South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Henley and Bland bring a reminder
Raise your hand if you had a guy named Bland sharing the
36-hole lead on your U.S. Open bingo card. Now put it down. Even he didn’t.
The 48-year-old Englishman — first name, Richard — won the first tournament of a not-so-distinguished European Tour career at the British Masters just last month to snap on 0-for-447 streak and earn an invitation to Torrey Pines. Next, he followed up his opening-round 70 with a
67 on Friday, sharing the top spot on the leaderboard with the slightly-less-improbable Russell Henley at 5 under.
Results from Saturday’s third round were not available in time for this edition.
To suggest the golf world didn’t see either one coming might be an understatement.
“Most guys who come in here,” a reporter asked Bland at his post-round news conference, “have Ping or Titleist across their hat. What’s the story behind …”
“This is just my golf club back home, the Wisley,” Bland said. “I don’t have a hat kind of deal at the minute. … I kind of said to the golf club, ‘Look, it would be quite nice if I wore the hat,’ and they gave me sort of like 10 to come out here with.”
Henley has a golfing pedigree. The former college golfer of the year award winner at Georgia turned pro 10 years ago and has won three times on the PGA Tour, the last one in 2017. He hasn’t recorded a single top-10 finish in 26 previous major appearances.
“I’ve never been in this position before in a major,” Henley said.
What the rest of us learned is that the U.S. Open deserves its reputation as the toughest test in golf. Unlike the doubledigit birdie-fests the PGA Tour stages to favor the big-hitting stars every week, there’s never any question where the United States Golf Association set-ups fall on the risk-reward scale. It isn’t just the narrowed fairways and speeded-up greens. The only time a PGA Tour player encounters anything as tall and gnarly as the rough pinching those fairways and ringing every green is after returning from a month on the road to find out the gardener retired.