Henrik Stenson takes a one-stroke lead into the final round of the British Open, looking to become the first male golfer from Sweden to win a major golf championship.
Advertisement
Mickelson, ever the showman, bounded on to the first tee, kissed his fingertips and then touched the Claret Jug posted at the side of the tee box. Stenson said Parnevik send him a message that said, “Go out and finish what I didn’t manage to finish”.
How remarkable a show did Stenson, 40, and Mickelson, 46, produce while playing in the final pairing for the second straight day?
Mickelson turned in what would normally go down as one of the greatest closing rounds in major championship history: a bogey-free, 6-under 65. They went back and forth from there, pouring in birdie after birdie – and even an eagle from Lefty at No. 4.
Sweden’s Stenson stands at 12 under par, a lead of one shot from Mickelson, after an excellent third-round score of 68 in cool and blustery conditions on Scotland’s west coast on Saturday.
Stenson entered the final round with a one-shot lead, but bogeyed the first hole while Mickelson birdied. “I was terrified of taking someone’s head off with a drive”, he said.
“I hope I can perform well, and hopefully get one of the medals, and hopefully the best one to bring home”. (I’m) happy for Henrik.
“Some in the media have already tried to compare today’s final round to 1977 at Turnberry, with Tom Watson and me in what they called the “Duel in the Sun”. I got beat by 10 birdies”.
Besides his bogey on No. 1, Stenson made one on the par 4 11, the most hard hole on the course.
“It has a lot of spinoffs”, said Stricker, who is ranked No. 167. “I certainly was thinking about that”.
Now, Phil Mickelson knows how Jack Nicklaus felt that day at Turnberry.
“I’m very proud of the way I played. It’s bittersweet, I guess”.
But it was Stenson, a five-time victor as a part-time player on the PGA Tour, who held the claret jug and told Mickelson at the closing ceremony, “Thank you very much for a great fight”.
At Troon, Stenson finished 68-63, Mickelson 70-65.
Stenson closed the tournament with a 20-foot birdie putt that left him with a 20-under 264, breaking the total scoring record for a major tournament.
Stenson exhaled and then knocked his approach to 20 feet and curled that birdie putt into the hole for good measure.
But at the Postage Stamp, which Stenson had bogeyed from a bunker on Saturday, the Swede grabbed the lead again in an absolute atypical matchplay scenario; holing for 15 feet for birdie as Mickelson missed from eight.
The main reason Sunday wasn’t quite in the Duel in the Sun realm is that while Mickelson’s career might be comparable to Watson’s, Nicklaus is in his own stratosphere.
There’s one more major to play before Rio.
That “97 Open was here in Troon”. The leader was now a staggering ten shots ahead of third place.
“I knew I had to keep on pushing, keep on giving myself birdie chances and he wasn’t going to give it to me, so I had to pull away”.
Being the Runner-up Golfer of the Year, maybe the decade, was of little solace to Mickelson, who knows what it feels like to be Nicklaus in another respect.
Spare a thought for five-time major victor Mickelson, aiming to become the oldest victor of the Open in the modern era. Afterwards the Tyrone boss said: “This is the best of them all because of the starvation that was there for six years and because of what had gone on before”. I don’t look back on anything and say, ‘I should have done this differently or that.’ I played well enough to win this championship by a number of strokes, and I get beat by three strokes. It’s not like other guys were out there doing the same thing. “I got beat by 10 birdies”.
Advertisement
This Topic is Missing Your Voice..
