Former Open champion Ben Curtis revived fading memories of his tournament prowess by taking the second-round lead at the Texas Open on Friday.
Getting in his round before a two-hour storm delay and resultant strong winds, Curtis shot another bogey-free five-under 67 to finish at 10 under. He was two strokes ahead of David Mathis, and three in front of Cameron Triangle and Matt Every.
Mathis matched Curtis with a 67, Triangle had a 65 and Every was poised to inch even closer before darkness suspended play. He would line up for an 11-foot birdie chance on the par-four 17th when second-round play resumed yesterday.
Blake Adams (69), Ryan Palmer (69) and Hunter Haas (74) were tied for fifth at four-under.
In his first time playing TPC San Antonio, Curtis has looked right at home after starting the year in Dubai and hopping around on the European Tour. The Texas Open is just his fourth PGA Tour stop because of his low conditional status following a miserable year last year, when he did not muster a top-10 finish for the first time since joining the tour in 2003.
That was the year Curtis came out of nowhere to win the Open. He racked up two more tour victories in 2006, but has not won since, and his 149th ranking on the money list last year was a career-worst. The slump, Curtis said, has left him not only trying to repair his game, but also his mindset.
No longer able to pick and choose where he plays, Curtis described simply being “ready to go” if his phone rings the week before a tournament. He said he tries to focus on the 12 to 15 starts he expects to make this year, rather than dwell on his place near the bottom rung of the tour.
The 36-hole lead is his first since the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2010.
“Everybody knows me, know that I don’t stress about much,” Curtis said. “If you see me stressing it’s probably over nothing, too. I usually sweat the small stuff and the big stuff, I don’t really worry about.”
Triangle and Scott Piercy, who started the day four-over, vaulted back into contention with their 65s. Triangle began a bogey-free round with birdies on five of his first six holes, using his irons on the fairway to set up four putts from 4 feet or closer.
“There was no wind this morning and it was a little softer,” Triangle said. “So you could be a little more aggressive to the pins.”
The afternoon group fared badly, as a still morning gave way to strong wind gusts delivered by a passing storm cell, freezing the leaderboard and raising the projected cut line to four-over. Troy Matteson tumbled hardest, slipping from fourth to potentially out, after an 81 which included a quadruple-bogey on the par-five 14th.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier