Golf : Woods has leaders in his sights
Aaron Baddeley and Jonathan Byrd were well on their way to the top of the leaderboard Friday at the BMW Championship in Lemont, Ill., when Tiger Woods figured he better get going if he didn’t want to be left behind.
That’s about the time he started losing his swing and finding his putter, not a bad combination at Cog Hill.
Baddeley returned from a three-hour rain delay by making three straight birdies and finished strongly for a 6-under-par 65, giving him a share of the lead with Byrd (69) going into the weekend of the third tournament in these PGA Tour Playoffs.
It was difficult to ignore Woods, whose second straight 67 put him one shot behind along with Barclays winner Steve Stricker (66), Justin Rose (69) and Camilo Villegas (69).
Woods is a three-time winner on this public course outside Chicago, and it was not unusual to see him birdie all the par 5s and wind up in the thick of contention. How he got there was not so typical.
He birdied the par-5 ninth by slicing his tee shot into the woods, pulling his second shot behind more trees and then hooking an 8-iron out of the rough to 15 feet and making the putt.
“It’s all about the angles,” he said leaving the green, as if that was the strategy all along.
LPGA
As rain wreaked havoc with the start of the LPGA NW Arkansas Championship in Rogers, players found different ways to wait out a 4 1/2-hour delay.
For Stacy Lewis, the decision was easy. She goes to college about 20 minutes away and stayed home until midday.
Lewis was in the right frame of mind when she started her round, making birdies on four of her first five holes to move quickly up the leaderboard. Her round was suspended by darkness after a par on No. 15, which was her sixth hole. By then, she was already within two strokes of the lead.
Kristy McPherson, Katherine Hull and Teresa Lu were tied for the lead at 6-under 66. They were among the lucky ones who finished the first round after heavy rain postponed the start.
Tracy Hanson of Rathdrum shot an even-par 72, four shots better than Wendy Ward of Edwall, Wash.