Floyd’s 65 Gives Him Four-Shot Lead

There have been choices to make for Raymond Floyd.

“I have a golf course design business, I own six golf courses, I’m involved in the AJGA Raymond Floyd tournament, I have some businesses behind the scene,” he said Saturday after his third-round 65 gave him a 54-hole total of 14-under-par 202, four shots better than runner-up Hale Irwin in the Senior Players Championship at Dearborn, Mich.

“I have more to do than just what goes on around the golf course, and I had a tendency to do more with those things than I was with my game,” Floyd said.

And they were keeping him out of contention until this week.

“I realized what I had done, and I didn’t want to just be another number in the field,” Floyd said, adding that he had begun working on his game again enough to be a number at the top of the field.

He made sure of that Saturday with birdies on five of the first seven holes to break a tie with Irwin and John Bland.

Bland opened bogey-double bogey and shot 78.

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Scott Hoch shot a five-under-par 66 to open a four-shot lead after three rounds of the Michelob Championship on the PGA Tour in Williamsburg, Va.

Hoch was two under for the day when he knocked in a bending, 30-foot putt on the par-three 13th hole to begin a run of three birdies. He then parred out to finish with a 15-under 198 in the tournament he has led since the opening round.

“I needed something like that to get me going and it did,” he said. “I didn’t get that much out of the front nine, but on the back nine I did better than I should have.”

Dicky Pride, who shot a 68, was second at 202; and Fred Funk and Tom Purtzer were next at 203, both after shooting 69s. Rex Caldwell, who shot 68, and David Edwards, who had a 67, were at 204.

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Former champion Deb Richard birdied the final two holes to take a one-shot lead after two rounds of the Youngstown-Warren LPGA Classic in Ohio.

Richard shot a seven-under-par 65 to move one stroke ahead of defending champion Michelle McGann--who broke her own course record with a 64, her best round on the tour--and Kim Saiki.

Richard, who won the tournament in 1991, has a 36-hole total of 10-under-par 134.