After a week of weather woes and doubts about the course’s worthiness, the United States Open at Merion Golf Club on Saturday looked a lot like any other Open: a bunched-up leader board full of players struggling to keep par in their sights.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Tiger Woods pumped his fist after a birdie on the first hole on Saturday at the United States Open.
Only two players with scores under par entered the third round, which started Saturday only after the second round finished in the morning. Those two, Phil Mickelson and Billy Horschel, teed off last at 2:40 p.m. Ahead of them, few players were making much headway on a course that has proved its mettle over the past few days.
Despite doubts that Merion was no longer long enough nor tough enough to provide the prototypical (read: punishing) Open test, the going has been anything but easy. The waves of rain that inundated the course all week did not succeed in turning the greens into spongy welcome mats, as some feared, but it did add a layer of squishiness to the rough, only deepening its ball-swallowing potential.
The early holes did yield a few birdies. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy — playing together for a third straight day after they each finished the second round at three over par — both walked off No. 1 with a birdie.
Charley Hoffman managed two birdies in his first four holes to push himself to two over, and Edward Loar used an eagle on the par-5 No. 2 to reach that score as well.
While Woods grabs his share of attention in his effort to break his major tournament drought, Mickelson is also trying to break a drought. He has never won the United States Open despite five second-place finishes, most recently in 2009. The tournament does not naturally suit his high-risk, high-reward game because Open courses rarely reward risk.
And Merion has followed that trend nicely, despite all the hand-wringing.
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