Garcia keeps surge going

Note the wizened old hand who clung to his perch Friday. He persevered when Carnoustie ramped up its surliness. He rescued himself right off the bat on No. 1 with a daydream of a chip. He held on for his toilsome, even-par 71. He played the role of grizzled sage in his 36th major tournament while others foundered and floundered.

Well, if it isn’t Sergio Garcia, still 27 after all these years, and the 136th British Open somehow has become all about him. He’s still hunting his first major title, just days after the retirement of his pioneering countryman Seve Ballesteros.

He’s asked if he’s tired of the when-you-gonna-win-your-major question, and he cracks, “First time I heard it.”

While his 65 on Thursday revealed again the talent that makes people ask that question, his 71 on Friday may have revealed some necessities that could give him the answer. It didn’t even lap at the shores of spectacular, but it preserved both his six-under-par score and the two-shot lead he’d held at breakfast.

It sent him into the weekend two shots ahead of South Korean K.J. Choi, three shots ahead of fellow Spaniard Miguel Angel Jimenez plus Canadian Mike Weir, four shots ahead of Americans Jim Furyk and Boo Weekley, and seven shots ahead of Tiger Woods, the twice-defending champion, “but still not out of it,” Woods said.

All this, after Garcia missed the first two major cuts this year and arrived at Carnoustie with a new belly putter.

“The belly putter feels miles better under pressure than the short putter has felt,” he said. The belly putter required 32 putts Friday after a sterling 27 on Thursday, but Garcia blamed himself for that as he sets out to redeem maligned belly putters everywhere.

Asked if he’d ever participated in the common maligning of belly putters, he kidded, “No!” and the room rattled with laughter.

As it happened, he barely had to use the new baby on No. 1 because of how he’d accessed the green. Embedded in the weeds to the right after shanking an approach off a female spectator’s thigh, he seemed destined for a momentum stoppage.

Just then, he wedged a lovely piece of work that plopped down in the grass beside the green, rolled on and took up residence a tap-in from par.

“More than anything it was a really nice shot because it kept me on the right mood,” he said.

From there, he did not so much thrive as suffice in a chilly wind even as the sky flashed some blue, and after Thursday’s armada of under-par players shrank from 24 to 12, sufficing had become thriving.

“It was more of a grinder’s day today,” he said.

In fact, as the weekend chase of Garcia begins, the people doing the chasing will include the only two contenders who managed to dip into the 60s in the second round.

There’s Choi, 36, who won two of his last three tournaments, shot 69 Friday and said of his previous major contentions, “Back in those days I didn’t have the shots then that I needed. I was not comfortable with the shots that I had. Now I have more shots in my bag.”

There’s Weir, 37, the 2003 Masters champion, who played admirably in Carnoustie’s haunted house of 1999, and who said of having won a major, “I don’t think you can overestimate it.... You think you can do it, but until you do it you don’t know that. When you have that in your back pocket in the last nine holes of a major, it’s like extra ammo.”

There’s Jimenez, 43, who said of the pioneering Ballesteros, “We feel proud for what he did for us.”

There’s a batch of others, and then comes Woods, who drifted from a fine 69 to a muddled 74.

On any list of the reasons Garcia has yet to win a major, Woods would finish No. 1 (as usual). In six of the seven majors in which Garcia has placed in the top five, the winner has been Woods. Yet as Woods teed off Friday in fine shape with Garcia on the nearby 18th green, there came a jolting thud.

His iron shot strayed sickeningly left and skittered into the Barry Burn, the famed creek that meanders through the course.

“It was such a poor shot because the commitment wasn’t there,” he said. He’d committed to a low shot, then “all of a sudden I throw this ball up in the air a little bit,” and all of a sudden he’d started with double-bogey six.

A birdie followed, Woods being Woods, but Carnoustie got stingy from there, and rather than Garcia having to chase Woods as ever, Woods would have to chase Garcia.