Tiger fades in third round on punishing U.S. Open course
A TOTAL OF 17 PLAYERS SIT WITHIN FIVE SHOTS OF THE U.S. OPEN LEAD
The door to the 112th U.S. Open championship is not slightly ajar. It’s wide open, hanging off one hinge, and about a dozen-and-a-half players are going to have a fair kick at it in the fourth (not necessarily final) round.
If you have a flight out of San Francisco on Monday morning, you might want to check out the change fee. If you’re watching at home, start developing a convinc- ing cough.
Owing to a pair of awful rounds by Tiger Woods (75) and David Toms (76), who shared the 36-hole lead with Jim Furyk, and an abundance of moxie displayed by a raft of pursuers — both pedigreed and not — Sunday at The Olympic Club’s snarly Lake Course shapes up as bun fight of the first order.
And so many players are nominally in the hunt, an 18-hole Monday playoff is more than possible.
When the co-leaders all bogeyed the first hole, no one in the field was left under par, and it continued that way until Furyk recovered from another bogey at the fifth with birdies at No. 7 and No. 11, and again put a red number on the board.
But that, too, disappeared until the very end, when 2010 champ Graeme McDowell birdied the 18th and Furyk, a hole behind, did the same at the par-five 17th.
Old Man Par is kicking the stuffing out of the field, but McDowell and Furyk, the 2003 winner, are beating it by a razor-thin stroke — two ahead of Sweden’s Frederik Jacobson, he of the painter’s hat and the plumber’s swing.
“Myself and Jim played together the first two rounds, so we’ll have the pleasure of one another’s company tomorrow,” said McDowell. “It’s wide open. I look at guys at 2 and 3 and 4 over par in this tournament, who I really think have a realistic shot to win tomorrow.
“I’ll expect there to be large cheers going off. Maybe kind of a Sunday afternoon at Augusta, the way the cheers go around that place. All I can ask is to give myself a chance down the stretch and hope for the best, really. I’ve enjoyed it today. I’ve enjoyed the buzz of it all.”
“Graeme and I are tied for the lead, but there’s a bunch of people piled up and close to it. Obviously I like being up front in the position I’m in. The golf course will take its effect on a bunch of people,” said Furyk, who shot even-par 70. I probably won’t try to look at the leaderboard too much, I’ll get a feel for how things are going scorewise, but it will be more about trying to play the golf course tomorrow rather than trying to play Graeme or trying to play the guys trying to hunt us down.”
Among the luminaries in that chase, two-time U.S. Open champ Ernie Els was the most dramatic, holing a 50-yard recovery shot at the 17th for eagle and a 68.
That moved him to twoover-par 212 and a tie with, among others, the eternal bridesmaid, Lee Westwood, who shot a crisp 67 and incredibly is once again in position to win his first major title.
Also at that figure were Tour journeyman Blake Adams and Belgium’s Nicolas Colsaerts.
“I’m in a much better mood now than I was on the 6th tee,” said Els, the 1994 and ’97 champion.
“I just played the first six horribly. I hit it all over the ballpark, and if you’re going to play that way, the course can be firm or soft and you’re not going to score.
“So to come back and play the last 12 holes in 5-under is quite amazing, and obviously the shot on 17 is what dreams are made of, a shot like that in a U.S. Open.
“It was the softest the course has played all week, but that didn’t make it easy.
“Wow, moving day in the U.S. Open, if you shoot even par you’re moving,” said Els. “In a regular event you got to shoot 7 or 8-under par on a Saturday.”
“A 67 isn’t a really low score,” said Westwood, ranked No. 3 in the world, who rolled in a 40-footer for birdie at the last, “but I made the bomb at the last that you don’t expect. So it was a good way to finish.”
He survived playing the first two days with world Nos. 1 and 2 Luke Donald and Rory McIlroy, both of whom missed the cut.
“The two lads struggled a bit,” he said. “You pay the price on the U.S. Open style setup. You can’t afford to miss too many fairways out here.”
But the cast of plausible winners is at least six-deep in major champions alone — Furyk, McDowell, Els, Woods, Retief Goosen and Martin Kaymer — and in between are everyone from a sensational 17-year-old high school junior, Beau Hossler, to budding PGA Tour stars Webb Simpson and Jason Dufner to John Peterson, who aced the 13th hole to join the crowd at three-over that included the high school kid and that Woods fellow.
The only player in the top 60 who played worse than Tiger on Saturday was Toms. No one saw that coming, but they probably didn’t see Els coming, either.
“Experience helps around here,” Els said.
“For some reason I’m patient again this week and that’s been kind of my virtue in major championship golf, the ability to wait it out. I think you’re going to have to do that tomorrow, and then if you have a little bit of a flier somewhere in the round, take it and protect it.”
Westwood said all he can do is play this one. There are no do-overs for the many chances he’s missed.
“I think every time you get yourself in contention you learn something new,” said the 39-year-old Englishman. “I’ve been in contention a lot in different kinds of positions, leading, coming from behind.
“But the main thing is just to go out there and believe that I’m good enough. I must be, I keep getting myself in contention often enough.”
Win or lose, he said, nobody will die.
“It’s a golf tournament. I go out and play golf for a living on the best golf courses in the world in the biggest tournaments. It’s not a bad way to pass the time.”