Chip Lutz’s run at the 66th U.S. Senior Amateur Championship ended in the quarterfinals Wednesday at the Country Club of Detroit.
Lutz, of Reading, suffered a 3-and-2 loss to Craig Davis of Chula Vista, Calif. Lutz won his first three matches in the match-play event, but he struggled Wednesday.
“It wasn’t my best day, unfortunately,” Lutz said. “The wind came up, the conditions were way different, and I didn’t adapt the way I normally do.”
Lutz, the 2015 champion, had played brilliantly during the rest of the tournament. He shot a 6-under 138 over 36 holes in qualifying to earn the No. 2 seed. It was the 11th straight time Lutz made the 64-player match-play bracket, the longest current streak.
Lutz won his first match on Monday and two more on Tuesday to advance to the quarterfinals for the sixth time. But he struggled on the course at Grosse Pointe Farms, Mich., and against Davis, the No. 58 seed.
Lutz, now 28-10 in Senior Amateur matches, said he had the most trouble with the changed conditions of the greens.
“It ended up the green speeds were probably a foot, a foot and a half faster,” Lutz said. “I hit the first one by and then missed it coming by, and then you go the other way and you hit it short. Really my distance control wasn’t what I had for the tournament. It was just really off. That kind of got me kind of perplexed.”
In the semifinals, Davis lost 5-and-4 to No. 38 seed Gene Elliott of West Des Moines, Iowa. Elliott will play in the championship match on Thursday against No. 9 seed Jerry Gunthorpe of Ovid, Mich.
Lutz looks forward to next year’s Senior Amateur at the Kittansett Club in Marion, Mass. As a quarterfinalist, Lutz earned an exemption to the 2022 event.
“Well, you know, there’s both pleasure and disappointment, obviously, and that’s golf,” Lutz said. “You never seem to — only one guy gets to walk away really happy. But it’s pretty nice that I got this far and I made a good showing out of it, so I’m happy about that.”
Source: Berkshire mont
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