A 63 and bogey free, O'Hair takes moving day seriously
By Dave Shedloski, PGATOUR.COM Senior Correspondent
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Inside the mind of a hot golfer is a whole lot of nothing.
"You can't think about what you are shooting. You can't think about what you want to shoot. You can't think about anything but the next shot," Sean O'Hair said. "You are literally going one shot at a time and just allowing it to happen rather than trying to make something happen."
The result of this cranial submission is that something good happened to O'Hair Saturday at the Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by MasterCard, something that allows him to think about winning his second PGA TOUR event in as many weeks.
Winner last week at the PODS Championship, O'Hair glided around Palmer's Bay Hill Club with a bogey-free 63 that lifted him from the lower middle of the pack to the top five on the leaderboard. O'Hair began the day 1 over par for the tournament and 10 strokes behind leader Vijay Singh. When he holed out with a closing 30 on the inward nine, he had moved up from a tie for 49th to a tie for third and was three behind Singh, who hadn't yet hit a ball.
O'Hair's score was the lowest since Palmer converted the Champion Course to a par 70 last year. He had a chance to tie the course record shared by Andy Bean and Greg Norman, but he inexplicably left short a downhill putt for birdie at the 18th. "That green is just a little slower than the rest, and I didn't adjust," shrugged O'Hair, who eagled the par-5 12th hole for the second day in a row and added five birdies. One was a chip-in from off the green at the 14th from 65 feet.
"That kept some momentum going," he said.
Momentum was a bit slow in coming this week for O'Hair, who overcame a three-stroke deficit last week to capture his second TOUR title at the Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Palm Harbor, Fla. Sure, he is just 25 years old, but the kid was tired by time they started keeping score on Thursday.
O'Hair played in both the Monday and Wednesday pro-ams. In between were a lot of extra footsteps for this media request or that congratulatory handshake. It's all good, but it takes its toll.
"I was a little tired, a bit mentally drained," he said, obviously getting a better understanding of what No. 1 Tiger Woods encounters on the weeks he competes.
He opened with a 72 and then worked hard on the driving range Thursday afternoon. O'Hair rewarded himself for a 69 Friday by taking the rest of the day off. That bit of rest proved beneficial.
"I felt a lot more rested at the start of the day," he said. "I felt ready to play, like I could go out and try to do some of the same things I did last week."
A former resident of the Orlando area, O'Hair hit 12 fairways and 16 greens, which were soft after overnight rains and relatively smooth given that he and partner Retief Goosen were in the seventh group out.
"That was a pretty impeccable round of golf there," Goosen, the two-time U.S. Open champion, said of O'Hair's play.
Another round of similar quality would give him consecutive wins, which no one other than Woods has achieved since Phil Mickelson took two in a row in Georgia at the AT&T Classic and the Masters Tournament in 2006.
"That [repeating] would be cool," said O'Hair, who pondered taking his kids to Sea World Saturday afternoon and eschew the driving range again. "I just need to do my part and let it fall into place, not think too much, not try too hard. I need to do the same things I've been doing and stay out of my own way."
Words of wisdom from a hot golfer.
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