Martin Kaymer may do more to grow American interest in soccer than Pele, David Beckham and Brandi Chastain combined.
For, if Kaymer continues his one-man show at the U.S. Open through the weekend he’ll leave viewers no other choice. You can almost hear them now: “Throw me the remote, Hilda. Uruguay’s playing Costa Rica in the World Cup. And this golf tournament is more over than my first marriage.”
After two rounds, Germany’s Kaymer has made a historic shambles of the Open leaderboard. His 36-hole lead of six strokes ties the record for the largest halfway lead, built by Tiger Woods in 2000 and achieved by Rory McIlroy in 2011.
And no one before Kaymer had shot as low as 65 in each of the first two rounds of a major.
The German has posted the “r” and the “o,” halfway to a rout.
If there is anyone who should know a little something about playing from behind, about desperate sporting straits, it is someone from Atlanta. Brendon Todd, the former Georgia Bulldog, is just the man for the job. One of the rounds of his lifetime, a 67 in the U.S. Open, was only good enough to place him six back of Kaymer, at 4 under.
Then Todd invoked the loftiest compliment a player can muster in the 21st century: “(Kaymer’s) playing a brand of golf that we haven’t seen probably in a long time, since maybe Tiger.”
It says something about the state of things when some of the greatest drama of the afternoon was over whether Matt Kuchar’s ball trembled on a green as he addressed it. (He was found not guilty, but at 1 under, he still seems at least three ZIP codes behind).
There is a whale of a battle going on behind Kaymer, though. While there is no one within five strokes of him, there are 25 within five of the second-place Todd.
At least someone has enjoyed the spectacle of Kaymer’s consecutive 5-under 65s. “I played well, but it was fun watching him hit every fairway, every green and make every putt,” said Keegan Bradley, one of his playing partners the past two days.
“It gets boring the words that I use, but I mean there’s not much to say. It’s just good right now the way I play golf,” Kaymer said.
There’s a challenge. If the author himself doesn’t know what to make of his work, what hope does that leave the rest of us?
Friday’s 65 was even more aesthetically pleasing than Thursday’s. This one came without the single bogey that was a pimple on the first round. This one was a clean as the soles of a new pair of Guccis.
Sure, the course has played easier than anyone suspected, softened by the rain that swept through the sandhill country Thursday night. And the Friday set-up was not impossible by any measure.
Why, then, was it only Kaymer who was able to take full advantage?
Are we 100 percent certain that he hasn’t been playing one of the other seven courses on the Pinehurst property while everyone else was stuck on toothy No. 2? Kaymer has the two lowest scores ever shot on this course in a U.S. Open, which covers 1999, 2005 and this year. Meanwhile, no one among the other 155 players in the pre-cut field has done better than 67.
“He’s as dialed in as I’ve seen,” Bradley said.
Dialed in means hitting 25 of 28 fairways through two rounds.
Dialed in means scrambling with the cool of a fighter-jet pilot. Hard to believe, but Kaymer did miss three greens Friday. And then got up and down from the bunker all three times.
Dialed means requiring the fourth fewest number of putts in the field (54). He jarred two birdie putts in the 20- to 25-foot range Friday just to show off his range.
Kaymer has some handy experience winning wire-to-wire — see this year’s Players Championship. He has returned to the level he enjoyed in 2011, when ascending to the world’s No. 1 ranking. Only now he has the benefit of the years and the wisdom that comes with them.
He’s sounding like a real vet at this running away thing.
“I don’t need to set any goals (for the weekend),” he said. “I just wait for what the afternoon will do. If you set goals, you’re adding a little pressure because you try to reach them instead of going out there and being neutral, just playing.
“I’m not really into goals for the next two days. I just want to play.”
There is another half of a tournament to go. Some time yet to tighten up the leaderboard and hook the wandering attentions of the TV audience. Still, as Todd acknowledged, that won’t happen without some help from Kaymer. “He might need to come back a little bit,” Todd said.
It’s getting late early at this U.S. Open.
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