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SOUTHPORT, England (AP) — David Duval finally put together two good rounds to get into contention at the British Open, raising the idea that he was close to breaking out of a mystifying slump.
Then came a triple bogey on the first hole at Royal Birkdale, and an 83 on his card to match his highest score in this major. Yet none of that changed his outlook.
"I don't walk away from today's round any less confident than yesterday's round," Duval said. "If anything, I gained confidence with how I struck the ball and maintained my rhythm. You need good bounces on a day like this to have a good score. I just got behind it and couldn't get any nice things to happen."
Starting the third round only three shots out of the lead, Duval's approach ballooned into the 40 mph gusts and wound up 30 yards to the right of the green in hay so deep he took a one-shot penalty for relief, even though his drop wasn't in grass much shorter. He pounded that one over the green into another nasty lie, chipped out effectively to 25 feet and made triple bogey.
"It didn't demoralize me," Duval said. "I figured that's three bogeys everybody is going to make."
He didn't make a par until the fifth hole, and didn't make a birdie all day. But he wasn't alone. Duval had one of nine rounds in the 80s.
"It's about as hard as I've ever played in," Duval said. "I don't know how you can describe it. You have to be out there trying to hit a shot to appreciate it. How do you judge on one hole if a 2-iron is going to go 160 yards, and on the next hole a 5-iron is going to go 230 yards? There's a lot of guessing out there."
He played with defending champion Padraig Harrington, who shot 72 to get into the final group.
"I knew everybody would find it tough," Harrington said. "David played with me and didn't really play too badly, and you could see his score. You could see that if things got away from you and you didn't get the right breaks, it was going to be a difficult day."
TROUBLESOME TENTH: It took about five hours to play the third round, thanks to two delays on the 10th hole from wind so strong the ball wouldn't stop moving.
The 10th green is among the most exposed at Royal Birkdale, and Anthony Kim was the first victim.
After replacing his ball, he noticed it moved a foot backward, then about 8 feet back, then a long way back. He had to remark it again, leaving himself a much longer birdie putt.
"I waited and wondered if they were going to call play," Kim said, alluding to a delay on the green that took more than 30 minutes, such a long time that "it felt like we played two rounds."
Even more bizarre was what happened to Fredrik Jacobson.
His ball was in the bunker on No. 10, and when he got ready to step into the sand, he noticed the ball moving.
"The ball was rolling five times in the sand before I walked down in the bunker," Jacobson said. "I was scared of getting a penalty shot if I walked down, because if it counted as addressing the ball and the ball moved ... I could have been standing in that bunker still trying to replace that ball."
Jacobson checked with a rules official, and the discussion caused a huge backup behind them. By the time Greg Norman and K.J. Choi got to the 10th tee, they had to wait 30 minutes.
"I would have refused to play if I was penalized," Jacobson said. "So they made an exception."
Stephen Ames was playing with Jacobson, and he had to wait while finishing off his triple bogey. As usual, Ames held nothing back about how it was handled.
"They had to assess whether it was a penalty or not," Ames said. "The guys didn't know the rules."
