PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — In the long and storied history of golf at Pebble Beach, there’s a strong chance no golf lesson has ever changed a player’s fortunes quite as quickly as it did for Angelina Booan on Saturday morning at the PURE Insurance Championship.
Booan, a 17-year-old competing in the First Tee Division at week’s PGA Tour Champions event, started the day with a text message from her PGA Tour playing partner, Vaughn Taylor. She ended it in a way that still has her speechless: With her first-ever hole-in-one.
The story of the ace heard ’round Pebble Beach begins early on Saturday morning, when Angelna’s phone buzzed with a text from an unlikely source: Taylor, the PGA Tour pro assigned as her playing partner for the week. Taylor was headed to the range, and he wanted to know: Would Angelina like to join him for a lesson?
Truth be told, by the time the text arrived, Taylor had been weighing how best to help his teenage playing partner for the better part of a full day. He’d been paired with Booan during Friday’s opening round, and had been quietly cataloging swing advice, but he was leery of seeming overbearing.
“This is a big event for a junior golfer, especially playing at Pebble Beach,” Taylor told GOLF Sunday. “I was scared of putting too many thoughts in her head.”
Angelina quickly agreed to the meeting, and found Taylor on the range around 10 a.m. Right away, they focused on a few easy fixes: remembering to clean out the grooves of her irons before every swing, and ensuring she released the head of the putter during her stroke. Before long, though, they’d moved on to the big stuff: Angelina’s driver swing, “a beautiful, dynamic” movement, was causing too much length in her backswing with her irons and wedges.
“He wanted me to shorten it,” Booan said.
Angelina, still a teenager, was grateful for the help, but she was leery herself: Taylor was a pro golfer playing in a real event for real money. She didn’t want her lesson to take over his entire weekend, especially before his second round in an event where he was still very much in contention.
“I thought we were going to work for a few minutes,” Booan said. “But we were there for an hour and a half.”
Of course, Taylor was under no obligation to provide 90 minutes worth swing advice to his playing partner. While the pro-junior nature of the tournament naturally encourages kinship between the players and their teenage counterparts, there are zero expectation that players will take much time outside of their typical schedule to assist with their playing partners.
But Taylor didn’t seem to mind. His student was easy to work with — a “kind, down-to-earth” girl who genuinely wanted to get better. It helped, too, that she was a quick study.
“I mean, she did shortened her backswing like that,” Taylor said. “That was the coolest part, how fast she changed it.”
But then they turned for the 12th hole, a short par-3, and everything changed.
“I shot it at 107, but we agreed that it was probably playing longer with the wind, so we played it at 117,” Angelina said on Sunday, a smile growing across her face. “I took out my pitching wedge, and I cleaned the grooves, and then it landed an inch away from the hole and … it went in.”
Recounting the story a few minutes later, Taylor couldn’t hide his own grin.
“I wanted her to know about clean grooves because it’s important to be able compress and spin the ball,” he said. “Well, her shot landed a foot behind the hole and spun back in.”
It was an ace, the very first in Angelina’s golf career. And for the girl on the receiving end of Vaughn Taylor’s advice, words couldn’t do it justice.
“I’ll never, ever forget this,” she said with a laugh. “An ace at Spyglass Hill, I’ll be telling my grandkids about it.”
As it turns out, it was pretty special, too, for the guy on the giving end of the advice — just not for the reason you’d expect.
“I was her once,” Taylor said. “I mean, we were all junior golfers at one time. To have that opportunity just to help her, it’s kind of just something I felt like I should do.”
Taylor finished the week at 7 under, good for T9 at the PURE Insurance Championship, his best finish in months. That outcome, he says, is no surprise.
“Believe it or not, she’s actually a distraction out there,” he said. “Lately I’ve been struggling, I’ve been in my head, being frustrated. So being out there with her kind of takes my mind off of what I’m doing — and sometimes that works in golf.”
Goodness — it’s not always traded. Sometimes, it’s multiplied.
