There are bad days at the office, and then there’s the one Andrey Pavlov endured at the Lyoness Open.
The Russian will be keen to forget about his Friday at the Diamond Country Club in Atzenbrugg, Austria, after writing himself into the record books for the wrong reason.
Pavlov, who shot an impressive 71 in the opening round Thursday after receiving a tournament invitation, registered a nightmare score of 17 on the par-five first hole – the joint-second worst in European Tour history.
What’s more, if that was not frustrating enough for the 1,598th-ranked Pavlov, he proceeded to find the water on a whopping six different occasions in that time.
Pavlov started the day six shots off the lead but ended it languishing down in the lower echelons of the tournament leaderboard and failed to make the cut.
He can at least take consolation from the fact that his score on the first hole was not as poor as Philippe Porquier’s effort of 20 on a single hole at the 1978 French Open.
Pavlov’s 17 matches that of Chris Gane, who made the same score at Gleneagles in 2003.
The Russian can also rest safe in the knowledge that he did not fare quite as badly as Tommy Armour and Ray Ainsley, who both needed 23 shots on a single hole on the American tour circuit.
Armour’s nightmare came about at the 1927 Shawnee Open, while Ainsley’s hole to forget was at the 1938 US Open.
