Olin Browne sounded like any other 50-something after playing a mudder round on a Saturday at the local club. He complained.
“You’re trying to keep your sense of humor,” said Browne, his shoes and pants spotted with mud after playing 24 sopping wet holes to complete the second round of the Greater Gwinnett Championship at Sugarloaf Country Club. “Your feet hurt, your back hurts, your hammies are tight.”
Shooting 64 made him feel a lot better.
Brown’s 8-under score over his final 18 holes established a tournament record and gave him the 36-hole lead in this Champions Tour event. It gave Browne a one-shot lead over Bernhard Langer, who also shot a second-round 64, and could end up being a really big deal.
With the weather report calling for a virtual certainty of thunderstorms all day Sunday, Browne may have won this thing already. Tournament officials are prepared to award him the championship trophy — and $270,000 first prize — if they’re unable to play the final 18 holes. And with tee times scheduled to start at Nos. 1 and 10 at 8 a.m., they’ll make every effort to make it a 54-hole tournament as planned.
“I played today like we weren’t going to get to play (Sunday),” said Browne, 55, whose only Champions Tour win came in the 2011 U.S. Senior Open. “That’s the approach I had. Hopefully we’ll get to play. I mean, it’s going to mean a lot more if I go out there and hold the lead. But it is what it is. … Everybody knows the weather forecast is crummy. So we do the best we can with it.”
That was definitely the mindset for Langer, the Champions Tour’s star player. Playing in the group directly behind Browne, he hit a 2-hybrid on the 544-yard par-5, 18th hole right over the flag to 25 feet and then sank that putt for eagle. That gave him a birdie-eagle finish, got him within a stroke and allowed him to share the single-round record that Browne would hold for all of 15 minutes.
“There’s the possibility this could be a 36-hole event if the forecast is right,” said the 57-year-old Langer, who has had 23 wins in eight seasons on the Champions Tour. “They’ve been saying a 100 percent chance of rain all Sunday or something like that, so we knew that. We’re aware of that, and we tried to get off to a hot start. I didn’t … but ever since it’s been a lot of good golf.”
Browne was being interviewed on the live telecast when Langer’s approach to 18 barely missed the flag and settled above the hole. He said there was nothing of which he was more certain than that Langer was going to make the eagle putt that awaited him. It wasn’t until later he found out that Langer actually did.
“He’s a public peril,” Browne said of Langer’s perpetual dominance on the tour. “That’s what you expect out of him. It’s no accident. He didn’t win two Masters by accident, and he ain’t in the Hall of Fame because he’s a broom. He’s our marquee guy out here, and he shows up every single week, and there’s one thing that he cares about doing and that’s winning the tournament.”
Rocco Mediate is three shots back at 9 under and might be a bigger part of the conversation if he hadn’t made a ghastly double bogey on the par-3 11th hole. After addressing his tee shot, he stopped and went back to his bag to switch to a 4 iron from a 5. He promptly hit his ball in the water. He had a one-shot lead before that.
With the weather situation being what it is, Mediate knew it was a big mistake. He was approaching the day as if it was the final round.
“I was thinking that all day, absolutely; I think we all were,” Mediate said. “And I was right where I wanted to be. I just made that itty-bitty mistake. … But if it ends tomorrow, that’s all I can do.”
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