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Weekley blog: Boo on the second round in China
 
Nov. 27, 2007

Editor's note: Boo Weekley is teaming with his good friend, Heath Slocum to represent the United States at the OMEGA Mission Hills World Cup in China. He'll be writing a diary each day for PGATOUR.com and this is his fourth installment.

SHENZEN, China -- It's great to be here in China but it's a little disappointing that we aren't getting to see a lot of the actual country. I would love to go and see different parts of China. To travel this far, and then all you do is really come to the golf course and then go back to the motel, well, it's kind of disappointing. I'd love to go visit the Great Wall but they tell me it's pretty far away. The people are nice and they are friendly, and they seem like they would help you. I'm sure there are some bad places here but at the same time, it's just like in the States, there's bad places there. But we've come all this way, and we're here to play golf.

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Boo Weekley and teammate Heath Slocum are enjoying a one-shot lead in China. (Getty Images)

This is a difficult format to get used to. It's hard for me, because I like to get up there, get my yards and hit it, where this is a little more strategy. You're kind of thinking, all right, this is not my favorite shot, so I'm going to aim it over here to the left and hit it on this side of the green, but that might leave Heath a real tough putt where for me it would be OK. So you have to think twice. So it's kind of hard to get into a rhythm and it's hard because you don't want to miss the shot and leave him in a bad spot.

As for a strategy for today, which was alternate shot, we kind of had one but we kind of didn't. We told each other in the practice round, hey, I'm going to play the par 5s -- tee off on the first hole, on the odd numbers -- and Heath's going to take the evens. Last night, we didn't even talk about it. We ate our dinner and went and listened to some music and then went on back to the room and went to sleep. Then we got up this morning and had breakfast, and we still didn't talk about it. I wasn't for sure exactly what we were going to do until we got on the first hole and I said, 'Heath, what do you think?' And he said, "Dog, you got it.' I said all right.

I don't hit it much farther than Heath but I just think that sometimes I carry it a little farther. It helped out a bunch today. I think we birdied four of the par 5s, and we should have birdied the other one; I just hit a bad chip. But it worked out in our favor. I think that's the best way we've got to play it. The first day was good. We maybe could have got two strokes better. That's just golf, though. But today, it was kind of like we could not get our putters in a rhythm. We both hit a lot of good shots, but we couldn't putt. I missed one from I would say about 3, 3 ½ feet, and that kind of winged us down a little bit. And then Heath missed a couple of decent putts at it and I missed another decent par putt from about 10 feet that kind of shot us back down again. Heath picked us back up with another birdie on the following hole, I think, though, so that was pretty good.

We just couldn't get in a rhythm with our putters and that's kind of hard. I think it was four holes out there today, I didn't touch my putter except just holding it -- just in case. That's what makes this format so tough, especially for me. I'm not the greatest putter by any means, and I'm not the worst, but it's just hard for me to get a rhythm with the speed of the green, the feel in my hand, just making sure I make a good stroke. It's just kind of hard. So we'll see what happens tomorrow.

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