Johnson is in Championship form

He is 2 strokes up on field as season-ender tees off

ATLANTA — Dustin Johnson is the No. 1 seed and starts with a two-shot lead at the Tour Championship, not nearly enough to tempt him into looking too far ahead at a FedEx Cup title that already has slipped away from him once before.

“It’s not like I’ve got a two-shot lead going into the final round,” Johnson said, who speaks from experience of once losing a sixshot lead in the final round of a World Golf Championship.

“I’m still going to have to play some really good golf for four days if I want to be a FedEx Cup champion.”

And then there are players like Billy Horschel and Mackenzie Hughes, who will be 10 shots behind Johnson before they even hit their opening drives at East Lake. They

have to play their absolute best golf and get some help.

“I know I’m going to have to do something special,” Horschel said.

The strangest season in golf — no tournaments for three months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, only one major championship in the last 14 months — ends on Labor Day with the second year of a format that gives players a head start depending on how they played up to this point.

Johnson, also the No. 1 player in the world, starts at 10-under par and is two shots ahead of Jon Rahm, who beat him last week at Olympia Fields with a 65-foot birdie putt.

Rory McIlroy won last year from the No.

5 seed, meaning he started five behind. He posted an actual score of 13-under 267 and still needed the top two seeds — Justin Thomas and Patrick Cantlay — to falter. McIlroy was 10 shots better than Thomas, 22 shots better than Cantlay. That did the trick.

Is it possible for someone to start 10 shots behind and still win the $15 million bonus?

“It’s going to happen one year,” Marc Leishman said. “I just don’t know if it’ll be this year, next year or the year after. If the top three guys get off to a slow start … 5 (under) could potentially be leading after one round.”

Thomas knows how that works. He was the No. 1 seed a year ago, opened with a 70 and was in a three-way tie for the lead after one day. The rest of the week didn’t go much better. But while he witnessed McIlroy winning from five shots behind at the start, a 10-shot deficit looks feasible only on paper.

“It would be one thing if they were 10 back of one person,” Thomas said. “But there’s 25 people ahead of them, and that’s the hard part.”

More likely, at least this year, is a scenario the PGA Tour has tried to avoid — a runaway with no drama.

Nothing will be as bad as 2008 when the format allowed Vijay Singh to wrap it up no matter how he played at East Lake. He needed to stay upright for only four days, and the Fijian managed fine.

Johnson, however, is playing as well as anyone, and he’s arguably the biggest talent in the game. He has had the 54-hole lead in his last three tournaments, winning at the TPC Boston and finishing runner-up in the PGA Championship and BMW Championship. Imagine if he gets it going at East Lake while staked to a two-shot lead.

It all starts to unfold Friday, and there is plenty on the line for everyone, mostly money. The $15 million payout — $14 million in cash, $1 million deferred — is only part of the $45.6 million in bonus money being paid out this week.

LPGA: Players can ride in carts during practice rounds and caddies can use them during the tournament to cope with the extreme heat expected for the ANA Inspiration next week at the ANA Inspiration in the California desert.

Caddies can choose to walk and push carts are an option. The LPGA said players can ride in carts during the practice rounds, but walking is required during the championship.