Players thriving at Bellerive with low scores
Field on pace to set record low for 36-hole cut at a PGA
Bellerive. It sounded more like a spa than a golf course, and it has played like it so far at the PGA Championship. All it had for defences were some picket fences, and dank ponds with bending old trees, and a thunderstorm. Otherwise the door to the place was wide open, and any bold squatter could take up residence on the leader board.
Charl Schwartzel hadn’t made the cut in a major this season, but the effect of Bellerive on his game was better than an infirmary: He felt so revived here that he shot a 63 that tied for the lowest round in tournament history. Which would have been more of a feat if it was the only one. But it wasn’t. Here came Brooks Koepka with a second-record 63, only the second time such a thing had happened in major championship history. Here’s how easily Bellerive yielded to her gentleman guests: Both players just missed putts for 62s, and you wondered if a 61 wasn’t out there somewhere before rain halted the second round.
Bellerive. It sounded like dancing. Like waltzing, which is what all those low scorers looked like as they promenaded around the par-70, skipping so happily from one tee to the next. There were so many red numbers that it was almost desensitising — a total of six players shot 65s in the morning wave. When Kevin Kisner came in with his 64, it seemed almost a ho-hummer, leaving him one stroke shy of Gary Woodland, who at 10-under-par was the leader in the clubhouse with a tournament record low of 130 for 36 holes. By the time play was suspended by fat black clouds and drenching rain, the field was on pace to set another record low, for 36-hole cut at a PGA. It was projected to be at even par 140.
“This golf course, you’re going to have to keep firing,” Schwartzel said. “Most majors, the weekends get difficult, but I think this course you’re going to have to keep shooting birdies.”
Bellerive. It sounded like a rich dessert on an overpriced menu. This PGA Championship will be a test of a lot of things, from who’s got the best sweat-wicking apparel to just how low someone may go, but it’s not exactly a test of pure golf. The course is so unremarkable, with some mildly bending doglegs and a puzzleshaped bunker here or there, that players were hard-pressed to sound interested by it. “A bombers paradise,” Justin Rose called it. “The start of the week I felt like this was a 20-under par golf course, and it seems we’re edging in that direction.”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” said Dustin Johnson, who had five birdies in six holes for 66, and stood at 7-under.