Open Course Fits Rosales’ Style to a Tee

She wears white tape on two fingers of her left hand and one finger on her right to prevent the chronic blisters she gets from gripping her golf clubs too tightly.

But it’s the entire Orchards Golf Club that’s in need of a tape job because Jennifer Rosales is blistering the U.S. Women’s Open.

Though she wears stylish clothes and snazzy orange-tinted wraparound sunglasses, Rosales isn’t the hip choice of most spectators, who instead are enamored of No. 1-ranked Annika Sorenstam and 14-year-old Michelle Wie.

But Rosales, 25, a native of the Philippines who maintains a residence there as well as in California, shot a two-under-par 69 Saturday to go with her rounds of 70 and 67, and is the only player to shoot three rounds under par in the premier event on the LPGA Tour.

The seven-under 206 total is three shots better than the second-place trio of Sorenstam, Meg Mallon and Kelly Robbins. Rachel Teske is at three under and Michelle Ellis is two under.

Wie is one of five players at one under after a double bogey on the 18th hole.

“There’s a little cushion there, but in an Open you never know what’s going to happen,” said Rosales, who gained her first tour victory two months ago in Atlanta. “There are a few good players behind me. Annika is Annika. She’s an awesome player. You know she’s going to make birdies.”

Sorenstam made three birdies and an eagle Saturday but also had four bogeys. Rosales made four birdies and only two bogeys.

“Obviously, she’s playing really good golf,” Sorenstam said of Rosales. “She has a lot of confidence and this is a course that fits her game really well.”

Rosales narrowly missed an eagle on the par-five 13th when her six-foot putt was off line. “I told myself it’s an eagle putt, but if I miss it’s still a birdie,” she said.

She was most pleased with her birdie on No. 16, the 439-yard par four that has been the toughest hole of the championship. She bogeyed the 16th Friday and acknowledged Saturday, “I was thinking about 16 when I was on the first tee.”

But by the time she got to the hole, where the green is protected by a creek, she was in her aggressive mode. “I hit my drive and my five-iron where I wanted to,” Rosales said of the two shots that left her a 10-foot putt that she sank for her final birdie of the sun-splashed afternoon.

Rosales, the 1998 NCAA champion at USC, joked that if she wins the U.S. Open today, “I can run for president [in the Philippines].”

Right now she has to run away from a formidable field on a course that has grown drier and more difficult since Thursday’s thunderstorms while also running from her own thoughts. “It’s hard to block it out,” she said about the prospects of winning here and of thinking too much about it. “I can’t let myself do that or I’ll put too much pressure on myself.”

So she planned to relax Saturday night with family members who were able to join her for this event -- her mother, her brother and her 4-year-old niece Isabel, who dripped ice cream on herself while sitting in Rosales’ lap during her session with the media.

“It’s a great feeling to have my family here and with me in the same room to help me forget about it,” Rosales said. “But my brother will not let me. He’s going to go, ‘Come on, come on, one more day, one more day.’ ”