Snedeker begins with bogey — then shoots 11-under 59
Brandt Snedeker predicted low scores at the Wyndham Championship — but not this low. Snedeker shot an 11-under 59 on Thursday, falling one 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 him a four-stroke 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.
Snedeker — who said a day earlier that the tournament would turn into a “birdie-fest” — began the round at 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. 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. 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.”
LPGA Tour: Lizette Salas matched the Brickyard Crossing record with a 10-under 62 in the Indy Women in Tech Championship, birdieing the final three holes for a two-stroke lead over fast-starting 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.
European Tour: Clement Sordet opened with four straight birdies to shoot 8-under 62 and take the first-round lead of the Nordea Masters in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Frenchman has a two-stroke lead over Scott Jamieson of Scotland and Lee Slattery of England.