Sometimes you just can’t make up ground no matter how hard you try. For Hannah Green, such was the case on Sunday at the DIO Implant LA Open. She began the day four shots back of eventual champion and close friend Nasa Hataoka and though she fired a 3-under 68 making just a single bogey, Green ultimately finished solo second, her best result so far this season.
“I've known Nasa for years,” Green said. “We played amateur golf together. She's obviously a very successful player, but it was really nice to be alongside her winning and just along for the ride. She holed some great putts and you got to take them while you can here because sometimes you can miss some short ones. Definitely really happy with how things are trending. It was nice to be a bit more consistent.”
While it was a ho-hum putting week for Green at Wilshire Country Club – she averaged 30.75 putts per round – her ball-striking was solid. She hit 48 of 56 fairways and 58 greens in regulation, no easy feat considering Wilshire’s small putting surfaces. Green’s solo second is her best finish in the LA Open, topping her T-3 performance in the 2021 edition of the event, and is her third top-10 of the 2022 season, joining a tie for sixth at the HSBC Women’s World Championship and a tie for eighth at The Chevron Championship. In other words, she’s close to getting back into the winner’s circle, but Hannah knows the putting needs improvement.
“I guess I've had good results here at Wilshire before,” she said. “(I’ve come) tied third so I kind of knew that it was possible to have a good result here. It was nice to see some putts go in today. Just made my confidence go up a little bit higher. Hopefully, I can continue that into next week and the rest of the year. Last week I got off to a great start and then just couldn't maintain it in Hawaii. So I feel like once I get the putter hot I'm pretty excited to see what's to come.”
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