Fierce Oak Hill Daunts PGA Championship Field, with more to come

PITTSFORD, NY — Scotty Scheffler, at least for now, had a share of the PGA Championship lead when he made an ominous prediction Thursday afternoon: Oak Hill Country Club, already playing to the point of danger in the first round, will only get even scarier.

The wind is expected to blow. The rain is coming. And, for good measure, the East Course was recently restored to bring back the century-old Satanic charm of architect Donald J. Ross.

The 2022 Masters winner, who nonetheless had his first bogey-free run in a major, said Scheffler, the 2022 Masters winner, Thursday. “There are a lot of hard holes out there.”

The rough shows it is fiercely punishing, the fairways so firm that often only the balls remain – even after the sleet that delayed Thursday’s start by nearly two hours had softened the turf. Four-time major champion Rory McIlroy hit two ways all day as he battled with a crosswind of tees.

But there was no afflicted players displaying public outrage over the setting outside of Rochester, New York. Instead, where a tight leaderboard formed before play was suspended due to darkness, a brand of grief and admiration prevailed, even as the prospect of a runaway winner seemed distant.

“Very tough golf course,” said Bryson Dechambeau, who put him in second place a shot under 66 behind single leader Eric Cole, who did not complete his round Thursday night. “As I’ve been looking at it over the course of the week, I’m like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know how it’s even possible to shoot for par here on some holes of golf.'”

“He’s playing hard,” said Kurt Kitayama, who was on par. “I don’t think anyone is really comfortable.”

“It stacks up to some of the toughest major slam courts I’ve ever played,” Corey Conners, who has three top-10 finishes at the Masters, said after his sub-par-3 tour.

Sterling’s performance by Dechambeau, who has routinely faltered since winning the 2020 US Open in New York on Winged Foot, and is often seen as similar to a recharged Oak Hill, came after an early bogey on the 12th hole (with a par-156). (Because of the frost delay, the group’s final tee time was pushed back to 4:32 p.m., less than four hours before sunset.)

He moved to the lower par for the first time on the seventh hole – par 16 – and finished the front nine at one-under-one. Three birdies on his back, nine, including one in the sixth, the hole that Oak Hill, course restorer Andrew Green, deemed the most threatening put him to fourth. Then, having become “accustomed to hitting it all over the place,” he rejoiced in a day of straight driving that, he conceded, could be little more than a memory by Friday evening.

“You always think you have one day and then you leave the next,” Dechambeau said. “You just have to be careful.”

Scheffler, just a week after a round near Dallas where he made a birdie or eagle on five of his first six holes, found something close to a groove on the Par-5 No. 1. 4. Tree. He eventually saved up for par anyway.

“We got a key wind and had a really good up and down to continue the tour,” said Scheffler, who finished the day tied for third with Conners and Dustin Johnson, another Masters winner. “You hated to mess with five guys, especially when there were only two of them around. That was good momentum.”

Cole, 34, was at the top of the leaderboard late in the day, when three consecutive birdies brought his score to five under. He played in another major of his career, the 2021 US Open, where he missed the cut.

“When I got the chance, I kind of felt like I read it right and hit a good shot, and they came in today, so that was good,” Cole said Thursday night.

The first round, in which the 11 group was scheduled to resume on Friday morning, was baffling to others.

There was Kazuki Higa, a Japanese golfer who missed the other two majors of his career, opening the day with birdies on four of his first five holes, only to end it with four consecutive bogeys or a double bogey. John Rahm, the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Rankings and winner of the Masters tournament last month, later finished in No. 6, the worst showing in a single PGA Tour tournament by a world No. 1 since 1987. and Brooks Koepka, who dueled with Rahm on the tour His last at the Masters but finding himself with a two-over-par 72 on Thursday, he said the first round “was the worst I’ve hit in a long time.”

Jordan Spieth, who pulled out of the tournament last week with a wrist injury, played Thursday and signed for three more, tying him up with former champions Shane Lowry and Gary Woodland. McIlroy, who had struggled lately and missed the Masters cut, ended his day with one out. But his flair included a daunting 37-foot putt to save the ball on second down, resulting in the kind of shake-up he suggested might keep him competitive.

“Depending on what happens over the next three days and what I’m going to do, you know, I might look back on that shot as the turning point of the week,” he said.

The rigors of an event like this week helped shape Green’s thinking as he set to work on the course, which has hosted the PGA Championships in 2003 and 2013, as well as the Ryder Cup and three US Opens.

“Knowing that the golf course has a wonderful legacy of major championships, and knowing that this is something the club wanted to continue to do, we had to blend elements of Donald Ross design with modern championship golf,” Green said in an interview this year.

The green took on unconventional shapes again, shelters assumed greater wildness and more so-called chocolate drops appeared – the turf-covered hills that were Ross’s signature.

“You play really well and hit fairways and greens, you can do some putts, you can putt a few on par,” said Victor Hovland, who finished second on Thursday. “But if you’re a little off, the roughness is just a penalty kick. If you’re short or you make two bogeys, you want to attack the pin, you hit it more in a bad place and it’s just a never-ending loop.”

The cut is scheduled for Friday night, daylight permitting, with Top 70 and Heroines moving forward to the weekend. Then it will start to rain.