DUBLIN, Ohio — There has been a Martin Kaymer sighting.
He’s at the top of the leaderboard at the Memorial through two rounds at Muirfield Village on Friday, tied with Troy Merritt and Kyoung-Hoon Lee at 9-under par.
That unlikely trio of leaders, ranked 186th, 197th and 255th respectively in the world rankings, is followed by Jordan Spieth at 8-under, and then by five players at 7-under, including Adam Scott and Rickie Fowler.
Tiger Woods, who had it to 4-under before a sloppy double bogey on No. 15 derailed him, is 2-under and on the outside of contention unless he can post something in the mid-60s on Saturday.
Of those names at the top of the board, it’s Kaymer who stands out because he’s gone from such a force in the game, as a two-time major championship winner and Ryder Cup star, to virtually invisible recently.
The 34-year-old from Germany, who shot a 4-under 68 Friday, hasn’t won a PGA Tour event since he captured the 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst. He also won the Players Championship that year, and was the 2010 PGA Championship winner.
The past several years, though, have been lean.
“I was trying to force it a little bit, the success,’’ Kaymer said. “And obviously we all know in golf what happens … the frustration comes out because you work hard, everything is there, [and] you just can’t get the scores on the scorecard. You don’t get the results.
“I really look forward to the next two days,’’ Kaymer added. “It’s been a while for me, it’s been five years pretty much since I was leading the U.S. Open in 2014. So it would be nice to get a little bit of reward for all the work I put in the last two or three years.’’
Kaymer, who’s played in the Memorial only once (in 2009) because of his commitment to the European Tour, has taken to watching video of some of his greatest moments, including the 2012 Ryder Cup in which he delivered the winning point to Europe and his U.S. Open win.
“I watched the Ryder Cup quite a lot, the last three or four holes,’’ he said. “They put me in the position to have that gift in my career, to receive that gift to be making something like that happen. [At] the U.S. Open I was just dominating the field. So I just try to visualize the tournament, watch it and try to get the feel back what I had, how did I feel.
“And also about swing thoughts. There was no swing thoughts. It was just playing. And that is what you’re supposed to do. But we forget. It’s so silly that we forget certain things. And then you start doubting yourself and you question and you ask other people, and then you’re lost.
“Fortunately, I’ve never felt lost,’’ Kaymer added. “But I can see it in other players. They go through so many swing coaches, they even ask other players, and hopefully I never went there. But you need to realize where you’re at, and that is where I was. And then you need to find a way back. And everybody needs to find their own way back. It’s not one way that works for everybody.’’
Take Merritt, for example. He played almost all of last summer with a large blood clot that ran from his chest down to his left elbow and didn’t even know it. That eventually led to Merritt having surgery to have a rib removed.
“I couldn’t really lift my arm up,’’ he recalled. “I could make a golf swing, so I kept playing and I ended up winning Barbasol, and 10 days later right before the PGA, I couldn’t lift it anymore. It was twice the size of my other arm, and it was purple all the way down.
“My wife told me I needed to go to the doctor, and they determined it was a blood clot. And the underlying cause was a condition called thoracic outlet syndrome. You see it more in Major League pitchers. Basically, my top rib and clavicle were too close together, and it pinched the vein and it caused the blood clot.’’
Merritt said he played all fall on blood thinners and with a compression sleeve before having the rib removed in January so he didn’t have to be on the blood thinners anymore.
“Right now it’s just trying to get the body back into playing every day again on PGA courses,’’ Merritt said.
Just like Kaymer trying to get his mind back into winning again.
Everyone has a thing to deal with.