His top-seeded Oregon golf team alive for at least one more day in the NCAA Championship, Ducks coach Casey Martin did a little jig just behind The Honors Course’s No. 9 green Thursday evening.
“My happy dance,” said a smiling Martin, whose team shot 5 under par to go from outside the eight-team match-play cut Wednesday to No. 5 overall Thursday with a final minus-3 total.
The Ducks face Washington in the quarterfinals this morning, the Huskies having ended stroke play in fourth place at 4-under-par 860.
“We really played great,” Martin said. “We showed a lot of character. We talked a little bit Wednesday night that great teams showed up, and we really did that today.”
As for Martin’s dance moves possibly landing him a spot on “Dancing With the Stars,” Ducks senior Jack Dukeminier boldly labeled those odds “not good.”
Then again, when you’ve just fired a 66, as Dukeminier did under the most pressurized conditions, you’re probably not worried about offending your coach.
“We’re all feeling pretty great right now,” the player said. “We’re just so excited to be in the top eight.”
Martin has had great feelings about The Honors Course since 1991, when he lost a U.S. Amateur match to defending champ Phil Mickelson on the 19th hole, easily one of the highlights of that year’s tourney.
“I told our players when we first got here that this place is awesome,” said Martin, who turned 38 on Wednesday. “It will always remain one of the best courses and venues I’ve ever played.”
The fact that Martin was playing at all made the 1991 tourney special. Because of a birth defect, his right leg has always been little more than a walking cane, the leg never properly developing muscle tissue, particularly below the knee.
It forced him to require a cart to compete, something that Martin had to fight for in court using the Americans With Disabilities Act as his argument.
Martin won at every step, which eventually allowed him to play on the PGA Tour. But by 2006 he’d lost his Tour card at about the same time Oregon needed a volunteer golf coach. One year later, Martin took over the program.
“Even though I went to Stanford,” he said, “I grew up in Eugene and I’d always been a Ducks fan. It was a perfect fit.”
Here’s a perfect fit: Like Martin, Dukeminier also grew up in Eugene. In fact, Martin’s father and Dukeminier’s dad have been golfing buddies for years. The player even remembers accompanying his dad to one of Martin’s court cases over the use of a golf cart “when I was 8 or 9.”
Having fallen into a tie for ninth place Wednesday, Oregon looked like it might need a court order to reach match play. But then the Ducks played the Martin has taught them — firing at the flags, playing to win, not letting a little adversity do you in.
Or as Oregon player Eugene Wong told one media outlet earlier in the week, “When you look at Coach and all he’s been through, you realize what real adversity is, and it isn’t golf.”
Still, on a day when the scoring average climbed to its highest of the week at over 74 strokes a round, the Ducks firing 5 under as a team is heady stuff. Especially with Dukeminier tying a course record with his 66 just three days after receiving the NCAA’s Elite 88 award for carrying a 4.0 grade point average as an economics major.
Asked which was rougher, shooting a 66 at the Honors or carrying a 4.0, Dukeminier, said, “It’s close. They’re both tough.”
Looking back on his own playing career, Martin said he hoped his court victories “opened the door for some people. I hope it made them realize you don’t have to go second-tier. You can still shoot for the top.”
And occasionally break into a happy dance during the journey to get there.