As mentioned yesterday, I am volunteering at the Valero Texas Open this week at TPC San Antonio. It’s my second year working the tournament and it’s quite fun. I get to walk inside the ropes with the pros and call back their scores after each hole to the NBC/Golf Channel truck. The funny part about it, with all the technology we have these days, they still depend on people actually walking with a group and manually calling back scores to the truck. I’m not complaining though, because I enjoy the job.
On Friday, I got assigned to the 2:40 pm group of Heath Slocum, John Mallinger and Ryo Ishikawa.
At the start of the round, Heath Slocum was the only player in the group under par, firing a 2-under 70 on Thursday. But this quickly went the other direction with a bogey on the 1st hole. Slocum went on to shoot a 43 on the front 9, to put him at 5-over when he made the turn. He did get it together a little better on the back 9 but ended up missing the cut with an 8-over 80 for the day.
John Malinger started the day at 2-over par and as the day progressed he kind of played a boring round with some wayward drives which missed the fairway but ended up getting up and down for most of the round. On the par-5 second, his third shot hit hard on the green and rolled off the back into the bunker. After a less-than-average bunker shot, he missed his par putt and carded his first bogey of the day. He would go on to par the 6 holes before obeying #9. Malinger picked up one more birdie on the back 9 and ended up making the cut on the number, at 3-over.
Ryo Ishikawa was the star of the group. Their was quite a few Asian media folks walking with the group. Ishikawa is a star in Japan and the people following him and cheering for him were really passionate about his play. Unfortunately, he didn’t play all the great for the day. Ishikawa shot a 4-over 76 on his round for a two day total of 150, which was three shots off the cut line.
[…] for a leisurely walk around TPC San Antonio with some PGA Tour pros. I wrapped up my day three of volunteering at the Valero Texas Open at around 4:15 PM, which was 5 hours and 15 minutes after teeing off. But more about that […]