Nick Of Time

Daly, who admits that the weakest part of his game is the three-quarter shot—for that matter, any shot that's less than full-out—accepted the characterization. "I couldn't handle those shots from 100 yards in," he said after shooting a 74 on Thursday. "If the wind blows 40 miles an hour when I tee off tomorrow, I might as well pack it in."

The wind, in fact, held steady at 20 to 25 mph on Friday, and Daly balanced enough homers and pop-ups to shoot a 69 and stick around. However, in similar winds on the weekend he shot 80-75 to finish last among the survivors.

By contrast, the first round was played in baby-breath breezes and saw 56 subpar rounds. Co-leaders Steve Pate and 49-year-old Ray Floyd shot 64s on the par-71 layout. "If this were just an ordinary tournament and not the most important championship in golf, someone would have shot a 62," said Ian Woosnam, who had an opening-round 65.

On Friday, despite the blustery conditions, the course gave up 38 subpar rounds. "You can attack the golf course a little bit because the greens are not real severe to putt on," said PGA Tour veteran Donnie Hammond, who had qualified at Dunbar on Monday and wound up tied for fifth at 279. Indeed, Muirfield's greens were nowhere near as fast as those in last month's U.S. Open at Pebble Beach.

The other ameliorating factor throughout the tournament was the rough. To television viewers it looked a foot high, with all those golden-seed stalks bending in the wind. Actually, dry weather had thinned the rough considerably, and many balls that missed the fairway wound up gently perched on cushions of matted grass with only a few wispy blades as interference. On Saturday, Faldo drove into what looked like heavy stuff left of the 6th fairway, 180 yards from the flag. But he was able to lash a six-iron 30 feet past the hole. Old-timers shook their heads, remembering the rough of 1966, when a caddie who was looking for a ball in the long grass put down his bag—and subsequently lost the bag.

Even on the weekend, when the winds were gusting and scores rose (there were only 29 subpar rounds in those two days), Muirfield was not the ruthless punisher of even five years ago, when rain fell incessantly, noses froze and only 73 subpar rounds were shot over the four days. This time the players could concentrate on avoiding the only truly penal hazards left—the famous revetted bunkers. Faldo drove into one of those sod-walled pits from the 1st tee on Sunday, which partially explains why his final-round walk around flat Muirfield seemed, as he put it, "like climbing a bloody mountain." Whether his opening bogey unnerved him is debatable—he went on to make nine straight pars—but it scotched any chance of his making 18 straight pars, as he had on the final day of his first British Open win, at Muirfield in 1987.

"The worst thing is the buildup," Faldo said later, decrying the aura of invincibility that rises around him when he is going well. A 64 on Friday gave him a tournament-record 130 for 36 holes. The next day the International Herald Tribune headlined its Open story thusly: 2 ROUNDS LEFT, BUT THE TITLE SEEMS HIS FOR THE PUTTING OUT. When Faldo shot a 69 on Saturday, stretching his lead to four strokes over Cook and Pate, Hill, the bookmaker, made Faldo the "virtually unbackable" favorite at 1 to 6. Said Cook on Saturday evening, "If there's anyone that doesn't beat himself, it's Nick Faldo." And Pate: "He's probably the least likely to go out and shoot 74."

Cook and Pate themselves represented a couple of shades of unlikely. Pate is best remembered for getting injured in a motorcade accident near Kiawah Island, S.C., last fall, which limited him to a single match of Ryder Cup play. Nicknamed Volcano, Pate is Faldo's antithesis—a spray-hitting birdie-bogey machine with a self-deprecating sense of humor. Asked if he'd spotted his name on the leader board on Saturday, when he was briefly tied with Faldo at minus-12, Pate said no. "If I had," he added, "I would have pulled a camera out and taken a picture of it."

The boyish-looking Cook, with two tournament wins this year and two other top-10 finishes—he has quietly risen to fourth on the PGA money list—posed a more subtle threat. He brought most of the tools needed to play in the wind—bump shots, fairway putts, 150-yard three-irons. "I feel I can hit some different-looking shots," he said. "I'm not one of those one-dimensional Americans."

He proved that to Faldo on Sunday by closing to within a stroke of him with an eagle on the 5th hole. At the turn, though, Cook trailed by four strokes. But as he had in the final round of several recent European Tour events, Faldo suddenly seized up, making bogies on numbers 11 and 13. Moments later Cook rolled in a six-foot putt for birdie on number 15. Meanwhile, Faldo was getting intimate with a fairway bunker on number 14 en route to his fourth bogey of the day. Cook then dropped a 20-footer for birdie on the par-3 16th hole. That left Faldo two down with four holes to go.