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Surprise Leader in Houston Hasn’t Made a Cut in 4 Months

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Houston Open's Surprise Leader

The numbers are presented not to demean Martin Trainer, but simply to put into perspective just how brutal the game can be at the PGA Tour level, and how difficult it can be to fight your way out of massive slumps.

And for that matter, how remarkable it is that Trainer is leading this week’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise Houston Open after two rounds.

Since a February Sunday in 2019, when he captured the Puerto Rico Open in only his ninth start as a tour member, Trainer had played on the weekend only nine times in 63 appearances. The 30-year-old was 3-for-16 after the win in 2019, 2-for-19 in ’20, 4-for-23 last season and this year he began the 2021-22 campaign going 0-for-5 before arriving in Houston. He’d missed 17 of the past 18 cuts, playing his last weekend at the 3M Open in late July.

But one’s golf outlook can change in the matter of a single week, and Trainer is having one of those breakthroughs that he hopes isn’t fleeting. With back-to-back 65s on the par-70 Memorial Park Golf Course—his best scores since a 64 in the 2021 Sony Open—Trainer is alone at the top, one shot ahead of Kevin Tway and three up on Adam Long with second-round play continuing into Saturday because of Thursday’s weather delay.

“It’s been tough at times for me the last couple years not playing well, but now that I figured out a little bit of ball-striking, dropped some putts, it really can turn around that quickly,” Trainer said. “So I’m just grateful that that’s happening to me this week, and hopefully I’ll keep it going.”

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Not all missed cuts are the same, and Trainer said he hit the ball better than he had in a long time in shooting 72-69 while missing the cut last week at Mayakoba. He just couldn’t make putts, but he’s put it all together this week, gaining more than a half-stroke (.60) on the field with the flat stick. Trainer started on the 10th hole on Friday and made bombs of 25 feet and 34 feet, respectively, at the 15th and 17th.

“Every course on tour is firm and fast and difficult, but this week especially so,” Trainer said. “So it’s really tough just to make pars, and then I had a couple instances today where I was just trying to two-putt and they dropped in from long range. When that happens, not only do you know it’s your day, but you’re thankful that you’re in that position.”

Trainer, who was born in France and raised in California, admits that he’s been demoralized at times by the results. After all, he very well earned his way onto the PGA Tour with two victories in 2018 on the then-Web.com Tour. He seemed destined for more success after the victory as a big-league rookie in Puerto Rico. But it’s been a monumental struggle ever since. In the last two years, Trainer has earned a total of $149,766 after making $692,155 in his first full year.

This is the last season he can lean on being a tour winner to own his card.

“There’s always an incentive to play, and there’s always that hope that maybe I can find it, but yeah, there’s definitely been times when I haven’t been playing well in the last couple years where I thought about and pondered my future in the game. It’s nice to finally have one of these validating performances where all that work actually is paying off.”

This article originally appeared on Golf Digest.

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Meet The Canadian Open Qualifier Tied To ClickIt Golf!

“This week was incredible,” he said. “A dream come true.”

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Josh Goldenberg doesn’t plan to quit his day job. But he had a great time dabbling in his old career.

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He gave up on pro golf, then qualified for his first PGA Tour event.

Read the full story here
https://golf.com/news/josh-goldenberg-rbc-canadian-open/?amp=1

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Bets & Babes: Betting on Birdies

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In this latest episode of Bets and Babes join me and my special guest Robert from the World Series of Golf as we tee up a whole new way to think about betting on the green.

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We break down golf betting basics, share hilarious stories and talk about how to bet in a way that might resonate with us ladies.

Whether you’re a total newbie or just curious how to make golf Sundays more exciting, this episode delivers fun, flirty, and smart tips to get you in the game. 🎧⛳💸

Click below to listen to the entire episode and leave your comments and suggestions for future episodes.

