Round 2 Notebook: Posco E&C Songdo Championship

text size

Weather: Cloudy, warm and humid again with intermittent light showers during the day. Daytime highs reached 80 degrees. Winds were light and variable from 5-15 mph. The course received over four inches of rain since Friday morning and the start of play was delayed for one hour to allow for course preparation. Lift, clean and place rules were in effect for the second consecutive day.

• Current Leaderboard: 1 -- Fred Funk (136/-8); T2 -- John Cook, Tom Pernice, Jr., & Russ Cochran (138/-6); T5 -- D.A. Weibring & Michael Allen (139/-5).

• The original field was to be 60 players but with four fewer players starting, the winner of Sunday's event will now earn a first-place check for $456,000 as well as 456 points in the Charles Schwab Cup race. Bernhard Langer (currently T13) is the leader with 2,791 points followed by Fred Couples (2,216) and Tom Lehman (1,420). Nick Price (1,246) and Fred Funk (1,243) are currently fourth and fifth, respectively. Only Langer and Funk are in this week's field.

• Second-round leader Funk is bidding for his second victory in the last three weeks. He won the JELD-WEN Tradition in Bend, Ore., on August 22 for his sixth career victory. Should he win on Sunday he would claim multiple wins in a season for the second time in his five-year Champions Tour career. He also did so in 2008.

• Funk is slowly making steady progress from right knee replacement surgery last November. In addition to his win in Oregon, he was also T8 the following week at the Boeing Classic in the Seattle area. He will undergo another surgery on his right knee later this year to remove some scar tissue which has been causing some soreness in the last few weeks. It will be his fourth surgery on the knee in the last four years.

• Funk has won two of the three 54-hole events when he was the leader heading into the final round. His wins came at the 2006 AT&T Championship and the 2007 Turtle Bay Championship (went wire-to-wire in each). His lone setback came at the 2009 Dick's Sporting Goods Open where he finished T2.

• Tom Pernice Jr., and Russ Cochran posted the day's best rounds. Pernice posted an 8-under-par 64, 10 strokes better than his Friday effort, while Cochran was eight better, shooting a 7-under-pat 65.

• However, the day's biggest turnaround was turned in by Bob Tway. He shot an 8-over-par 80 on Friday, but bounced back with a 5-under-par 67, a 13-stroke improvement.

• One day after only six players in the 56-man field finished with a round under par, there were 36 on Saturday and there were 38 rounds of par or better compared to just 10 in the opening round.

• The field shaved more than three strokes off the scoring average from Friday's round. The second-round average was 70.857 compared to 74.428 on Friday. On Friday, only three of 18 holes had a scoring average under par, while on Saturday, 14 of 18 had a scoring average below par.

• The most difficult hole on Saturday was No. 16 with a scoring average of 4.432 (+.432), while No. 3 was again the easiest at 4.571 (-.429).