Coody twins come through in Final Match as Texas edges Arizona State to claim national championship

    Texas’ Coody twins, Pierceson and Parker, were missing from the Longhorns’ lineup when the spring portion of the wraparound 2021-2022 season got started in February.

   Turned out the twins had each broken the same bone in their arm during a resistance training exercise during the midseason pause in December. In stories about the twin bad break for Texas, there were the predictable references that maybe they were taking the twin thing a little too far.

   The good news was that the twin grandsons of 1971 Masters champion Charles Coody from Plano, Texas were going to be able to recover in time to tee it up when the postseason got going in April.

   And there they were Wednesday, delivering two critical points as Texas, ranked seventh in the latest Golfstat rankings, edged No. 4 Arizona State, 3-2, in the NCAA Championship’s Final Match just miles from the Sun Devils’ campus at Grayhawk Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz.

   For the trio of the Coodys and fellow senior Cole Hammer, who dealt with a loss in the Final Match to Stanford in 2019 as freshmen, a global pandemic that shut down college golf in 2020, a disappointing 2021 season and the twin breaks suffered by the Coodys, playing in front of a partisan crowd was the least of their worries.

   Parker Coody put the first point on the board for the Longhorns Wednesday with a 6 and 5 victory over James Loew, a senior from Singapore. It capped a huge week for Parker Coody, who lost in a playoff for the individual title in stroke play and won two of his three matches in match play.

   That helped ease the sting a little when it became apparent that Hammer, a Houston native and No. 13 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking (WAGR), was coming up short in the leadoff match against Mason Andersen, a fifth-year player from Chandler, Ariz. and No. 61 in the WAGR, Anderson ultimately claiming a 3 and 2 victory that evened the overall tally at 1-1.

   Pierceson Coody, No. 4 in the WAGR, probably had the toughest assignment of the day in trying to cool off Preston Summerhays, a freshman from the golfing Summerhays family of Scottsdale and No. 86 in the WAGR.

   All Summerhays did in Tuesday’s quarterfinals and semifinals was to knock off two of the best players in college golf, Fred Haskins Award winner Chris Gotterup of Oklahoma and Joe Highsmith of Pepperdine.

   But Pierceson Coody, always the higher-ranked of the twins throughout his college career, gutted out a critical 2 and 1 victory.

   With Mason Nome, a junior from Houston, locked in a tight battle with Arizona State’s David Puig, a senior from Spain and No. 9 in the WAGR, the spotlight fell on Texas junior Travis Vick, another Houstonian and No. 27 in the WAGR, in the anchor match with the Sun Devils’ Cameron Sisk, a senior from Sam Diego and No. 42 in the WAGR.

   When Sisk left his birdie putt, a trickly downhill slider, half a roll short on the 17^th hole, it enabled Vick to take a 1-up lead to the 18^th hole.

   I’ve met golf people who watched Vick playing in the U.S. Junior Amateur in 2018 at Baltusrol Golf Club in Springfield, N.J. and became instant fans of a kid who plays the game with an aggressive edge.

   When Vick bombed his approach shot from 190 yards away onto the green at the last at the 7,289-yard, par-70 Grayhawk layout and Sisk found a greenside bunker, victory was withing Texas’ grasp.

   Vick lagged his 25-foot birdie putt perfectly to gimme range and Texas had its fourth national championship and second under veteran head coach John Fields, who won a national title a decade ago in 2012 with Jordan Spieth.

   Puig would gain a second full point for Arizona State when his match with Nome was conceded on the 19^th hole after Vick clinched the win for the Longhorns.

   Fields was understandably happy for his trio of seniors, Hammer and the Coodys who had reached the Final Match in 2019 as freshmen at The Blessings Golf Club in Fayetteville, Ark. and just kept battling to reach their ultimate goal.

   “They arrived with incredible enthusiasm, maybe not the experience that we needed that week, but they got there because of the enthusiasm that they had,” Fields told the Texas website, referring to the loss to Stanford at The Blessings. “Now, they’ve added the experience and they still have the enthusiasm. They’ve done the hard work, they’ve done the heavy lifting and now they’re national champions.”