Snedeker shoots ‘cool’ 59
Brandt Snedeker predicted low scores at the Wyndham Championship but not this low.
Snedeker shot an 11-under 59 yesterday, falling 1 shot shy of matching the PGA Tour record. He made a 20-foot putt on his final hole to become the 10th player in tour history to break 60.
Jim Furyk set the record with a 58 in the final round of the Travelers Championship in 2016.
“I better be smiling,” Snedeker said. “I don’t do this every day.”
This is the third consecutive year the PGA Tour has had a sub-60 round. Snedeker is the first to shoot 59 since Adam Hadwin in the third round of the 2017 Careerbuilder Challenge.
It gave Snedeker a 4-stroke lead after the round over Ryan Moore and
John Oda, who shot 63s.
Martin Flores, D.A. Points, Brett Stegmaier, David Hearn, Abraham Ancer, Ollie Schniederjans and Jonathan Byrd had 64s.
Snedeker, who said a day earlier that the tournament would turn into a “birdiefest,” began the round at the par-70 Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, N.C., with a bogey at No. 10, and took off from there. He played the front nine in 27, including an eagle 2 on the par-4 sixth hole when he holed out from 176 yards.
After that shot, Snedeker said a 59 felt like a real possibility.
“To know what you’re trying to do and step up and have a 20-footer (on the final hole) and know what it means, I was very aware of what was going on, and to knock that putt in was really special,” Snedeker said. “To know I’m a part of a small club on tour and not very many people have done this, really cool feeling right now.”
Snedeker, the 2012 FedEx Cup champion, won the Wyndham in 2007. He broke Si Woo Kim’s two-year-old Wyndham record of 60 and had the best opening round in this event’s history. Arjun Atwal had a 61 in 2010.
It’s been a somewhat frustrating, turbulent year for Snedeker. He has three top 10 finishes and two missed cuts in his last seven events and has not won on tour since 2016. During his first 16 tournaments of the season, he finished in the top 10 just once.
“Nobody could see this coming, trust me,” Snedeker said. “As much as I tried to positive self-talk myself into playing good, I didn’t see 59 coming today, to be honest with you. Luckily, it kind of clicked all day today, and hopefully it will keep clicking for the next three days.”
At No. 80 on the points list entering the final event of the tour’s regular season, he’s nowhere near the playoff bubble and his spot at The Northern Trust next week in New Jersey seems safe. But that ranking is his lowest since the tour’s postseason format debuted in 2007.
Moore, who won here in 2009, made a move up the leaderboard in the afternoon with five birdies in a six-hole span on the front nine. Oda, a second-year pro coming off a tie for third earlier this month in the Barracuda Championship, had three consecutive birdies on the back nine to pull even with Moore.
Salas’ 62 ties mark
Lizette Salas matched the Brickyard Crossing record with a 10-under 62 in the Indy Women in Tech Championship in Indianapolis, birdieing the final three holes for a 2-stroke lead over Angel Yin and Nasa Hataoka.
Yin birdied eight of the first nine holes in her morning round for a frontnine 8-under 28, one short of the LPGA Tour’s ninehole record. It matched the third-lowest nine-hole score in relation to par in tour history.
Salas matched the course record set by Mike McCullough in the PGA Tour Champions’ 1999 Comfort Classic.
Sordet claims lead
Clement Sordet of France opened with four straight birdies to shoot 8-under 62 and take the first-round lead of the European Tour’s Nordea Masters in Gothenburg, Sweden. Hunter Stewart is the top American after a 5-under 65 left him in a four-way tie for fourth.