Job half-done for likeable Spaniard

The scene here at Muirfield is magnificent. The course is brown and burnished, with fiery fairways dried like to tinder. Yesterday the wind got up in the afternoon, with a cooling breeze fanning the thousands of spectators, but after an hour out on these links you were panting for breath and water. Amid it all one ageing, pony-tailed Spaniard was in his element.

"Hello everyone . . . I'm here!" Jimenez announced to the media last night after his second-round 71 gave him a one-shot lead. There then followed 20 minutes of occasionally wacky repartee as Jimenez, in his impressively hurried English, took us through his round and his career.

Renowned as a survivor, a grinder, a man who just goes on relentlessly (with no-one quite knowing how) Jimenez at least revealed one secret to us last night. Golf is evidently very important to him. He thinks about it deeply. "I keep playing golf because I keep enjoying it, it is my life," he said. "I like what I do. I feel relaxed. Golf is my living, I've done it for 25 years. Maybe that is too many years but it's what I like to do in my life.

"People talk about the pressure. But I like to feel that pressure, the pressure is always there, to make birdies. It keeps me intense, it keeps me competitive.

"I wasn't a long hitter before, and I'm not a long hitter now. But on this course you need to be able to play golf: to hook, to slice, you need to think, to be patient, you need to keep the ball in play."

Jimenez has won 19 European Tour events in a stretch going back over 20 years. In that time, he has also threatened to win eight majors in total, but never got over the line. He also clearly understands links golf and relishes it. In last year's Open he finished tied-ninth. In the 2007 Open he finished tied-12th. Back in 2003 he finished tied-third. This is a man who understands the capricious nature of linksland with all its character-testing traits.

"Sometimes the point about links golf is not to make birdies . . . the point is not to make bogeys," Jimenez said. "I made some good recoveries out there today. This golf course is terribly hard. With this wind, and with these pin positions, you can't get the ball close. It is a great golf course, but this one is a little bit too hard."

His ski-ing accident of last December appears not to have deterred him. Jimenez was laid up for three months, and upon his return found that his physique was a little impaired. Yet it has not halted him one bit. "In ski-ing I am a 10-handicap," he quipped. "But since I came back some of my muscles here [the leg] are still only at 80%. I didn't play golf for a few months and then, when I returned, I got tennis elbow when I practice." To protect his left elbow Jimenez wears a brace on his left forearm.

He also claimed that, if he wasn't a golfer, he'd like to have been "a pilot", though in immediately talking about "Formula One" Jimenez might actually have meant a racing-driver. Either way, this Spanish golfer seems to be irrepressible.

If he wins tomorrow night it would make Jimenez the oldest ever winner of a major in golf. The current record holder is Julius Boros, who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48. Jimenez, born in January 1964, would outstrip Boros by 15 months. "Have I not the right to do it?" he asked with a smile. "Tomorrow, I need to shoot low. If not, I won't be here, and I'll kick my ass. Tonight I will have dinner with my girlfriend and with my sons. I will do nothing special. Then I will have to go to bed at 10 o'clock."

It was hard, looking at and listening to this colourful character, not to root for him. Miguel Angel Jimenez has never been a pin-up of golf. On the contrary, he is viewed as the ultimate grinder, "the mechanic" as he is known.

If he wins here at Muirfield tomorrow night it will be a victory for tubby middle-aged men everywhere. But there is some work to be done yet.