Aloooooo … hah!
Hawaii welcomed the LPGA back — and Michelle Wie home — with big blasts of wind in Wednesday’s opening round of the LPGA Lotte Championship.
Only 13 players broke par at a Ko Olina Golf Club slammed by constant breezes of about 20 mph and gusts over 30 mph. Only four of those sub-par scores came in the morning, when eight players shot in the 80s.
Big breeze is nothing new here. Sunday’s qualifier was nearly blown away, and ultimately won with a score of 74. A few years ago, a volunteer making an untimely stop at a portable toilet ended up rolling down the fairway in it. The PGA Tour’s Hyundai TOC last year at Kapalua was blown off the side of the West Maui mountains for three days.
So Wednesday’s winds were no surprise. The leaders simply coped better than the rest.
So Yeon Ryu, who shares first with Se Ri Pak and Hyo Joo Kim, started fast — birdie from a foot on the first hole and 2 feet on the second — in her round of 4-under-par 68. The rest of the day she analyzed and embraced a breeze she called "super extremely strong," and kept a close eye on her playing partners.
"I discussed a lot with my caddie today," said Ryu, No. 7 in the Rolex World Rankings. "Sometimes it feels like right-to-left wind, but actually it was into you. It was really hard to see and really hard to judge.
"But if someone hit it first, I can see the ball flight and I can see how much effort into the ball, the wind. So I pretty much copied a lot with my fellow competitors."
Pak nearly escaped Ko Olina bogey-free, but three-putted her next-to-last hole. It was the only blemish on a day when she chipped in for eagle and needed just 25 putts.
"It was really windy out there, a lot windier than last year," the World Golf Hall of Famer said. "It got stronger and stronger, never slowed down. It was really hard to choose a club at every hole. Off the tee, in the fairway, on the green, all day you had to focus so much on the wind because it was just really hard."
Inbee Park shot to No. 1 in the world with a fourth-place finish here a year ago and is still there. She teed off at 7:40 in the morning and birdied four of her first six before the wind started howling. She shares fifth, at 70, with a group that includes Wie.
Park won the first three majors last year, and the last two money titles, so she knows a little about dealing successfully with adversity. She said she had never seen Ko Olina play so tough.
"I have to watch out for a little bit of distance controlling the next three days, and obviously everybody is going to make mistakes in this wind," Park said. "It’s really tough to control the distances, so I really scrambled for pars on this golf course. Today all day was scrambling for pars on the back nine. Trying to give myself more opportunities for the next three days."
The bluster also made Ko Olina’s slick greens tougher. Park said she was reading the wind into the break, convincing herself to hit some breaking putts straight
"It definitely comes into play on the greens," she said, "along with, obviously, the concentration part."
The big breeze even bothered Wie, who considers Ko Olina her home course.
"You expect the tradewinds, but at certain points you just needed stones in your pockets," Wie said. "I felt like I was going to blow away. It was pretty strong out there. There were some holes where the ball was wiggling a little bit. It was tough."
The weather is predicted to stay the same over the next three days — temperatures in the low 80s and constant 15- to 20-mph winds.