Tabuena medal chance fades after 4-over 75
MIGUEL Tabuena bogeys 13 again and falls to 6 over for tournament, 4 over for day. Photo by Ted Melendres
RIO DE JANEIRO—A medal in golf moved farther away from Miguel Tabuena’s grip as he managed a four-over-par 75 Friday and fell a whopping 16 shots behind Australian front-runner Marcus Fraser halfway through the men’s competition at the 31st Summer Games here.
Compounding Tabuena’s troubles over the windswept 7,128-yard layout was a hurting right shoulder that bothered him when he hit his irons or when the club made contact with the ground.
The 21-year-old Asian Tour campaigner opened with a three-putt bogey from 50 feet as a cold downpour softened the sleek greens, forcing him to play a kind of catch-up golf that he never bridged.
Together with his first-round 73 Thursday, the country’s first golf Olympian totaled 148 over the links-type Olympic Golf Course, tied for 54th with flight mate Roope Kakko of Finland and two others.
Fraser, the overnight leader with a brilliant 8-under-par 63, slowed down to a 69 for a 36-hole total of 132, now just a shot clear of Belgium’s Thomas Pieters, who added a 66 to a 67 Thursday.
Sweden’s British Open winner Henrik Stenson lay another stroke back at 134 after a 68, with Great Britain’s Justin Rose, who shot the first hole-in-one in Olympic history in the opening round, lurking at 136, in a tie for fourth with France’s Gregory Bourdy.
Two-time Masters winner Bubba Watson made the biggest leap among the tournament’s other big names, firing a 67 to rise from 38th to joint 18th on 140.
Tabuena’s bogey on No. 1 was followed by another on No. 4 as he missed the green, before he came to grief on the 413-yard seventh hole with a fat double bogey-6.
With the downpour not letting up, his 5-wood slipped off his hands on his second shot, which carried into the bunker and left him with a plugged ball. He blasted out and over the green and then chipped back way short of the pin.
Tabuena birdied the par-5 fifth hole, which he reached in two, and the par-3 eighth, where he canned a 10-foot putt, but back-to-back missed-green bogeys from No. 12 killed his chances of a rally just as the sun peeped out of the leaden skies.
“I’ve felt the pain on the follow through since Thursday when I woke up and I had thought it would go away,” said Tabuena, who avoided the layout’s shoulders of deep, fine sand fit for beach volleyball this time.
“It’s not really that painful but it’s something that I think about,” he added. “It’s bad enough to get me thinking about it instead of my golf.”
If it’s any consolation, Tabuena stood right behind Asian and European Tour stars Thongchai Jaidee (70-75-145) of Thailand and India’s Anirban Lahiri (74-73-147), the AT’s runaway Order of Merit leader, where Tabuena ranked fourth.
Former Manila Solaire Open winner Lin Wen-tang of Chinese Taipei brought up the rear with 154.
Tabuena, the reigning Philippine Open champion who played in the US Open only in June, gets to start the third round at least two hours before the high winds blowing from the Barra coast, east of the course, intensify anew.
He tees it up at 7:42 a.m. in the company of Venezuela’s Jhonattan Vegas and Norway’s Espen Kofstad.
Tabuena said he must shoot very low scores in the last two rounds because “that’s the only chance to get a medal here.”
“[The shoulder pain] is not good entering the last two rounds and if you’re trying to make a move, but let’s see what happens tomorrow,” he said.
“This is all part of the experience. If this wasn’t the Olympics I would have pulled out as early as last night.”
