'Delete button': Steven Alker recovers from double-bogey, shoots 65 to lead at Firestone

If golf were a keyboard, the most important button would be an easy choice: "Delete."

Every golfer worth his or her salt will have a good delete button. This sport will always leave players — including the world's best — with a hole that just goes sideways and demands a quick response to halt the round from completely going off the rails.

It's a mantra that Steven Alker lives by, and it's a major reason he was able to put together a 5-under 65 in Friday's second round of the 2024 Kaulig Companies Championship at Firestone Country Club, which was just enough to overtake Steve Stricker for the tournament lead going into Saturday.

Friday's 65 put Alker at 7 under overall, one stroke better than Stricker and three strokes better than Kenny Perry and Robert Karlsson, who are trailing at 4 under. Alker, Stricker and Perry will tee off in Saturday's final group at 11:21 a.m.

Recovering from a wayward drive was perhaps Alker's most important stretch of the day.

"Yeah, you just go, like, 'Delete button,' just go, 'Boop,' and that's it," Alker said. "That's all you can do because I've got [14] holes to play, so I've got to knuckle down."

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Alker's tee shot on the par-4 fourth hole found its way into the woods. He spent the next two strokes simply trying to get back into the fairway. Once he finally reached the green, he two-putted for a double-bogey 6.

But then he instantly got back on track, striping his next tee shot on the par-3 fifth hole and sinking the birdie. After the double-bogey on the fourth hole, Alker birded two of the next three (the fifth and seventh) and then birdied three holes on the back 9 with no bogeys to close out the best individual round of the tournament thus far.

"I knew I was playing good, swinging it good, putting it good, so just got to try and get momentum back and keep going," Alker said. "You can't get down on this golf course. You've just got to stick to your guns and keep trying to flush [the bad result]."

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Just about any golfer will tell you how easily one bad hole — or even one bad shot — can send the rest of the round into chaos. Being able to truly move on from that can be easier said than done.

Alker said Friday that it helped that he was playing well, and he knew it, so the double-bogey felt more like an outlier. But it's also something that isn't always as simple.

"Yeah, [that ability] comes and goes, depends how you're feeling with your golf game," Alker said. "My golf game is feeling pretty good, so it's not hard to just kind of push delete and carry on."

Ryan Lewis can be reached at rlewis1@gannett.com. Follow him on Threads at @ByRyanLewis.