Snedeker joins select group with 59 at Wyndham
GREENSBORO, N.C. — Brandt Snedeker predicted low scores at the Wyndham Championship — but not this low.
Snedeker shot an 11-under-par 59 on Thursday, falling one stroke 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 him a fourstroke lead after one round. Ryan Moore and John Oda shot 63s, and Martin Flores, D.A. Points, Brett Stegmaier, David Hearn, Abraham Ancer, Ollie Schniederjans and Jonathan Byrd had 64s. Brandt Snedeker reacts after making a birdie putt on the ninth hole at the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C. His 59 fell one stroke shy of matching the PGA Tour record.
Snedeker — who said a day earlier that the tournament would turn into a “birdiefest” — began the round at par-70 Sedgefield Country Club 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. He remembered a non-tour event he played in China in which he was one putt from that score, but those thoughts “got in the way.”
“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 2-year-old Wyndham record of 60 and had the best
opening round in this event’s history. Arjun Atwal had a 61 in 2010.
“The trick for him is, he’s playing great. Now he’s just got to rest, relax and start over tomorrow from scratch and go play three more good rounds,” said Furyk, who also shot a 59 at the BMW Championship in 2013. “It’s awesome to see.”
LPGA TOUR: 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 two-stroke lead over faststarting Angel Yin and Japan’s Nasa Hataoka. Yin birdied eight of the first nine holes in her morning round for a front-nine 8-under 28 — one short of the LPGA Tour’s nine-hole record. It matched the third-lowest nine-hole score in relation to par in tour history. Salas eagled the par-5 second in the afternoon and added three straight birdies on Nos. 4-6. She birdied Nos. 12 and 14 before reeling off three more in a row to close, waiting out a late 77-minute suspension for an approaching storm. Salas matched the course record set by Mike McCullough in the PGA Tour Champions’ 1999 Comfort Classic.