Wind Blows Zang's Missed Putt Back Into the Hole at St Andrews

Madeleine Zang had already given the putt up for missed. Her bogey try on the Jubilee Course at St Andrews slid past the right side of the hole on Tuesday and stopped just beyond the cup, and the Penn senior was walking in to tap in for a double bogey when the North Sea wind reached down, rolled her ball backward and dropped it in the hole for her, Golfweek reports.

What exactly happened to Zang’s putt?

The putt missed in the ordinary way and finished in the strangest way of the college season. Zang’s bogey putt ran past the right edge and came to rest a short distance beyond the hole, Golf Digest reports, close enough that her next shot was a formality. Before she could play it, a gust caught the ball and pushed it back into the cup. Golf Channel’s coverage was filming the group, so the whole sequence survives on video: Zang grabbing her beanie-clad head in disbelief, her playing partners throwing their arms up behind her. It is the second time this month a golf score has turned on something nobody hit, after Tyler McCumber called a two-shot penalty on himself that the cameras could not prove in Australia, except the direction of the luck is reversed. McCumber’s honesty cost him two strokes. The wind gave Zang one back.

Why does a putt blown back into the hole count?

Because the rules clock had not run out on it. Golfweek reports the ball dropped well within the 10-second rule, the window a player is allowed to walk to a ball hanging by the hole and wait to see whether it falls. A ball that drops inside that window is treated as holed by the stroke that put it there, which is why Zang’s score for the hole was a bogey five rather than the double bogey six her tap-in would have produced. The distinction matters: this was not a ball that had finished its business and got lucky. In the eyes of the rules it was still, in effect, finishing its putt when the wind arrived. Golf’s rulebook produces an odd ruling most weeks, from Daniel Hillier’s toed hole-in-one that won him a BMW he did not know was on offer to markers and wrong places, but a putt completed by the weather is rarer than any of them.

How strong was the wind on the Jubilee Course?

Strong enough to be the day’s main character. Golf Digest put Tuesday’s gusts at up to 25 mph, on a sunny day at a links where the wind is a design feature rather than an interruption. The Jubilee sits exposed along the coast at St Andrews, and the collegiate field played its second stroke-play round in conditions that bend flagsticks and push standing putts around. Marco Penge topping a drive 158 yards in the Spanish Open last week showed what a mishit looks like in calm air by comparison. At St Andrews on Tuesday the air itself was a player, and mostly it was taking strokes from the field. Zang’s putt is the one time it handed one back.

Who is Madeleine Zang, and what is this event?

Zang is a senior on the University of Pennsylvania women’s team, Golfweek reports, playing an invitational that has become one of the plum dates in college golf: four men’s and four women’s teams, 36 holes of stroke play on the Jubilee Course, then a match-play finale on the Old Course. For American college players the trip is the story as much as the golf, a competitive week at the home of the game on courses most of them have only seen on television, in the kind of weather that explains why a round at St Andrews costs what it does and why the place has the mythology it does. Zang now owns the week’s defining clip whatever happens on Wednesday.

What happens next at the St Andrews Links Collegiate?

The finale, on the most famous course in the sport. Golfweek reports the Texas men and women will be the top seeds for Wednesday’s match play on the Old Course, where the stroke-play results set the pairings. Zang and Penn play out their bracket there with a story already banked: somewhere in the team hotel there is a scorecard with a five on it that was a six for about ten seconds. If the wind blows the same way on Wednesday, the Old Course will produce more of them. It usually does.