Clarke, Karlsson share one-shot lead in Boca
Darren Clarke eagled the par-5 18th hole Saturday for a 10-under-par 62 and a share of the second-round lead in the PGA Tour Champions’ TimberTech Champions.
Winless on the 50-andover tour, the 52-year-old major champion from Northern Ireland had eight birdies in the bogey-round at The Old Course at Broken Sound in Boca Raton.
“I’m looking forward to [Sunday],” Clarke said. “Maybe one of these days I am going to have one. Unfortunately, with my S-10 visa situation, this is my last tournament, I can’t play Phoenix next week. Let’s hope I finish the year strong.”
Robert Karlsson of Sweden birdied the 18th for a 66 to match Clarke at 13-under 131.
“When you play on the Champions Tour, it’s just very, very low scoring all the time and very bunched up,” Karlsson said. “I’m trying not to get too caught up in it, play my own game and that’s going to be the plan tomorrow as well. It’s a bit of a weird feeling playing without crowds as well, so in one way it’s not much different. I’m just going to try to treat it as a normal day and go out and try to shoot as low as I can.”
Clarke overcame a onestroke penalty for picking up his ball on the second fairway, forgetting that preferred lies weren’t allowed in the wet conditions.
He set up the closing eagle with an 8-iron to 3 feet.
Jim Furyk was a stroke back after a 68. Furyk, 50, won this year in his first two starts on the senior tour.
Local favorite Bernhard Langer, the winner in
2010 and 2019, had a 68 to join Cameron Beckman (66), Kent Jones (66) and Scott Parel (68) at 11-under.
John Daly, tied with Furyk for first-round lead after a 64, had a 73 to drop into a tie for 20th at at 7-under. Daly is playing his fourth event since revealing he’s fighting bladder cancer.
PGA TOUR
Doc Redman found the wind far more manageable Saturday, and he took advantage with a 4-under 67 for a one-shot lead going into the final round of the Bermuda Championship in Southampton.
The wind came out of the opposite direction as the previous day and it wasn’t quite as strong. It showed in the scores and in the number of opportunities for players who never won or have gone without winning in years.
Redman was at 10-under 203, one shot ahead of Ryan Armour (70), Wyndham Clark (70) and Kramer Hickok (69), who took three putts from a tough spot on the fringe on the 18th at Port Royal.
Another shot behind were Matt Jones (66), Brian Gay (67) and Ollie Schniederjans (69). Jones was bogey-free in the third round, which to him was as impressive as any of his five birdies.
Redman, the 2017 U.S. Amateur champion, is among 10 players separated by four shots who have never won on the PGA Tour. A victory Sunday comes with an invitation to the Masters next April.
“I feel like with the wind switching, it was a little easier,” Redman said.
“And it was still really windy. But yesterday was incredible. We couldn’t have been far away from stopping play yesterday. That made it a little easier. And the greens roll great, so if you have looks at it you can make birdies.”
Redman still was mindful of the wind, particularly on the par-5 17th when he made decisions to play short off the tee because of the strong left-to-right wind off the Atlantic
Ocean and potential problems it could have created.
The wind also made it tough on Armour, the 44year-old from Ohio who picked the wrong day to not be swinging his best. What saved him was a short game that enabled him to break par for the third straight day and to stay very much in the mix to win on Sunday.
“I’m going to have to go figure out what was going on,” Armour said. “Toward the end there, I started hitting the center of the face a little more. As you know, when the winds are this high, you’ve got to hit in the center or else it’s going to get blown all over.”
He took a little off a pitching wedge for a beautiful third shot just below the pin for birdie on the par-5 17th, and he narrowly missed a 15-footer on the 18th that would have given him a share of the lead.
Jones is used to windy conditions from his roots in Australia, and he handled it well. He will be going for his first PGA Tour victory since the 2014 Houston Open, although Jones won the Australian Open at the end of last year, and that tournament had a stronger field than what he’s facing in Bermuda.
EUROPEAN TOUR
Jamie Donaldson will look to seal his first European Tour title in more than six years after taking a one-stroke lead at the end of the third round of the Cyprus Open in Paphos.
Donaldson, who is most famous for securing the winning point for the European team at the 2014 Ryder Cup, birdied the
18th hole for the third time this week to shoot 2-under 69 and reach 14-under. He won the last of his three titles at the Czech Masters in 2014 and is playing on an invitation this week.
The 45-year-old Welshman moved one shot ahead of five players at Aphrodite Hills Resort — David Drysdale, Marcus Armitage, Thomas Detry and the Finnish pair of Kalle Samooja and Sami Välimäki.
Samooja started the third round six strokes off the lead but shot the lowest round of the day, a 7-under 64.
PGA OF AMERICA
Jim Richerson was elected the 42nd president of the PGA of America at a virtual annual meeting that included Tim Rosaforte becoming the first journalist to be awarded honorary membership.
Richerson, the senior vice president of operations for Arizona-based Troon Golf, succeeds Suzy Whaley. He previously was general manager and director of golf for Wisconsin-based Kohler, where he first was elected a PGA officer.
The PGA of America, which has some 29,000 members, held the annual meeting virtually for the first time in its 104 years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Among the final acts of Whaley, the first female president in PGA history, was to bestow honorary membership to Rosaforte, whose career spanned newspapers, magazines and television.
He is the 12th person to be appointed a PGA Honorary Member, joining a list that includes former Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, and nine-time major champion Gary Player.
Rosaforte, 65, retired last December and is battling early onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. He worked at three newspapers in Florida, Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest, and most recently was part of the NBC-Golf Channel reporting team.