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The Bogey Man’s Guide to Accidental Course Exploration: Or, How I Found My Ball (Eventually) in the Rough of Life

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Ah, golf. The gentle game of precision, patience, and occasionally, profound personal humiliation. You know, the kind that makes you question all your life choices, particularly the one where you decided to spend your Saturday morning chasing a tiny white ball around 18 acres of manicured torture.

Boo here, reporting live from the depths of a particularly thorny patch of “rough” that I’m fairly certain wasn’t on the course map. My mission? To recount a tale of a golf shot so spectacularly off-target, it became less about breaking par and more about breaking new ground. Literally.

It was a glorious Tuesday. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and my swing felt… well, it felt like something. I was on the par-4 7th, a hole notorious for its deceptive dogleg and a bunker that swallows balls faster than a hungry teenager devours pizza. My plan was simple: a nice, controlled fade, landing gently just short of the green. A textbook approach, really.

What actually happened was less “textbook” and more “abstract expressionism.” My driver, bless its misguided heart, decided that “fade” was merely a suggestion, and “controlled” was a concept best left to professional pilots. The ball, a brand-new, gleaming Titleist Pro V1 (because, you know, optimism), launched with the trajectory of a startled pheasant and veered sharply right. So sharply, in fact, it cleared the cart path, hopped over the maintenance shed, and disappeared into what I can only describe as a dense, untamed jungle previously known as “the woods bordering the 7th fairway.”

Now, a lesser golfer, a more sensible golfer, might have declared it lost, taken a drop, and moved on with their dignity mostly intact. But I, dear readers, am Mr. Bogey Man. And the Bogey Man doesn’t abandon his children, especially when they cost $5 a pop.

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PING Hoofer

So, armed with a 7-iron (optimism again, clearly), a profound sense of misplaced determination, and a faint hope that perhaps a deer had picked it up and was using it as a chew toy, I plunged into the abyss.

The first five minutes were a blur of tangled vines, unseen roots, and the distinct feeling that I was being watched by small, judgmental woodland creatures. My pristine golf shoes quickly became mud-caked relics. My carefully tucked-in shirt became a casualty of low-hanging branches. I swear, I heard a squirrel snicker.

Then, a glimmer! A flash of white amidst the green. “Aha!” I cried, startling a family of robins. I pushed through a particularly stubborn bush, only to find… a discarded plastic water bottle. My heart sank faster than my last putt from 3 feet.

I pressed on, muttering to myself about the unfairness of golf, the existential dread of lost balls, and whether it was too late to take up competitive napping. Just as I was about to give up and declare the ball a permanent resident of the arboreal underworld, I saw it. Nestled perfectly at the base of an ancient oak, gleaming defiantly, was my Pro V1.

The triumph! The sheer, unadulterated joy! It was like finding the Holy Grail, if the Holy Grail was spherical and prone to slicing. I carefully extracted it, brushed off a few leaves, and held it aloft.

Then I looked around. I had no idea where I was. The fairway was a distant, hazy memory. The cart path? A myth. I was utterly, gloriously lost.

It took another fifteen minutes of bushwhacking, a brief but intense wrestling match with a particularly aggressive thistle, and the accidental discovery of what I’m pretty sure was a very old, very moldy sandwich, but I eventually stumbled back onto the course. My playing partners, who had long since finished the hole and were contemplating sending out a search party (or at least ordering another round of drinks), looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement.

My score on the 7th? Let’s just say it involved a number that would make a mathematician weep. But the story? The adventure? The sheer ridiculousness of it all? Priceless.

So, the next time your ball decides to take an unscheduled tour of the local flora and fauna, don’t despair. Embrace it. See it as an opportunity for accidental exploration. You might not break 80, but you’ll definitely have a story. And isn’t that what golf is really about? (Besides the frustration, the lost balls, and the occasional snickering squirrel, of course.)

Until next time, keep those swings (mostly) in bounds, and remember: even a bogey can be an adventure.

Boo

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