Open Championship round three: For Garcia, memories are not made of this

If you just happen to bump into Sergio Garcia Sunday morning, be sure not to say the word Wachovia. And any casual discussion of Greg Norman is also strictly out of bounds. The Spaniard bidding to take on the mantle of Seve Ballasteros does not need to be reminded that six-shot leads can disappear of a Sunday afternoon as easily as storms can evaporate into nothing.

If our weathermen had any shame, the papers would be full of adverts for met officer vacancies this weekend. Whatever happened to all that wind and rain Saturday? I suspect it turned round to dump on me again, because up at Carnoustie balls were fair skipping along dry(ish) fairways. I never expected to see a birdie-fest this weekend, but down the front nine you couldn’t give them away.

So I’m not going to bother looking at Sunday’s forecasts, even though I think the weather will play its part. We know Angel Cabrera doesn’t like the bitter cold that has oft times engulfed the course and K J Choi didn’t look too enamoured of it Saturday either. I wonder whether it isn’t partly a factor in Tiger Woods’s up and down game, although for a man clearly out of sorts he put in a superb third round.

They say local shops have been doing a roaring trade in mittens, especially the fat thermal ones Tiger and Co are using. It would be useful to know if it was going to get any warmer Sunday, as forecasts previously suggested, so players can be rid of these discomforts.

Garcia, by contrast, seems least bothered by the conditions on his imperious path to a first major title. Again his game was near flawless and I’m far from alone in observing that it’s the way we used to see Woods play, although not quite with the great man’s blinkered focus.

The forums have been abuzz overnight with discussions of major meltdowns and someone has even helpfully posted an all-time top five, headed not surprisingly by Jean Van de Velde on this very track. But it also includes Arnold Palmer dropping five shots at the 1966 US Open and, of course, Norman’s collapse from a six-shot advantage at the 1996 Masters. And lest we forget, there’s the six shots Garcia himself gave away on the Sunday at the Wachovia in 2005. Six is significant, of course, because that is the distance between him and the main field.

But Sergio undoubtedly learnt a thing or two from the Sunday mauling he got from Tiger last year at Hoylake. Crucially different is that he has mastered his putter. But on Saturday he also showed strategic maturity, for instance with his more conservative use of the driver.

It helped that he went round with someone like Choi, who does not attract a mad media scrum, and the same will be true Sunday with Steve Stricker. Garcia will be free of the razzmatazz of Tiger’s trailing circus.

So it’s down to whether he can prevent the dream from becoming his master and playing games with his mind. I hope he slept well because he can’t afford to relax. He was very lucky with a couple of wayward shots Saturday, especially the one that left a photographer seeing more stars than he’d bargained for.

Garcia’s opponents know they have nothing to lose by going on the offensive and, if they can keep their hands warm long enough, there are a few you can see doing that. Maybe Stricker has had his hour of glory, but we’ve seen Choi charge up the field to win and even Tiger might still have it in him to rattle the cage.

But there’s one other man who had a terrific round Saturday, but for one dreadful hole. If Ernie Els hadn’t come to grief on the sixth, he would almost certainly be rubbing shoulders with Stricker.

What’s to say he doesn’t put the fear of God into Garcia with an early surge to close the gap? Okay, as straws go it’s a bit thin. It’s also impossible to tell what kind of wind it’ll be flying in.