SAS CHAMPIONSHIP There’s no stopping Langer in SAS Championship

One thing often said about Bernhard Langer is that the man never seems to age.

Langer, for one, tends to disagree.

“We all age and it shows,” he said this week at the SAS Championship. “Things are hurting and aching that didn’t hurt 10 or 20 years ago.

“But that’s life and you just make the best of it. The good thing is the golf ball doesn’t know how old I am.”

For the record, Langer is 61. He’s still making the golf ball do good things and Sunday turned the SAS Championship into a runaway victory at Prestonwood Country Club.

With a 7-under-par 65, Langer quickly broke away from Gene Sauers in the final round of the PGA Tour Champions event. He finished a tournament-record six shots ahead of Scott Parel and seven in front of Jerry Kelly, also setting a tournament record with his 22-under 194 total in winning the SAS Championship for a second time.

“It’s always fun to go back to where you’ve won before,” Langer said.

Fun for Langer also is contending for the Charles Schwab Cup, the biggest prize on the tour. He has won it four times but fell short last year, and now will go into the Charles Schwab Cup playoffs in the top position with $1,918,904 in winnings after a $315,000 payoff Sunday.

Langer nearly shot his age for the first time -- and said he had it on his mind -in the opening round, carding a 10-under 62 that had a torrid run of nine birdies on his last 10 holes. But Sauers and Tom Lehman also had 62s to share the lead the day after Tropical Storm Michael softened up the golf course with 3.5 inches of rain.

It was Langer and Sauers tied at the top after the second round, three shots ahead of Lehman, but Langer continued to surge on Sunday. Langer had a four-shot lead over Sauers at the turn and it was six after Langer birdied the par-4 10th while Sauers doublebogeyed after a poor drive.

“It was pretty special,” Derek Carr of the Oakland Raiders speaks with head coach Jon Gruden during a timeout in the NFL International Series game between Seattle Seahawks and Oakland Raiders at Wembley Stadium on Sunday in London, England.

The Raiders’ 27-3 loss to the Seattle Seahawks Sunday in London’s Wembley Stadium was much worse than the final score or the final statistics – both of which were bad enough.

It represented the loss of hope for the season as well as the chance any East Bay-based fans will ever have of seeing an NFL team in Oakland amount to anything more than an also-ran.

Coming off a 26-10 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers, the Raiders were being watched closely for signs of life. Instead, they flew more than 5,000 miles for a “home” game that amounted to a funeral for the 2018 season.

There have been worse scores – a 52-0 loss to the St. Louis Rams jumps immediately to mind – but that team was circling the drain much later in the season en route to 3-13.

About the only game which compares to this one and the rage which will be forthcoming on social media was a 27-0 loss on Monday night to the San Diego Chargers in the 2006 season opener.

That one was when Twitter was just getting started, but the postgame comments on the Bay Area News Group blog that existed at the time were angry and unending. Fans felt as if they’d been sold a bill of goods and it turned out they were right.

The head coach that night was Art Shell, the offensive coordinator Tom Walsh and the quarterback Aaron Brooks. The Raiders finished 2-14, and in truth, it’s hard to refute the notion that a similar season is possible a dozen years later based on the last two games even though the coach is Jon Gruden and the quarterback is Derek Carr.

The Raiders are a punching bag of their own making at 1-5 and it was apparent not long af-