Overcoming Weather, Kim Is Solid in Debut
SOUTHPORT, England — Anthony Kim may not win this year — although he still has a chance at five strokes behind the leader Greg Norman — but he has all the essentials to be an Open champion one day.
Playing in his first British Open, and his first tournament on a seaside links course, Kim, 23, has not been derailed by the vagaries of the British game, including a bout with the howling winds that repeatedly blew his golf ball off the green at the 10th hole, causing a lengthy debate about whether Kim would be assessed a penalty stroke (he did not) and whether play would be suspended because of the wind gusts (it was not).
“It was a rough day, but I hung in there and it felt great to make eagle on No. 17 and end on a positive note,” said Kim, who shot 71 and stands at seven-over-par 217. “I felt like I went through a war out there, especially on 10 when we had a 45-minute delay. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Kim had hit a 3-iron into the green and went to the green to mark his golf ball. After placing the ball back down, he was reading the putt and the ball rolled a foot. So he marked it again and it blew another foot. He called the rules official over, marked his ball again and then put the ball behind the marker so the official could see how unstable the exposed green was in the wind gusts.
“It rolled nearly five or six yards off the green, 15 yards total,” Kim said.
Once the ball was replaced at the previous marked spot, Kim made par on the hole and kept the round going.
“This is awesome,” he said of the whole experience. “I actually like playing in this stuff. I grew up playing where the cactus weren’t the best and your lies weren’t the greatest. I’m having a blast out there.”
There were at least two golf balls lost in the tangled thicket of rough, gnarly gorse and other assorted high grasses on Saturday. Not even British royalty could help find one of the wayward shots. The Englishman Paul Casey hit a shot into the bushes on the 15th hole, and as he was searching, he looked up to see Prince Andrew near the spot the ball entered the roughage.
“The Duke of York was there and he said he’d hit a ball in there the other day,” Casey said. “I said, ‘Did you find it, sir?’ And he said, ‘No.’ ”
The British Open has been a joyride for Linn Strickler, the weathered Floridian who got an unexpected call from Greg Norman to serve as his caddie.
But there apparently has been one downside to this short-term dream job. The interest from photographers and others in keeping track of Norman’s new wife, the tennis luminary Chris Evert, has been intense.
As Norman waited to play the 10th hole on Saturday, Strickler came up to a small group of reporters and complained in his rumble of a voice, “The next guy who comes up and asks me where Chrissie is, I’m going to take him out.”
Less than 30 seconds later, a BBC producer tapped Strickler on the shoulder and asked, “Have you seen Chrissie?”
Strickler turned, wide eyed, to the producer and said, “You’re kidding, right?” He then looked at the group of reporters. “You put him up to that, right?”
And with that, bag on his shoulder, he was off.
Ten years ago, when Royal Birkdale last staged the British Open, the talk of the tournament was the 17-year-old English amateur Justin Rose, who ended up in a tie for fourth after holing his final shot — a 59-yard chip onto the 18th green.
Rose turned professional the next day, and though he missed the cut in his first 21 professional tournaments, he has recovered and prospered and is now ranked ninth in the world.
But Birkdale has not been nearly as happy a hunting ground for Rose the second time around. Although he made the cut, there were times on Saturday when he might have preferred to be elsewhere.
He finished with an 82, one shot ahead of the day’s worst score, and now finds himself 16 shots off the lead at 18 over par.
“I never want to play golf in those conditions again,” Rose wrote in his diary for The Times of London. “I didn’t feel it was golf.”
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