By David Ferguson
China.org.cn staff reporter
Kiwi Mark Brown turned up very early on Saturday morning at the CDB Club in Beijing for day 3 of the Volvo China Open. He was a little surprised to be still involved in the competition at all. The reason for that was that he was lying in joint last place at 4-over par - ten strokes behind leader Ho-sung Choi of Korea - and he had not expected to make the weekend cut. His realistic targets could not have been much more than to try to drag himself back to some level of respectability, and pocket a decent cheque for his weekend's work.
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A great chip-in for birdie for New Zealand's Mark Brown on 14. [china.org.cn]
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By lunchtime he had a course record in his back pocket, the first bogey-free round of the tournament under his belt (Welshman Stephen Dodd later became the only other player to achieve the feat), and just possibly, a chance of being in contention for the title come Sunday afternoon.
I said Friday that if leader Choi slipped up Saturday, it might still be possible for anyone in the field to win the tournament, and I was almost proved right. Brown teed off when the leaders were still enjoying a well-earned night's sleep. Taking advantage of ideal conditions - a slightly overcast sky and little or no wind - he put together an immaculate seven-under par score of 65 to finish the day on 3-under.
"I guess going out this morning I was just fortunate to be playing," he said. "I thought I'd miss the cut yesterday afternoon. The goal today was to try to somehow get back into the tournament and that was going to take something pretty low, so to shoot a course record was a great result. I played really nicely so the signs are good for tomorrow."
Brown's round was built around consistently finding the fairway from the tee, and consistently being on the green in regulation, and close enough to the hole to be sure of his par. He estimated that he had hit 16 GIRs - an outstanding performance - Paul McGinley thought he had done exceptionally well on Friday to make 14. This gave Brown birdies on 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11, and on one of the two occasions that he failed to find the green in regulation - on the testing par-4 14th hole - he solved the problem by holing a monster chip from the fringe of the green for a birdie. That was terrific resilience.
