ARDMORE, Pa. \u2013 The first playoff hole Wednesday morning at the U.S. Amateur was the 119-yard, par-3 13th, which Merion Golf Club added in 1924 after rerouting a few holes because of increased traffic on Ardmore Avenue.<\/p>\n
Perfect number for Jack Whaley, though his nerves didn\u2019t get the message.<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, I kind of blacked out when I stood on the tee,\u201d said Whaley, the Florida State rising senior from Doncaster, England. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of pressure going into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
With five birdies already made in the three foursomes ahead of him in the 16-for-11 playoff, Whaley watched Ryder Cowan stuff his tee ball to a few feet, then stepped up with his 54-degree wedge, factored in a little bit of adrenaline and swung away.<\/p>\n
Whaley\u2019s ball landed about 5 feet past the hole, spun back past Cowan\u2019s ball and lipped out hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cWould\u2019ve been pretty cool,\u201d said Whaley, who has made two holes-in-one in his career. \u201cBut we\u2019re still in, so it doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whaley tapped in his short birdie to join Cowan, Emile Lebrun, Joshua Bai, William Jennings, Grayson Wood, Fifa Laopakdee and Kihei Akina in birdieing the 13th.<\/p>\n
Entering this championship, Whaley, who is ranked 90th in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, was on the outside looking in for a potential spot on the Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup team. He had a nice NCAA postseason for the Seminoles, capped by a T-14 at the NCAA Championship, but he struggled at the British Amateur, missing match play, and was T-33 at the European Amateur before nearly getting into the Sweet 16 at the Western Amateur.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know Walker Cup is going to be on a links golf course this year and I haven\u2019t played my best on links, but this week I\u2019m hoping to prove that I have got the ability to play the Walker Cup,\u201d Whaley said. \u201cBut it\u2019s not down to me, it\u2019s down to the selectors.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jennings\u2019 birdie came after a crazy back nine at Merion on Tuesday. The world\u2019s sixth-ranked amateur, one of four top-11 amateurs in the playoff, was two shots above the projected cut after birdies at Nos. 10, 12 and 13 before bogeying No. 14 and then carding a disastrous triple bogey at the par-4 15th, where Jennings nearly holed out for eagle before his ball spun back through the trampled down collar and into an impossible lie in the bunker. Jennings then left two shots in the trap. He saved his week with birdies at Nos. 16 and 17.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot going on on that back nine,\u201d said Jennings, who is entering his junior year at Alabama. \u201cIt was pretty much cruise control all day until that 15th hole. \u2026 I told myself moving forward, just birdie the last three holes and give yourself a chance. Managed to get two out of three and now we\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not starting his match until 1:50 p.m., Cowan headed out to watch the rest of the playoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat else am I gonna do?\u201d said Cowan, who now draws top-ranked junior Miles Russell, the No. 6 seed.<\/p>\n
Luke Poulter, ranked a spot ahead of Jennings in WAGR, wasn\u2019t so lucky. The Florida senior missed short putts on each of the first two playoff holes to eliminate himself from his third major playoff of the summer; he also missed in playoffs at the British Amateur and Western Amateur.<\/p>\n
Gators commit Giuseppe Puebla also bogeyed the 14th hole in the playoff while Matthew Diehl doubled after hooking his tee shot out of bounds.<\/p>\n
With William Love and Parker Sands birdieing the second playoff hole, that left Taishi Moto and Gabriel Palacios to battle it out for the 64th seed. Moto came up short of the front greenside bunker at No. 15 and in the rough, though Palacios hit his second shot long and then chipped through the green. Moto advanced to play medalist Joshua Ryan with a short bogey make.<\/p>\n
And with that, the playoff was over.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of those top seeds might be a little nervous,\u201d Jennings said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ARDMORE, Pa. \u2013 The first playoff hole Wednesday morning at the U.S. Amateur was the 119-yard, par-3 13th,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":811386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-811385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}