PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. — Abraham Ancer has a fun video on his Twitter page hitting a golf ball in slow motion in the snow in Texas that he shot on Monday.
On Wednesday, Ancer posted another message: “Made it to LA! No practice this week but here goes nothing.”
Ancer admits in the time between he had no idea if he’d make it from his home in San Antonio to Los Angeles for the Genesis Invitational this week. A wicked winter storm has been pounding much of the U.S., with Texas making plenty of headlines for power and water outages.
“At some points I thought I was coming, at some points I was like
there’s no chance I’m coming,” Ancer said after his opening-round even-par 71 on Thursday. “I was going to fly commercial on Monday and then after that it was like pretty much the commercial flights were not going to be taking off until maybe Friday.”
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A fellow PGA Tour pro who lives in Texas was also trying to figure out a way to get to the Riv.
“Sergio (Garcia) was in Austin and I was like, ‘Hey, do you have anything over there?’”, Ancer said. “I was maybe trying to, because his plane was over there as well, but he couldn’t fly his plane because his pilots were not there. They had to fly in and they couldn’t obviously. So he had to borrow a plane. He was like, ‘Man, I don’t think we’re going to be able to take off, either.’ I said, ‘Hey, I found a plane, you can drive south here and we can all just go together, but then the roads might be a little sketchy. He was like, ‘I’ll just wait.’
“Then I see him here. I was like, ‘What happened?’ He was like, ‘Well, they told me, ‘Hey, we’ve got a little 30-minute window and if you want to go, it’s right now.’ So we both made it last night here and here we are.”
Ancer did get some range time in before his round but never did get in a practice round ahead of the event after not getting to his hotel until about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
“I got good sleep, woke up, did my COVID test and got my results by 8 and then came and practiced a little bit,” he said.
Ancer says he never lost power at his house but, “I didn’t have water for like a day, no internet or cable.” He knows many others are having a much more difficult time.
“There were so many people without power and that was brutal,” he said. “I know a couple people that their house itself inside was like less than 40 degrees, so pretty chilly obviously. And not being able to cook or anything really, shower, it’s pretty rough. A lot of people had some like busted pipes and a lot of water damage inside the house. It’s just pretty rough.”