two players–winner Annika Sorenstam and Mallon–finished under par for the tournament. . . . Sorenstam actually outdrove Britain’s long-hitting Laura Davies for the weekend, averaging 263 yards to Davies’ 262. After going 72-73 in the first two rounds, however, and ranking 50th in fairways hit, Davies eased up in the last two rounds. The key to Sorenstam’s win, however, was greens in regulation. She ranked third with 54. She was also sixth in birdies and ninth in fairways hit.
Amateur hour: Sarah Lebrun Ingram of Nashville was low amateur in the championship with a 14-over-par 294. Kellee Booth of Cota de Caza, Calif., and reigning U.S. Women’s Amateur champ Wendy Ward of San Antonio, playing her last event as an amateur, finished at 296. Sixteen-year-old Grace Park of Phoenix, the youngest competitor in the field, totaled 297. “I learned a lot here; it is such a high level of play,” said Park, who will play in this week’s Women’s Western Golf Association Junior national championship at Conway Farms in Lake Forest. “I had to get over the pressure. The highlight was my first round and being interviewed on ESPN.”