GOLF
Steve Stricker is having too much fun at the Waste Management Phoenix Open to stress over a messy finish Friday.
Trying to become the oldest winner in PGA Tour history, the 53-year-old U.S. Ryder Cup captain shot a 5-under 66 to get within a stroke of leader Xander Schauffele entering the weekend at TPC Scottsdale.
Stricker scrambled for par on the eighth, but couldn’t overcome another poor approach on No. 9 in a closing bogey.
Stricker, who will be 54 on Feb. 23, won the last of his 12 PGA Tour titles in 2012. Sam Snead is the oldest winner at 52 years, 10 months, 8 days in the 1965 Greater Greensboro event.
EUROPEAN TOUR: Ryan Fox of New Zealand shot his second consecutive 5-under 65 to grab a share of the lead in the weather-delayed Saudi International.
Later starters in the second round, including No. 1-ranked Dustin Johnson, will finish their rounds on Saturday morning.
Fox was tied with Stephen Gallacher, who got through 12 holes before light faded. Play had been stopped for two hours earlier because of rain.
Johnson recorded five birdies through 14 holes, putting him in a third-place tie, two shots off the lead.
BOBSLED
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS: Kaillie Humphries and Lolo Jones of the United States are the leaders at the midway point of the women’s bobsled world championship in Alterberg, Germany.
Humphries drove to the fastest time in each of the two runs Friday, she and Jones finishing with a combined time of 1 minute, 52.94 seconds. That puts them 0.34 seconds ahead of the German sled driven by Kim Kalicki and pushed by Ann-Christin Strack. Another German sled, driven by Laura Nolte and pushed by Deborah Levi, is 0.43 seconds off the lead. The U.S. team of Elana Meyers Taylor and Sylvia Hoffman is fourth, 0.83 seconds back.
The final two runs are Saturday. Humphries is the defending world champion and seeking what would be a record fourth women’s world title. She won on the same track last season, with Kalicki second.
BASKETBALL
WNBA: Former MVP Tina Charles will stay with the Washington Mystics, the team announced.
The Mystics traded with New York for Charles last April, but she sat out the season after being granted a medical exemption because of coronavirus concerns.
SOCCER
UEFA BAN: Ajax goalkeeper André Onana was banned for one year in a doping case and is set to miss next year’s African Cup of Nations in his home nation of Cameroon.
Onana tested positive for furosemide, a banned diuretic often used as a masking agent to hide the presence of other drugs, in a urine sample given last October. After feeling unwell, Onana said he took a pill prescribed for his girlfriend from a packet he mistook for aspirin “because the packaging was almost identical.”
“I just want to clarify that everything was the result of a human mistake,” Onana said in a statement, describing the UEFA ban as “excessive and disproportionate.”
Anti-doping rules make athletes liable for banned substances in their body, though they can argue they were not at fault or negligent.
SKIING
MEN’S WORLD CUP: Dominik Paris got his first win since blowing out his knee a year ago, triumphing in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, in the last downhill before the word championships.
The Italian skier trailed Beat Feuz by one-tenth of a second midway through his run but excelled on the bottom part of the Kandahar course to beat his Swiss rival by 0.37 seconds. Feuz had won the previous two downhills and leads the discipline standings.
Matthias Mayer was 0.40 behind in third, with Austrian teammate Max Franz two-hundredths further back in fourth.
Paris was the 2013 silver medalist in downhill at the worlds and is the defending super-G champion. He tore ligaments and fractured a bone in his right knee in a crash during downhill training for the Kitzbühel race in January 2020.
His previous best result this season came when he returned to Kitzbühel two weeks ago and finished third.
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