When Bud Cauley rolled in his short birdie try on the par-5 16th hole in the opening round of the Players Championship, he was enjoying a solid, if not spectacular, round: four birdies against two bogeys to keep him very much in the mix on a day when no player in the early wave could manage better than Mav McNealy’s five-under 67.
Even the most casual fan knows what follows 16 on Pete Day’s vaunted Stadium Course: the iconic par-3 17th, where players, from approximately 140 yards, are asked to hit to a green surrounded by water. In any other setting, it’d be a nothing shot for the world’s most skilled golfers — but when you ring the green with thousands of fans plus a massive corporate hospitality buildout, mix in wind gusts and club indecision and the pressure of one of the game’s marquee events, the generous 4,000-square-foot target can feel more like 400 square feet. It’s not a shot you want to overthink and yet many players will tell you that from the moment they step foot on the course, 17 occupies real estate in their temporal lobes.
Cauley went off the first hole Thursday so he had 16 holes to ponder his fate at 17. Which turned into 16 and then some.
That’s because moments after Cauley had holed out on 16, a horn sounded, signaling suspension of play on account of a storm cell that was rolling through. To escape the downpour, Cauley and his partners, Vince Whaley and Chandler Phillips, took shelter in the back of a van, with only their thoughts to keep them company.
“The first thing I thought of was, is the wind going to switch? Because that happens a lot when a storm blows through,” Cauley said after the round. “We kind of had it down off the left before the delay, which wasn’t that bad.”
The stoppage proved to be brief — just 21 minutes — but when Cauley and his partners returned to the tee, they encountered markedly different conditions.
“From down off the left to pumping straight in,” Cauley said of the wind direction. “Probably close to 30 yards.”
As in a 30-yard increase in the effective distance the tee shot was playing.
Cauley had the honor. “I was the first guy to hit so I was kind of guessing,” he said.
Cauley said before the delay, he would have a hit a wedge but when he came back the shot called for an 8-iron. “Landed just short of middle of the green and spun back in the rough,” he said. “I was just happy to be on land.”
From the front of the green, Cauley played his second shot to the back-left pin to four feet and saved his par.
He made another par on the difficult par-4 closer to finish at two under.
“It was tough with the delay,” he said. “But I was happy to make two pars coming in.”
