Stricker’s 64 is quite a trick

Humans have played golf at Carnoustie since 1527, and have played seven British Opens here since 1931, yet nobody ever played it better than a guy from Wisconsin who floundered off the PGA Tour in 2005 and finds it weird this week not to be in Milwaukee.

“That was a pretty magical round,” Steve Stricker said Saturday.

His seven-under-par 64 in a calm, clearing drizzle tied the course record of Colin Montgomerie and Alan Tait and set the course record in British Opens. It included only 23 putts, rocketed him to second place after three rounds and lent an extra layer to one of the oddest majors careers on record.

Stricker, 40, played in 29 majors between 1995 and 2002, with four top 10s, two fifths in U.S. Opens (1998, 1999) and a heady runner-up finish in the 1998 PGA Championship at Sahalee near Seattle. For the 13 majors from 2003 to the 2006 Masters, though, he qualified for only one and missed the cut in that as he fell off the golfing map.

The road ground him down. He missed his wife, Nicki, who left caddying for him to raise their two children. He had a running feud with his swing. He changed clubs enough that, when asked about it Saturday, he said, “Do I have to answer all of that?”

He didn’t quit for reasons that included an inability to think up an alternative vocation. “There was that period there where I just wasn’t sure of things and what I wanted to do,” he said.

Since resurfacing, he has finished sixth in the 2006 U.S. Open, seventh in the 2006 PGA, 13th in the 2007 U.S. Open and first in the 2006 comeback-player-of-the-year voting.

That’s how he got to Carnoustie and to 64 and to missing Milwaukee, the PGA Tour event that runs concurrently with the British Open.

“Very strange, because I don’t know when my first one was there, maybe 1990, so it’s been 16 or 17 straight years I’ve played there. And not to be there is very weird. I’m watching the tournament through the Internet and saw that Joe Ogilvie was leading. Not to be there, and especially in 70-to-80-degree weather, is very weird.

“This is a good alternative.”

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The glove would seem the operative gift for spectators inadvertently struck by golf balls.

Tiger Woods hit Jennifer Wilson, 60, from Armagh, Northern Ireland, at No. 6, causing a cut on the side of her head. Woods apologized and gave her one of his gloves.

Sergio Garcia hit Chris Radcliffe, a photographer from Bloomberg News Service, at No. 17, striking him behind the right ear. Garcia apologized and gave him one of his gloves.

“It’s never nice,” Garcia said. “I don’t recommend it to anybody.”

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Garcia hails from Spain but often shouts out to his shots in English.

“Sometimes when I’m thinking to myself I think in Spanish,” he said, “but most of the times, the only time I speak Spanish is when I’m back home with my friends. I think my English is better than my Spanish at the moment.”

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Saturday’s tandem of Ernie Els and Paul Broadhurst has played a collective 30 British Opens (17 by Els), so that might explain how they recovered from their collective mishap on No. 6.

First Broadhurst hit out of bounds; then, he said, “Made me feel a bit better when I saw Ernie Els go out of bounds as well.”

They combined for 15 shots on the hole, Els making a triple-bogey 8, but Els rebounded to make five birdies from there for a 68, and Broadhurst rebounded to make two birdies and an eagle from there for a 68.

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The British media joins the American media in loving the unvarnished American hick Boo Weekley, with his lack of interest in golf history, his refusal to drive on the wrong side of the road, his stories about wrestling an orangutan, the 20 cans of chewing tobacco he stored in his luggage.

“Maybe this is the British champion we have been waiting for,” Owen Slot wrote in the Times of London.

Somberly for all, he finished bogey-bogey-bogey Saturday to plunge off the leaderboard at two over par after a 75.