Player's Journal: Jeff Fortson at the U.S. Four-Ball, Part 2

5/17/2018 | by AmateurGolf.com Staff

Jeff Fortson is journaling his week at Jupiter Hills (USGA photo)

Part 2: A travel nightmare, meeting the hosts, and hope despite a threatening weather forecast

Editor's note: As a special to AmateurGolf.com, Jeff Fortson of Palm Desert, CA has decided to journal his experience playing in the U.S. Four-Ball Championship. This is his second entry. After leaving Ontario Airport in the Los Angeles, CA, area at 6:25am PST we finally arrived to our host house in Jupiter, FL, at 10:15 pm EST. Everything was great on our flights until about 30 minutes from reaching Ft. Lauderdale. A tropical storm moved into the area and grounded flights for a short time in Ft. Lauderdale, which forced our flight to turn around and land in Tampa, FL, to refuel. After about an hour we were able to make the short jump to Ft. Lauderdale. After an aborted landing we finally landed and proceeded to wait an hour and a half for a gate to open up. It was a long, stressful travel day, but we are so happy to have made it with our clubs and luggage in time to check-in and begin practice rounds tomorrow. The forecast looks very wet the next 4-5 days but hopefully it won’t delay thetournament significantly. It will be interesting to see how the weather plays into theoperation of the event. We are prepared for the worst and hoping the forecastedrain and thunderstorms miss the Jupiter Hills Club over the coming days. Our hosts for the week are Tom and Kelly Jansen, friends of my partner Mike Waltonand his wife Jenn. We couldn’t ask for better accommodations. Getting to stay withfriends makes the experience that much better and we can’t thank them enough forhosting us for the week. Tom has even volunteered to caddie for Mike during theevent. I will be taking a local caddie to help me through the week. We are going to try to be at Jupiter Hills by 9:00 am tomorrow to register and warmup for our practice round on the Village Course at 11:18 am. We are very muchlooking forward to getting the week started. We will also be attending the Player’sReception tomorrow evening. If someone knows how to do some voodoo to keepthe rain away over the coming days, now is a good time to start. Previous Journal Entries: Part 1: the upcoming U.S. Four-Ball, the difficulty of qualifying, and what it's like to play in a USGA event

About the U.S. Four-Ball

The U.S. Amateur Four-Ball championship was played for the first time in 2015 at The Olympic Club in San Francisco, Calif. The event has no age restriction, however, it is only open to individual players with a Handicap Index of 2.4 or lower. It is o...

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