He’d gone out early in the chill and dampness on the Torrey Pines South Course and pushed himself to the top of the leader board by getting to five under heading into the weekend at the U.S.
But this is one of the four majors, where the leader faces a few dozen reporters and a phalanx of interview stages, conjuring a scene that is as close to the Oscars red carpet as Bland will ever come.
Bland, meantime, came here with 10 hats given to him by his home course, The Wisley, in a village southwest of London.
And if your mind doesn’t drift back to the tournament waged on these grounds 13 summers ago, then golf or beautiful nostalgia just aren’t your thing.
He entered this week as the 115th-ranked player in the world—the same position as Phil Mickelson was going into his PGA Championship win—but Bland was down into the 200s until the British Masters victory and a subsequent third-place posting in Denmark.
He lost his card as recently as 2019, and this is wild: In 25 years as a professional, this is only the fourth major he’s ever been in, and the appearance comes in a fourth different decade.
“There’s nothing like the back nine of a Masters,” Bland said.
“Golf is all I know,” Bland explained.
The belief became reality on May 15, when Bland won—in a playoff, of course—to lift a trophy for the first time in 478 starts.
“The social-media side of it I wasn’t ready for, just getting messages from people all over the globe, from Australia, from here, from America, South America, China, just saying how inspired they were by it.
It’s all there just straight in front of me, and that’s the kind of golf course I like.
Bland is well-regarded for his driving accuracy, even if he isn’t long, and that’s certainly working for him.
I was apprehensive about the length of the course, but the kikuyu is running fast and it’s so tight, it rolls long.
Bland can be a bit edgy on the golf course, according to Roadley, and the golfer all but admitted that in a hilarious way when he addressed the rhino headcover in his bag that is part of his support of conservation.
An Australian who has been looping for 23 years, the 53-year-old Roadley hadn’t carried a winner’s bag in his career until March 2020, when Finland’s Sami Valimaki captured the Oman Open.
“It took me a long while to win one, and I finally won one and got sacked because I was too old,” Roadley said, shaking his head.
So here they are.
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