Gourley’s relief after nearly ‘doing a Van de Velde’ on last
Rachel Gourley was five clear playing the last here on the final day of the Justin Rose Telegraph Junior Championship, but her head was spinning as her dream was collapsing. “Oh God, I’m doing a Jean van de Velde,” the teenager muttered to herself.
Yet while the tragicomic Frenchman failed to retain his big lead on the 18th at Carnoustie in the 1999 Open, Gourley succeeded, remarkably managing to compose herself after every wheel of her challenge had seemingly spiralled off to conjure a 97-yard wedge to seven-feet and then hole the putt. The quadruple-bogey eight saw Gourley beat Lottie Woad by a single shot.
“I was shaking, I couldn’t breathe and I felt sick,” Gourley said after her 73, for a five-under total. “To say this is a relief is an understatement.”
Gourley sensed it was set to be a bizarre day when, on leaving the hotel in the morning, she walked past a copy of The Daily Telegraph and spotted two lads from her school on the front page.
“I am a Newcastle fan and the city is buzzing about the takeover, “she said. “But I never expected to see that pair celebrating the news as the main picture of The Telegraph.i thought ‘that’s a bit weird, seeing as I’m playing in that newspaper’s tournament’.”
Events were about to get stranger still. Starting with a three-shot cushion over fellow English junior international Woad, Gourley, the 17-year-old from Arcot Hall Golf Club, looked serene as she went through the first eight holes of the Old Course in two under. And when Woad bogeyed the ninth, the gap had extended to six.
But then Woad holed her second on the par-four 12th and then birdied the par-five 14th as her playing partner bogeyed and the deficit was only two. “The momentum was with Lottie and I was determined to finish well,” Gourley said. “I managed to make three birdies in succession from the 15th and that gave me that five-shot lead on the last. I didn’t think I’d require every shot of it.”
The anatomy of the meltdown is fascinating, as is the manner in which she reversed what at one stage appeared inevitable humiliation. “I was thinking ‘just hit the fairway’, but I snaphooked it into a bush,” Gourley said. “I took an ‘unplayable’, so was hitting three from the side of the bush.”
At this point, Gourley needed a cool head. However, inside the cranium, the mercury was rising.
“I was beginning to lose it,” she said. “I really should have laid up in front of the bunker [guarding the green], but I went for it. I found another bush. I took an unplayable, so was hitting five into the green.”
No matter, find the putting surface, two-putt, pick up the biggest trophy of her career to date and get up the M1 to join in the party on Tyneside. Gourley thinned it. Over the green and out of bounds.
“This is when Van de Velde came into my mind,” she said. “What did he need? A double-bogey up the 18th for the Claret Jug? I only needed a triple-bogey. And the worst fact was that the Sky Sports cameras were there and they were filming it and I thought ‘oh, no, everybody’s going to see this. It’s going viral’. I was numb.”
Looking on, Woad was also in disbelief. She already knew all about the treacherous nature of that concluding par four. The day previous, the 17-year-old from Farnham had taken a triple-bogey seven when sharing the lead with Gourley.
“You don’t have to do too much wrong to get into trouble there,” Woad said, after her 71. Gourley had plenty to do to get herself out of it. Somehow she managed to squeeze her seventh shot – from just under 100 yards – to seven feet and from there was not about to allow her chance of redemption slip.
“I can’t even remember the putt,” she said, 10 minutes later. “But I do know that I didn’t forget to fistpump. This means a lot. It’s my best win so far and to do it like that, well I’m always going to remember it.”