A frost delay pushed back starting times at Dell Urich Golf Course late in January, and when I stepped to the first tee about 8:30 a.m., I was wearing the winter gear you use only two or three times a year in Tucson.
Somebody laughed and said it was insane to tee off when it was 42 degrees.
At that moment, UA assistant golf coach Derek Radley walked by the No. 1 tee toward the driving range. Most of the Wildcats golfers were with him: Bianca Pagdanganan, Haley Moore, Sandra Nordaas, Gigi Stoll and newly enrolled freshman Yu Sang-Hou.
Head coach Laura Ianello was in the pro shop, trying to squeeze in a tee time.
I didn’t see senior standout Krystal Quihuis, a former Salpointe Catholic state champion who, on many days, was Arizona’s No. 1 golfer.
“Where’s Krystal?” I asked Radley.
“She left the team,” he said. “She decided to turn pro.”
Really?
Radley gave a grim look and nodded. He didn’t need to say a word.
Haley Moore watches her shot from the fourth tee Wednesday. Hours later, she would sink a 5-foot putt to give the Wildcats the national title.
I remember thinking that what promised to be a season in which Arizona could seriously contend for a national championship had gone bust.
Two hours later my group made the turn, walking from No. 9 green to No. 10 tee. I noticed Moore in the middle of the putting green. She was the only person there.
I motioned to her, telling my golf partners that the young woman on the green was Arizona’s leading golfer. It was cold. I was still wearing my winter golf gloves. Moore kept putting.
Two hours later, when we completed the 18th hole and walked toward the clubhouse, she was still on the putting green.
Can you believe that? She had been working on her short game for four hours. How many 5-foot putts did she take and make that day? Maybe 200? More?
Four months later — just before sunset Wednesday evening in Stillwater, Oklahoma — Moore was again the last UA golfer on the green. This time it was 90 degrees with swamplike humidity. This time she was lining up a 5-foot putt with everlasting consequences.
Make it, and Arizona would win the NCAA championship with a finish so improbable that Disney wouldn’t buy it.
Miss it, and Haley Moore and her Arizona teammates would be engulfed in the type of sports grief that would accompany you for the rest of your life.
I know it’s impermissible to cheer for a team or an athlete when you are a newspaperman, but as Moore stood over that 5-foot putt I couldn’t bear to watch. The weight of that putt seemed to be too much for a young woman, or a young man, or almost anybody.
It was the putt of a lifetime.
But I also remembered what Ianello told me a year ago, a few days after Moore won the Sugar Bowl Invitational in New Orleans: “Haley is out for blood, and that’s hard to find. Every 50 recruits or so, we come across someone like Haley who has that killer instinct.”
Of course she made it.
Arizona players mob Haley Moore, center, after the Wildcats defeated Alabama for the NCAA Division I title.
Of the 19 NCAA team championships won by Arizona — baseball, softball, basketball, swimming — there has never been a moment to match the drama.
That frosty morning of putting practice at Dell Urich Golf Course and her 16 years of diligence all paid off in the most inconceivable moment in UA sports history.
“I’ve seen Haley play some of her best golf when she’s stressed and it’s pressure-filled,” Radley told Golf Channel Wednesday evening.
Fearless for sure.
Let’s not forget: when Moore should’ve been a senior at San Pasqual High School near San Diego — she enrolled at Arizona at mid-semester, 17 years old — she finished No. 2 in the NCAA finals, shooting rounds of 68-70-74-68. She made the cut in an LPGA major, the ANA Inspiration, when she was in high school.
So Wednesday’s heavenly finish in Oklahoma wasn’t accidental.
What the Wildcats did — what Moore did down the stretch — ranks with whatever Wildcats Hall of Famers Annika Sorenstam, Marisa Baena and Lorena Ochoa accomplished in college golf. And that’s a big statement, because Baena holed out from the fairway for an eagle, in sudden death, as Arizona won the 1996 NCAA championship.
Some of what transpired over the last six days and 129 holes of golf was outrageously unpredictable. For example, No. 1 ranked Alabama entered Wednesday’s match play finals with women ranked Nos. 6, 10 and 13 in the world amateur standings.
Nordaas, ranked No. 1,009, won anyway.
And no one dealing in reality could’ve drawn up Pagdanganan’s now-immortal 18th-hole eagle in the dusk Monday, saving Arizona from elimination, forcing a playoff in the dark in which the Wildcats eliminated Baylor and, after a few hours sleep, knocked off Pac-12 superpower UCLA.
It was so crazy that Ianello, who played a backup role to Lorena Ochoa and Natalie Gulbis on Arizona’s highly ranked 2001 team, stayed up past midnight doing laundry, washing and folding her team’s uniforms for an early Tuesday morning showdown with No. 1 seed UCLA.
What national championship coach does her team’s laundry?
It’s such a good story.
Before Arizona reached the No. 1 tee Wednesday, the five Wildcat golfers filmed a feel-good video with Golf Channel to be used only if the Wildcats chopped down the heavily favored Crimson Tide.
While doing the filming, Moore was asked about the challenge that awaited the Cinderella Wildcats.
“You’re here right now, so you’ve got to make the best of it,” she said. “You don’t know when you’ll get an opportunity like this again.”