rose zhang pot bunker st andrews
Rose Zhang’s pot bunker experience at St. Andrews was quintessential (and score-crushing).
If you’ve had the good fortune of playing the Old Course at St. Andrews, you probably know how it feels to have the bad fortune of finding one of its legendary pot bunkers.
Fortunately for you, your torture in and out of the sandy, sod-walled beasts affected only your score and the surface of your memories — not your paycheck in one of the biggest weeks of your year.
The second of these outcomes is what befell young star Rose Zhang on Friday morning at the AIG Women’s Open. It happened on the 2nd hole, with Zhang even par for the tournament and facing a greenside bunker shot after landing her approach against the lip of a nasty pot bunker.
Zhang lined up with her clubface open, needing to get up and down to save par. She was trying for the kind of start-and-stop shot that goes high enough off the clubface to clear the lip, but travels a short enough distance to land (and stop) on the putting surface. Instead, though, she learned a painful Old Course lesson: Just because you can clear the bunker doesn’t mean you will.
With her sixth shot, Zhang finally found the putting surface, leaving herself an easy two-putt for a scorecard-wrecking quadruple-bogey 8, pushing her to four over for the tournament, 12 shots off the lead set by Nelly Korda. It was a bad blow-up hole, made worse by a double-bogey on the par-5 5th — and also a reminder of one of St. Andrews’ cruel truths.
