British Open Golf Tournament

SOUTHPORT, England -- You knew the 137th British Open had gone completely wacko Friday when suddenly Chris Evert stood amid a gaggle of reporters discussing her new husband Greg Norman's backhand. "He's got a big serve, but he loves hitting his ground strokes," the 18-time Grand Slam tennis champion said. "He loves the fact that he has both a slice backhand and a topspin backhand, sort of a Federer backhand, and his game's quite good considering that you never know if golfers can run."

SOUTHPORT, England -- The born-and-raised Angeleno with the big talent and the large fortitude, Anthony Kim, on Sunday fleetingly seemed as if he actually might up and win his first British Open at 23. Beginning the day five shots out at seven over par, and holding his ground for hours while others around him toppled, Kim upheld Mark O'Meara's prediction that he would contend at Royal Birkdale.

* Hit: Standing 249 yards away on the 17th fairway, leading by two, Padraig Harrington demonstrated a champion's resolve. "I wanted to take it on," he said, and so he did, dispensing the shot of the tournament, a five-wood that came out low and true, seemed to ride upon the wind, smacked down on the green, curled around the left of the cup and rested obediently three feet beyond. He then putted for clinching eagle.

SUNNINGDALE, England -- Here culminates the heady first year in which friends and relatives knocked on the Ochoa house door in Guadalajara and asked to visit not a person but an elegantly understated silver ornament. "It changed a little bit, their priorities coming to the house," said a grinning Lorena Ochoa, who won the British Open trophy last year at St. Andrews and triggered 12 months of curious visitors and sublime recollections.

SUNNINGDALE, England -- She's a sublime 5-foot-1 force with a ready laugh and a daydream golf game. She's prone to paint every other fingernail lime-green with the others canary-yellow to match her shirt from Sunday. She wears perpetual eyeglasses and tucks tees and the scorecard pencil into the stem of her ponytail. Korean fans call Ji-Yai Shin the "queen of final rounds" for her outsized mettle.

Once called "the hardest course in the world" by Gary Player, Carnoustie, the site of next month's 136th British Open, will be host of the championship for the seventh time.

While Americans tend to bet on golf while playing with friends or neighbors or that egotistical cheater from the legal department at work, golf-minded Britons tend to bet on golf while, well, breathing. They bet on the British Open so reflexively and so enthusiastically that some of them this very week will wager not only on the winner or whether there will be a hole in one up the coast at Carnoustie, but on the daily color of Ian Poulter's outfits. "I'm guessing Mr.

A maudlin but irresistible tradition has sprouted and blossomed at the British Open. Each July, somewhere on the island of Britain, throngs of golf intellectuals gather and theorize on just how in creation the European continent has not won a major golf tournament since the 1999 British Open. Pioneering discussions occurred here and there in 2004, when the drought had reached 19 majors, and in 2005, when it had hit 23.

\o7Analyzing the odds for upcoming games and events. \f7 It is hardly startling news that Tiger Woods is the favorite to win the 136th British Open, which begins Thursday at Carnoustie in Scotland. The online betting site bodog.com has defending champion Woods a 3-1 choice to win the Open for a fourth time, obviously believing he will better his performance from the last time the tournament was played at Carnoustie. In 1999, Woods finished in a tie for seventh.

For the modern sequel, Carnoustie returns as a fair and revered beast. It sheds its image as a profanity-prompting monstrosity. It culls glowing reviews: "\o7A wonderful golf course"\f7 -- Jim Furyk. \o7"In excellent shape" \f7-- Colin Montgomerie. \o7"Extremely fair" \f7-- Tiger Woods. It widens its fairways from its previous horror chamber of a British Open in 1999. It makes the rough less penal, as if realizing that human beings don't like rough too penal.