MADISON – Darren Clarke and Ben Crane combining their talents in Wisconsin is a powerful force.
The duo built up unstoppable momentum in the second round of the AmFam Championship on Saturday, June 6, at TPC Wisconsin in the scramble format, birdieing every hole but one at the PGA Tour Champions event to shoot a scorching 17-under-par 54.
That round set a tournament record, and Clarke and Crane hold a four-shot lead. The format will return to best ball for the final round on June 7.
Being atop the leader board in the state is very familiar to both golfers.
Clarke won the AmFam Championship last year alongside Thomas Bjørn, who isn’t in the field this time around while recovering from spinal surgery.
You got to dig further back into the local golf archives to remember that Crane won wire-to-wire at the U.S. Bank Championship in 2005 at Brown Deer Park Golf Course.
“I love it here, absolutely,” Crane said. “You guys are so passionate about your sports and get a great turnout.
“Yeah, that was a hundred years ago: 2005, U.S. Bank Championship in Milwaukee. Yeah, but certainly great memories here as well.”
The talkative Clarke, from Northern Ireland, and Crane, an easygoing American, make a natural pair.
“When you’ve got full belief in your partner, you don’t think of it,” Clarke said. “It’s not like you’re playing a normal medal tournament or whatever. You’ve got backup, so you get freed up because of the way things were going.
“Both of us playing so well, hitting so many really good shots that it didn’t really matter if we hit an average shot because the other player was going to make up for it anyway.”
That chemistry played out on the course on a gorgeous day.
“We ham-and-egged it beautifully,” Crane said. “We had a plan going in with our order and how we were doing things, and it just produced freedom and fun.
“Yeah, honestly, I got to the scoring trailer and I didn’t know what we shot. I wasn’t really paying attention, I was just like ‘The next one, the next one, the next one.’ Trying to run good programs one at a time, trying to match the speed, get the read. And when they said we shot 54, I’m like, ‘What?!’ ”
Well, what happened on that pesky 10th hole in which Clarke and Crane combined for their lone par?
“Ben had a lovely wedge in there to about 17, 18 feet behind the hole,” Clarke said. “It was a bit of a tricky downhill, sort of breaking hard right-to-left and Ben’s broke hard across the hole.
“Whatever. I slightly misjudged the speed, just missed it on the low side. We both hit good putts.”
Wisconsin natives Steve Stricker and Mario Tiziana aren’t likely to catch Clarke and Crane, but they’re just trying to get a little better every round.
The 59-year-old Stricker, an Edgerton native and tournament host, is playing in his first competitive round since December. Tiziani, a former University of Wisconsin standout, had played seven stroke-play events in 2026.
They knocked off the rust with a 65 in the best-ball format in the first round. Then in the scramble on June 6, Stricker and Tiziani combined for a 61.
“17-under (by Clarke and Crane) is really impressive,” Stricker said. “Conditions are so good though today. The course is soft, the greens are pure. You have to hit quality shots, though.
“That 17-under’s a pretty special round. Mario played very nice. I’m not helping him very much into the greens at all. My iron play is lacking. Yeah, we needed something special like that to get back into it and I just didn’t help him enough, but 17-under is pretty low.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Darren Clarke, Ben Crane shoot 17-under to lead at AmFam Championship
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