Sauers Stays the Course and Retains Lead : PGA: Maggert’s 65 puts him in a tie for second with Price at two strokes back. Faldo folds with a 76.

The elderly gentleman sitting back in the golf cart overlooking the eighth hole at Bellerive Country Club was beaming Saturday as he watched Nick Faldo’s wedged approach shot to the 581-yard hole hit pin high, five feet from the hole, then roll ever so slowly back down a ridge, all the way to the front fringe, 20 feet away.

“The course is holding up all right, isn’t it now?” said 83-year-old Robert Trent Jones, the architect who designed it 32 years ago. “They didn’t stretch it out as long as they should have, but it’s a fair test.”

By the time the third round of the 74th PGA Championship had concluded, only a few could claim they had conquered Jones’ stately 7,148-yard jewel, and Faldo was not in that group. He settled for par at No. 8 but still shot 76 and had his hopes for a second consecutive major championship severely damaged by a barrage of bogeys that left him eight strokes off the lead.

Not intimidated by Bellerive was Gene Sauers, a journeyman from Georgia who began with a bogey on the first hole, then gathered himself to shoot 70, aided by a 25-foot eagle putt on the 17th hole that left him at seven-under-par 206 with a two-stroke lead.

Sauers has won only twice in nine years on the PGA Tour and keeps insisting he is treating this fourth major championship of the season as just another weekly stop. Now he finds himself ahead of a tightly bunched field, and none of his five closest pursuers has won a major title. Sauers has either shared or held the lead after each of the first three rounds and is in position to be the first wire-to-wire winner of this event since Hal Sutton at Riviera in 1983.

“Everything’s working for me right now,” Sauers said, adding that he will calm his nerves again by simply approaching it as another day at the office. “I sit here and say I can (take that approach). I won’t know until tonight. I think I can. I hope. The way I feel inside? I don’t know, but it’d be great to win a major.”

Jeff Maggert, a native Missourian in his third year on tour, finished a course-record 65 with birdies on his last three holes and is tied for second place at five-under 208 with South Africa’s Nick Price, who rolled in “the longest putt I’ve ever made in my life,” 105 feet for a birdie at No. 12 on his way to a 68.

And John Cook, the heartbreak loser to Faldo in the British Open three weeks ago, fought the golf course and what he described as “almost total exhaustion” for a 67 that left him tied with Jim Gallagher Jr., four back at 210. That was how far Cook was behind Faldo entering the final round at Muirfield, only to lose by one shot after losing a late two-stroke lead.

Saturday, Faldo was two shots behind the lead at the start of play. He had six bogeys after hacking the ball into the trees, the traps and the tall grass that have plagued lesser lights all week.

“I just lost it,” he said after finding himself in a group of eight players at one-over-par 214. Still, he said he has not given up all hope.

“It’ll be a hard day. It’s not impossible, so I just have to find out what I’m doing wrong,” Faldo said. “I’ve got to go for it. I’ve got nothing to lose--just see if I can play well enough to go for it and make it happen, let it happen or whatever.”

Sauers made it ugly on No. 1. He hit his drive into the deep left rough, and his seven-iron flew over the green and landed two inches from a cart path, with a dicey approach to the pin above his head. When he chipped his ball up to the pin, he was fortunate it stopped only 10 feet past the hole. He two-putted from there and decided to give himself a small pep talk.

“I just told myself to ‘be patient, you’ve got a lot of holes ahead of you,’ ” Sauers said.

He made seven consecutive pars before hitting a second-shot eight-iron to within five feet of the 426-yard ninth hole. He made the birdie putt to get back to par for the day, and also to take back the lead from Gallagher, who had birdied at Nos. 8 and 9 while playing in front of Sauers.

Sauers’ bogey at the 10th after a poor chip from the rough was canceled out by his 25-foot birdie putt at the 15th, and he made amends for a bogey, after a botched five-iron at the 222-yard 16th hole, with his first eagle of the tournament at the 536-yard 17th.

He put his tee shot in the middle of the fairway there and had 250 yards to the pin. His three-wood second shot over the water landed on the fringe, pin-high and about 25 feet from the hole. Sauers said there were three protruding spike marks between him and the flag.

“I looked at my caddie and said, ‘That’s real nice,’ ” Sauers said. “Then the ball went right between the spike marks, and I said, ‘Thank you very much.’ I’m glad it went into the hole. If it didn’t, it would have gone eight feet by.”