DULUTH, Ga. (AP) – Bob Tway and Lee Janzen are in position to win halfway through the BellSouth Classic, a spot neither has been in too often during long losing streaks.
Tway and Janzen made the best of late tee times Friday and finished tied at 8 under par in the second round of the final tuneup before the Masters. Defending champ Retief Goosen was two shots back, with four more players tied another shot behind.
Tway hasn’t won in more than eight years, and Janzen’s last victory came in the 1998 U.S. Open.
Janzen hasn’t had that kind of success this season, and his five-year exemption status following his last victory expires at the end of the year.
He faced a similar dilemma in 1998, five years after his first win in the Open, and responded by winning it again.
Tway shot 66, the best score of the second round, and had a couple of chances to go even lower.
After starting his round on the back nine, he had three straight birdies on the front side to get to 8 under, then made another to get to 9 under.
But he three-putted for bogey at the par-3 No. 8, which plays about 250 yards, then missed a 5-footer for birdie on his last hole.
“I didn’t hit a very good putt,” he said. “It looked like if I got it above the hole, it wouldn’t break. But if you start it straight, it’s going to break.
“I tried to go up the left edge, and I kind of quit on it. It didn’t really break.”
Janzen, who also started on the back side, had gotten to 9 under, too, before a bogey on the eighth. Facing a pin on the right side of the green, he pushed a 2-iron into a sand trap on the right, then barely got his bunker shot to the fringe.
He narrowly missed chipping in for par, then nearly ran into more trouble on No. 9. Janzen hit a perfect drive, but the wind kicked up before his second shot, and he left a 7-iron short and right of the green.
A chip to about 2 feet helped him save par and a round of 67.
“I haven’t played well enough this year to think I would be going into the Masters on a high, but it can turn around in a hurry,” Janzen said. “I’d like to win. It’s easy to say that’s all I’m striving for.
“But I want to get my game at a level where I can give myself chances to win more often. That’s just been a struggle to get there.”
Like the co-leaders, Goosen finished on the front nine, and he made a bogey on the ninth to drop two shots behind. He left his approach shot on the front edge of the green and three-putted.
“I had about a 40-footer that broke about 30 feet,” Goosen said. “So I really didn’t have much of a putt.”
Phil Mickelson, playing in his first tournament after taking a month off for the birth of his third child, shot 79 and missed the cut by six shots.
AP-ES-04-04-03 2009EST
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