Players mourn, remember friend Lyle

NOTEBOOK

ST. LOUIS — Of course, Rickie Fowler would’ve given the world to have worn the blue shirt he’d laid out for yesterday’s opening round of the PGA Championship.

Instead, he put on bright yellow — a shirt that matched the color hat his buddy Jarrod Lyle liked to wear when he played.

The Aussie golfer died Wednesday night after a long bout with leukemia. Tributes to him were everywhere at Bellerive Country Club, mainly in the form of yellow ribbons that many players pinned to their hats.

Fellow Aussie Jason Day lived across the street from Lyle in Orlando during their early playing days.

“It’s hard because you sit there and you know him and he’s a buddy of yours, and he’s not there anymore,” said Day, who choked up discussing the former PGA Tour player, who died at age 36.

Fowler wore a yellow pin on his hat last week, after Lyle announced he was ending treatment.

He wanted to do something more this time.

“You think about it as far as, Jarrod wouldn’t want us out here feeling sorry for him or feeling bad or anything,” he said. “(He’d) probably come out here and kick us in the butt and tell us to man up and go have some fun.”

Great start

It’s hard to blame club pro Matt Dobyns for thinking big. He opened the day with three straight birdies.

“You start dreaming, you see your name up there, I’m 2 back of the lead, you think, ‘What the hell?’ You never know,” Dobyns said.

Almost as quickly, the dream was over.

Dobyns blocked his tee shot on the fifth hole into the right rough. On his second shot, he pounded down into a tree root and the ball popped up and advanced about 4 feet. He didn’t know he had broken his 4-iron, so he lined up for another swing. The clubhead sawed off and went almost as far as the ball. That resulted in the first of two triple-bogeys, and he finished the round shooting 76.

“We always come back to the mean,” Dobyns said. “You don’t know how long that wave’s going to last. They key is to not go crashing off the wave and onto the barrier reef.”

Instead of challenging for the lead, Dobyns will have to scramble to make the cut for the first time in his five trips to the PGA.

Bad rake

It’s the sort of thing you’d see at the local muni. Justin Thomas saw it at the PGA Championship.

On his final hole of the day, he drove into a fairway bunker, and the ball came to rest inside an un-raked pitch mark. The defending champion had no choice but to pitch out and made bogey to close with a 1-under 69.

“I’ve never had my ball end up in somebody else’s pitch mark in a bunker before,” he said. “That was a pretty terrible break on my last hole. Could have cost me 1 or 2 strokes. It’s just unfortunate for someone not to rake it, but it is what it is.”