Two bad outings doom Rebels

Friday, May 30, 1997 | 11:44 a.m.

LAKE FOREST, Ill. -- It seemed cruelly fitting that the UNLV golf team's national championship hopes would be blown away in this Windy City suburb.

As the wind off Lake Michigan whipped Conway Farms Golf Club, making a difficult course even more treacherous, the No. 1-ranked and top-seeded Rebels were left twisting in the wind Thursday when the 30-team field was cut to the low 15 scoring teams.

A second-round, 9-over-par 293 left UNLV six shots off the cut with a two-round total of 593 and snapped at seven the Rebels' streak of making the cut at the NCAA Division I Men's Golf Championships.

For a team that had made winning the national title its clear-cut goal since the season began in September, Thursday's events were positively shattering. More than one Rebel player walked off the 18th green with tears in his eyes.

"I don't want to go out this way," senior Mike Ruiz said long before it was official that UNLV had ended its season. "Coming in as one of the favorites and to not even make the cut, it's disappointing. We expected to do at least as good as we did last year, if not better."

Ever since UNLV finished second to Arizona State at last year's NCAA Championships, the Rebels had their sights set on capturing their first national title this week. Four tournament titles, five second-place finishes, the No. 1 ranking and the top seed in this week's championship all were clouded by the Rebels' performance the past two days.

"It was either first or nothing for us -- nothing mattered except for winning this tournament," junior Bill Lunde said.

"To come out here and do what we did was extremely disappointing. Our goal all year was to win the national championship, that's what we've been working on, that's what we talked about and then we come out and have a bad, bad few days; that's about as bad a timing as it gets."

For nine holes Thursday, it appeared as if the Rebels would stage one of their patented comebacks and post a low enough score to extend their stay here for two more days. UNLV made the turn at even par but, as it did the day before, hit a lull on the first few holes of the back nine.

UNLV was a combined 7 over par on the 10th, 11th and 12th holes, and coach Dwaine Knight finally conceded the pressure of being the top-ranked team and the top seed in the tournament may have gotten to his players.

"Yep, I think it did," Knight said.

"We didn't handle it as well as we did all year. I thought maybe our season would kind of get us over that, the experience factor in the national championship, because we've been so competitive so many different times. But it's a different tournament once you're here. We talked about it and we knew what we needed to do, but the execution just wasn't there."

The Rebels bowed out of the tournament with a two-round score of 25-over-par 593 -- six shots out of 15th place and 22 shots behind second-round leader Northwestern.

Knight seemed more shocked than upset after he realized his team would be heading home two days earlier than planned.

"Going into the tournament, I thought, 'Wow, this is the best I've ever seen the team play' and it seemed like it was very comfortable with everything," Knight said.

"It's a real bitter pill to swallow. For one year, we've played incredible golf. It's really hard to come in here and have one poor tournament -- we haven't played a tournament like this all year."

But Knight could find no fault with his players' effort -- only their lack of execution.

"Usually you can kind of tell when a team is able to get the ball up and down and it seemed like every time we would have a bad shot, we weren't converting; you could kind of feel the old screws tightening a little bit," Knight said. "I think Jeremy (Anderson) felt it, being a freshman, and Gilly (Gilberto Morales), trying so hard his senior year, I think it was definitely a factor -- more than I thought it would have been.

"I could see it on the back side today ... the effort never gave up, it was always the same, but I could see it was wearing on them a little bit, the fact that we couldn't convert when we missed a green. Our depth, which carried us all year, at this particular tournament, (our) four and five (players), we couldn't mask that spot and it hurt us. We didn't get enough help there."

Sophomore Ted Oh rebounded from an opening 74 with an even-par 71, Lunde carded a 2-over 73, as did Ruiz. Anderson came in with a 76 and the Rebels threw out Morales' 78.

Lunde stated the obvious when he summed up the Rebels' worst outing of the year.

"That hasn't happened all year where all of us have struggled at the same time," he said. "Over the year, one person would struggle but everyone else would seem to play all right and hang in there ... but we came out here and all of us hung in there and nothing really happened.

"We all struggled together at the worst possible time ... it was a bad couple of days."