That kind of aggressive style doesn’t particularly suit Blake Wagoner, a North Carolina native who is about to enter his final year at Arizona State, but he’s making it work.
“Typically, I’m more of a conservative player but I’ve been hitting it well enough and the pins aren’t super tough so I’ve been attacking it more, and it worked out well today,” said Wagoner, 22.
Wagoner and classmate Chun An (Kevin) Yu, 20, have staked the Sun Devil flag on the top section of the leaderboard. Yu also didn’t make a bogey Friday in his second-round 67. In fact, he hasn’t made a bogey since the opening hole of the tournament.
Yu, at 11 under, is tied for third after 36 holes and Wagoner is tied for sixth.
“I missed a couple tee shots today but overall it was pretty similar to yesterday. I’m feeling good, looking forward to the weekend,” Yu said on the state of his game.
Yu has younger sister Han-Hsuan on the bag this week, getting yardages and generally providing reassurance. Han, as her friends call her, will be a sophomore at Oklahoma State in the fall. The Yu siblings are traveling together for much of this summer, trading off caddie duties.
“The bag is heavy for me,” Han said laughing. Kevin often calls her “meme” on the course, which is Chinese for sister.
Kevin is doing most of the playing, but he did pick up Han’s Pokes bag last week when she played a U.S. Women’s Amateur qualifier in Arizona. She came up one shot short. Even on weeks like this, Han is watching carefully what goes on in the heads of the world’s best – like her brother, who is No. 1 in the Golfweek/AmateurGolf.com Rankings.
Mostly, she says, it’s confidence – players here think they can pull off lots of different shots, and they do.
For Kevin, Arizona State’s newly opened practice facility at Papago Golf Course in Tempe, Ariz., has helped him hone some of those different shots, particularly around the greens.
“My short game was my weakness before but now we have like six different greens, sets up really nice,” he said. “My short game got better now, and I think that helped my score too.”
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Blake Wagoner
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“At our old facility, we rarely practiced short game just because we didn’t really have much of a short game area,” he said. “Everybody just hit balls. Now it’s completely the opposite – nobody really hits balls and everybody is just short gaming all day.”
Arizona State was one of the top teams in the nation this season, with four team wins and six runner-up finishes. The Sun Devils missed the first cut to 15 teams at the NCAA Championship, which was a surprising underperformance. Next year, the national championship starts a three-year stretch at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz., right under Arizona State’s nose.
The Sun Devils didn’t graduate a single player this spring.
“It’s cool when anybody in our lineup could win at any given point. We all just push each other,” Wagoner said.
Wagoner and Yu will be seniors in the fall. Teammates could learn a lot from both of them. Yu tries to live by the motto of staying “happy, humble and hungry,” and makes a conscious effort to smile while he’s playing golf. Wagoner is a thoughtful player, even stoic.
“Our games are really similar in a lot of ways, he’s just probably a little cleaner than I am but not for long,” Wagoner said, smiling. “I’m coming for him.”
Despite being a Carolinas native, Wagoner is making his Players Amateur debut this week. Two days before the tournament, he qualified for the U.S. Amateur through a qualifier at NorthStone Country Club in Huntersville, N.C., his high-school home course. The nostalgia continues next month at the Pinehurst-hosted U.S. Amateur.
“I grew up playing (Pinehurst) every other weekend in junior golf,” he said.
This is the perfect time for Wagoner to get on a run.