Fan favorite Funk among contenders at halfway in Baltimore  PGATOUR.com Editorial Coordinator TIMONIUM, Md. -- If Mike Weir was the crowd darling at last week's Presidents Cup, then it's Fred Funk who earns the Mike Weir award at this week's Constellation Energy Senior Players Championship.  Though still competitive on the PGA TOUR, Fred Funk is looking to expand his presence on the Champions Tour going forward. (Badz/PGA TOUR/WireImage)
Scores of fans -- mostly clad in hats or golf shirts with a Terrapin logo from his alma mater, the University of Maryland -- sought the hybrid golfer's autograph. The word hybrid, in this case, not referring to any clubs in his bag but the fact that Funk is that rare cross between a still competitive PGA TOUR player over age 50 and a proven Champions Tour winner. Funk claims he doesn't use the crowd's energy to better his own game -- "I'd like to, but I just have to get my game good enough so I can start feeding off the support I'm getting," he said -- but he still sits comfortably in a seven-way tie for fifth place, just four shots behind leader Loren Roberts heading into the weekend. Funk, however, doesn't think his recent play is going to cut it with just two days left of the year's final major. Baltimore Country Club's tricky greens mean that players must be not only on top of their putting game but also leave their iron shots close to -- and generally below -- the pins to avoid a dreaded bogey, or worse. "The test is on the greens and you get rewarded if you are hitting the ball well. But the thing is, right now I'm real struggling with my ball striking a little bit, so I have to get that fixed," Funk said. "I need to shoot a 66, 65, or 64 over the weekend, in one of the rounds anyway, to get back up in there. "I'm not hitting the ball quite good enough to do that so I've got to figure something out," he added. More the product of a couple of "bad habits" than a back injury that plagued him earlier in the season, Funk's ball-striking woes may not be as bad as they seem. After all, he did follow up a 68 in the first round with a 69 on Friday. His second round featured two birdies and two bogeys on the front nine plus a birdie on the 14th hole. Funk logged four birdies in his first go-around at the East Course on Thursday. Not too shabby for a guy who, despite growing up in nearby Takoma Park, Md., hadn't played the course since 1986. Though the rest of the Champions Tour had an off-week last week to help prepare for their strenuous task at hand in Maryland, Funk was busy trying to win the PGA TOUR's Viking Classic. In fact, he nearly succeeded, beginning the final round tied for sixth only to shoot a 4-over-par 76 on Sunday to wind up in a tie for 22nd. Funk's been in contention several times on the PGA TOUR this season, winning the inaugural Mayakoba Golf Classic in the spring and tying for fifth at the Travelers Championship in June. As long as he can hang in there with the younger kids on TOUR, Funk expects to keep playing the PGA TOUR. But he also said that, starting next year, he'll increase the number of Champions Tour events on his schedule. Funk, 51, has participated in just seven events during his sophomore season on the Champions Tour. Though he earned a win at the Turtle Bay Championship in late January and has finished inside the top-10 two other times, Funk is still fighting to make it into season-ending Charles Schwab Cup Championship, where only the top 30 on the Champions Tour Money List can play. At No. 33 on the Money List and No. 28 in the separate Charles Schwab Cup standings, Funk must place well in the Constellation Energy Senior Players Championship, the Administaff Small Business Classic and the AT&T Championship -- where he has hopes of defending his 2006 title -- in order to vault into the elite field in Sonoma, Calif. He's certainly a favorite to win this week, especially since he formerly coached golf at the University of Maryland before embarking on a professional golf career that rewarded him relatively late in life. Funk earned his first of his eight PGA TOUR wins at age 36 and bested the top players in the world at the 2005 PLAYERS Championship near his current home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. With his recent PGA TOUR success, Funk had to tackle both internal and external high expectations when he first joined the Champions Tour. But now he's reached the point where he just feels like one of the guys. "Definitely one of the guys who should compete week in and week out, for sure. There's a core group of guys who should be at the top of the leaderboard and I feel like I'm one of those," he said. "But to say I'm the favorite to win every week? No, the level of play out here is really strong. "It's hard to be expected to go out there and tee it up and think it's a gimme." |
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