Tabuena has come a long way, indeed
IN winning the Philippine Open last weekend, Miguel Tabuena wasn’t only superb but super superb as well.
It was a victory carved out in so classic a style that to call it pure Sunday Suspense Theater would be an understatement.
Down by three strokes when the crown croaked creepily out of his reach, Tabuena literally ran amok with 5 birdies in the last 9 holes to win it by one. Just one.
It can’t be so tantalizingly closer than that.
It can’t be so chillingly thrill- laden than that.
It can’t be so dramatically energysapping than that.
If Tabuena didn’t sink to his knees after the fact, then fiction has taken over life’s surreal realism.
Is Tabuena for real?
At 21 years of age, pitted against the game’s heavyweights from all over the region, he is but a kid just learning the tricks of the trade. Golf is so punishing, demanding, ego-draining a game that it ain’t really cut for anyone as young as Tabuena. But, hey, hold it right there. When Tabuena was done and over with, everybody who saw all the drama unfolding at Luisita’s typhoon-battered layout rendered soggy all week raced to three months back.
It was at the same Luisita loop lodged deep in the vast sugarcane fields of Tarlac up North where Tabuena first unfurled his heroics of unmatched glory.
He routed the field in winning the Philippine Golf Tour just 12 weeks ago, stashing away the Central Azucarera de Tarlac Open with a bruising 22-under-par total in a providential prelude to his victory Sunday.
After his 67-69 in the shortened PHL Open, Tabuena was on his way to winning his biggest title in an infant career—which is no less than the nation’s premiere trophy—finally erasing the stigma of a last-day collapse that saw him blow away the same Philippine Open in 2013.
May I say that I am the happiest person—next to his parents Luigi and Lorna, of course—to see Miguel triumph, for I happen to have a special affinity with the latest toast of golf.
In 2005, I was with Miguel and his Mom in Shanghai watching Tiger Woods play in the HSBC Open. A crowd ringed the 10th green as Woods was about to make a birdie putt. Who would crawl under my legs but Miguel—barely 12 then—for a ringside view from the fringe? Upps, Woods missed.
Ah, Miguel. You’ve come a long way, bebe.