1/ The Tournament
The Firecracker Open takes place every year over Fourth of July weekend — a 54-hole event with a cut after the first 36. Beginning in 1946, it’s been held at various Austin-area muni courses, but these days it’s always at the iconic Muny itself: Lions Golf Course.
Though not a true city championship or ‘premium’ amateur event, it’s historically drawn some high-level players: past winners include Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite, and varsity golfers at UT and other local colleges have frequently competed.
As a result, most regular players like me have to earn their place in one of two 18-hole qualifiers. In recent years the score needed to qualify has ranged from +2 to +4 on the par-71, 5800-yard course.
As a ~5 handicap, qualifying for the Firecracker felt like an ambitious but achievable goal. I’ve shot 75 or better a few times, so I know I can do it, but it would take my best golf.
2/ The Course
Lions Municipal Golf Course was founded in 1924. It’s a classic, but that also means it has some awkward architectural features left over from a bygone era. For example, the par-4 5th hole doglegs 90° hard left after only about 130 yards, so if you want to hit driver you have to try to fly one way high over the trees down the left side to cut the corner.
Since it’s an older course, it measures only ~5800 yards from the back tees — but the challenge here isn’t how far, it’s how many. And of course, like seemingly every course that’s been around since the 20s, it’s got some Ben Hogan history: the 16th is known as Hogan’s Hole, apparently because Hogan made a birdie and then called it “one of the best holes he’d ever played”.
First, you hit a blind tee shot downhill into a narrow fairway that runs out if you go too long. If you miss the fairway, any recovery shot will have to deal with a pond. If you do hit the fairway, you’ll still have a reasonably long second shot back up the hill to a severely sloped green. It takes two solid shots to hit the green in regulation, and par is a great score.
3/ The Round
My tee time in the qualifier was 7:27am — an early wake-up call, but it would be nice to get started before the worst of the Texas summer heat. I arrived about an hour early to get warmed up.
I was extremely nervous, and started out hitting the ball poorly. This was the measuring stick I’d been building towards as I’d worked on my game for the past several months. In hindsight, it’s easy to see I was putting too much pressure on myself, but I still don’t know how to combat that feeling in the moment.
After a shaky start, I missed about a two-footer for par on 5 to slip to 4 over on the day. It was an especially unsettling putt to miss, because I hit it where I wanted and it looked like it took a hop to the side to miss the hole. All day long the Bermuda greens were in my head, and I couldn’t quite find a feel.
But something about that miss helped me reset mentally and I started to rally. After getting up and down for pars on 6 and 7, I hit my first GIR of the day on the par-5 8th and made four straight two-putt pars. Then, on the par-5 12th, I pitched my third from about 50 yards to inside 4 feet, and rolled that putt in for a birdie.
All of a sudden I was +3 through 12 and looking at a real opportunity to make the cut. I figured I would need to finish the last 6 in one over par — a challenge, but certainly doable. I hit my approach on 13 to the middle of the green, and lagged the ball up to about three feet away… only to miss the par putt. Ouch.
But even with that bogey, I was still in position to qualify if I could finish strong. I stepped up to the par-5 14th hole and tried to psych myself back up. With OB left, the ideal play would be up the right center of the fairway. But there’s a tree on the right about 20 yards in front of the tee box. It felt like I might clip it if I took driver and aimed up the right. But ultimately, I decided I needed to be aggressive and try to make a birdie, so I pulled driver.
I pulled my tee shot directly into the tree and the ball dropped straight down. Then, I tried to hit 3-wood out of a dicey lie in the rough, and chunked one that only rolled out about 120 yards. I managed to get up by the green in 4, but my chip came up well short, and so did the 15-footer I had left for bogey. End result: double bogey, and 6 over par with 4 left to play.
At that point, I figured I needed to finish 2 under in the last 4 to get inside the cut line. I stuck my approach inside 10 feet on the 15th, but the birdie try just lipped out. It felt like my last bit of hope had been extinguished.
And then, finally, brutally, mercifully, the wheels came all the way off. I sliced my tee shot on 16 deep into the woods. There’s a lake in the middle of the hole, so it wasn’t guaranteed I could get something up near the green in two, but I felt I needed par to have any chance at qualifying.
I chose the hero shot, but it was not to be: I clipped some branches and couldn’t clear the pond. After a drop and a mediocre 4th shot, I topped it all off with a three-putt for triple. And that was it — I knew I wasn’t going to qualify.
After that disaster, I sort of phoned it in on 17 and 18. I made a very mediocre double on 17, and then took an unplayable on 18 to avoid damaging my club on some rocks, leading to another double. For those keeping score at home, that’s +6 over the first 15 holes and +7 for the last 3. Final score: a 13-over 84.
4/ Reflections
On one hand, I’m proud of myself for being in contention. In hindsight, I clearly could have made the cut, even without my best stuff. If I could have made the two-footer and three-footer I missed on 5 and 13, I could have been 4 over with three holes to play. So it was validating to feel like I belonged.
On the other hand, I’m pretty disappointed with the way I kind of gave up on the last few holes. As stupid as it felt to keep trying my hardest while knowing I was going to miss the cut, it feels even stupider to see my name on the leaderboard next to an 84 while trying to convince myself that I almost qualified.
It turned out that the cut slipped all the way down to +5, and I was much more in contention than I realized. I didn’t really need to do anything special to qualify. Instead, at critical moments, I was trying to force my way to a lower score.
In fact, the two shots where I intentionally tried to be aggressive were the two that cost me the most — the tee shot I pulled into the tree on 14 and the hero shot I tried from the trees on 16. If I’d taken hybrid off the tee on 14 and just punched out laterally on 16, I might have still been able to make the cut, even with the other mistakes I made.
Even though I thought I was playing smart and conservative, it turned out I wasn’t playing conservative enough. It’s a tough way to learn the lesson, but I’m hoping I can bring that renewed focus on playing with temperance into future tournaments.
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