CARLSBAD – The Cabo Collegiate is in March at the Twin Dolphin Club along Mexico’s spectacular Cabo San Lucas coastline. Ole Miss is a regular participant. On the afternoon after the practice round, several members of the Rebels team went paddleboarding at a local beach. Junior Michael La Sasso stayed onshore and, being the consummate teammate, was walking to a beach shack to get them towels as they came in. “I thought I just stepped on something sharp, like maybe a shell,” La Sasso said. “It was under the sand, so you couldn’t really see it. I was like, man, that hurt. I was starting to walk up some steps and put my foot down, and my whole knee buckled. And I was like, what is going on? “You look down and look at your foot and see all the spines, and you start to go in shock.” It was a sea urchin. The poison-tipped spines were in both feet and his hand from brushing away the sand. La Sasso spent the evening on his back as a doctor from another team dug into his feet with a scalpel and needle. “It was tough, too, because you can’t put any numbing cream on it because there are so many and they’re so small,” La Sasso said. “Not to get gruesome, but you have to dig under them because they have the barbs on them. You have to dig under them, wiggle them and pull them out. We were there for a good 2½ hours.” That was March. On Monday, less than three months later, La Sasso was near another beach, at the Omni La Costa Resort & Spa, winning the NCAA men’s golf individual championship by two strokes over Texas A&M’s Phichaksn Maichon and four over Oklahoma State’s Preston Stout. “We’ve been through a lot,” La Sasso said. He also got a nasty stomach virus last year before the SEC Tournament and lost 22 pounds, lingering into NCAA team qualifying that the Rebels missed by a single stroke. This year, the entire team caught the flu at an event in Puerto Rico. Oh, and assistant coach Emerson Newsome ended up in the ER when he got hit in the head with a golf ball. Then a sea urchin in Mexico? Newsome called head coach Chris Malloy with the news about their star junior. “I think my exact words were. ‘Yeah, of course he did,’” Malloy said. “If it’s weird and could happen, we’ve had it happen. It was nice to have a little smooth sailing this week.” Well, relatively speaking at least. Also at stake Monday was the eight match play spots in the team competition, and Ole Miss entered the day in eighth place, with a half-dozen teams breathing down its neck. Then La Sasso, who started on the 10th hole, double-bogeyed 15 and 17 after a couple bad breaks with wind and bunker lies. This is where the sea urchin helped. He found a way to limp around and play the next day in Cabo. He found a way to re-attach the wheels Monday, claim the individual title and clinch a top-eight team finish by a single stroke. The golf gods smiled. At 6, La Sasso’s drive was heading for the native grasses but hit the cart path and bounced into the fairway. He went on to birdie and stretch his lead to two strokes. At 7, his drive was headed for a fairway bunker but was stopped by a rake. His approached bounced over the green to an area he had marked with an X in his yardage book “of where not to hit it,” but he got up and down for par. Two more pars and 8 and 9, and he was national champion and the Rebels were still alive for the team title, facing No. 1 seed Arizona State and San Pasqual High alum Connor Williams in Tuesday’s quarterfinals. The other quarterfinals: defending champion Auburn against Virginia, Florida against Texas and Oklahoma State against Oklahoma. The semifinals are Tuesday afternoon. The final is Wednesday afternoon. For La Sasso, who transferred from North Carolina after his freshman year, it represents a triumph over La Costa’s perilous North Course and his own mind. “Sleeping with the lead is never easy, by any means,” said La Sasso, who led by two after 54 holes. “Just trying to shut your mind off and go to bed is a very underrated thing to do. I was tossing and turning a little bit, just thinking about what was at stake today. “A big thing for me is keeping my head on straight. It’s something I worked very hard on in the offseason. I started to see a performance coach. I’m sure she’s smiling right now. Kind of just being able to have a level head and learning that we’re just playing golf.” He becomes the second NCAA champion from Ole Miss, joining Braden Thornberry from 2017. The list of past medalists includes Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Ben Crenshaw and Bryson DeChambeau. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler led after 54 holes but finished third in 2017. “Last year, he couldn’t have done that,” Malloy said. “He’s worked really hard to be able to handle those breaks. Mike runs hot at times. It’s what makes him really good. He has a fire that’s there.”