Sunday the 13th

Woods prefers not to speak his mind but to let his clubs do the talking. A reporter asked, "Did it tick you off when you read that quote?" Woods danced around the question and ended up not saying if it ticked him off or not, revealing nothing, just as he gives his competitors nothing.

While he was on cruise-control in the third round, hitting his usual mix of long irons and fairway woods off the tees, his chief rivals crumbled.

Scott Verplank, by reputation a fierce competitor in the mold of Bob May, the sprite who gave Woods such trouble at the 2000 PGA, began the day two back and in the final group with Woods, matching every step of Woods's 4-4-4-3 start. Verplank dropped only a stroke on the front nine, but he crumbled on the back, looking very much like a short-hitting 43-year-old with a bad elbow. He was four over on holes 12-15.

"I guess I slept wrong," he said of the night-and-day difference between his 66 Friday and 74 on Saturday.

Woods, sensing the kill, birdied the par-4 12th to take a five-shot lead, at which point the truth was apparent: The world's greatest golfer was headed toward his 13th major championship, just five short of Jack Nicklaus's mythical total. It was over, and all that was left was getting the golfers to admit it.

"I don't want to — I can't say that because I'm competing," said Els, who rebounded from a double-bogey 6 on the 4th hole to shoot 69.

"He's playing well," said Verplank, who was in a seven-way tie for sixth place, seven shots back. "I mean, he's playing the golf course very smart, and when you hit a lot of fairways with irons, and he's hitting a lot of greens, and when you putt like he does, it doesn't look that difficult."

Geoff Ogilvy birdied the 3rd and 4th holes to get to four under but made three bogeys and a double-bogey the rest of the way to finish at one over, almost certainly too far behind to catch Woods.

Boo Weekley made the biggest move of the day with a five-under 65 that left him at even par for the tournament. He also kept an inaccurate scorecard for his playing partner Sergio Garcia, who absentmindedly signed it anyway and was disqualified. Otherwise very little happened in the third round.

With no one making much of a move and Woods out front, the possibility of a stirring final-round charge from one of his pursuers seemed remote. The most likely candidate was Ames, but that seemed a shaky proposition in light of the 9&8 debacle at the Accenture last year, and the final-round scoring averages of Woods (69.25) and his playing partners (72.92) in the 12 majors he's won.

"He has that influence on players," Ames said. "It's probably going to happen to me. I don't know. Like I said, I haven't been in this situation."