Winged Foot’s soft pedal: Justin Thomas leads run of red numbers in U.S. Open’s first round
By Chuck Culpepper,
MAMARONECK, N.Y. — A blasphemy occurred Thursday at the gorgeous haunted house called Winged Foot. A vulgar 21 players broke par to start the 120th U.S. Open. The old grounds bubbled with calm winds, excessive mirth and insufficient misery. What sacrilege.
How gauche that a fine brute such as Winged Foot would spend even one day among punk adjectives such as “soft” (for greens) and “pretty benign” (in general). In the first five U.S. Opens played across 77 years at this monster 21 miles northeast of the Empire State Building, 19 men broke par: three in 1929, four in 1959, zero in 1974, 11 in a what-the-hell 1984 and one (Colin Montgomerie) in 2006. Those men included multiple major champions Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Hale Irwin, Severiano Ballesteros and Curtis Strange.
Now such scores felt almost as abundant as hand sanitizer.
Is nothing still sacred? Must Winged Foot, too, succumb to golf’s big-boom era? The answer for now holds on as perhaps no because players expect the near-autumn weather to yield hardened greens that yield hardened scores that yield authentic U.S. Opens. They expect this for an event usually staged in stultifying Junes but postponed to the easier air and lesser daylight of September because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
In the meantime, if such a course had to reward the many, at least it rewarded many of the proven. The three most glowing names atop the board — Justin Thomas at a front-running 5-under-par 65, Patrick Reed at 4-under 66 and Rory McIlroy at 3-under 67 — all have claimed major titles, with McIlroy claiming four. He filled his coming weekend with promise by breaking his recent major habit of hole-digging starts. “Golf, I think,” he said to explain that habit. “Yeah, maybe putting a little too much pressure to get off to a good start.”
Otherwise, people spoke far too chirpily for a Winged Foot U.S. Open. Asked whether the number of red scores surprised him, Thomas said: “No. The greens are very soft.” The 2012 champion, Webb Simpson, shot a 71 and spoke of a “kind of humidity” that made things “pretty benign.” The 2013 champion, Justin Rose, shot a 73 but called the pin placements “generous” and “a little bit Augusta-like.”
[Boswell: Golf has seldom been so deep in talent, but its future star is yet to identify himself]
Great talents capitalized. Matthew Wolff, the 21-year-old out of Oklahoma State who has made it clear he doesn’t intend to spend a lot of time waiting around for glory — he finished tied for fourth at the PGA Championship in August — shot a 66 to tie Reed and Thomas Pieters, the 28-year-old Belgian ranked 77th in the world. Under-par sorts included major winner Louis Oosthuizen (3 under) and chronic contenders Lee Westwood (3 under), Xander Schauffele (2 under), Rickie Fowler, Tony Finau, Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau (all 1 under).
Should we let in some amateurs? Sure! They were Davis Thompson and John Pak, both 1 under. What unchecked sin.
Three below-par scores came from one morning group alone, from a batch of Georgia Bulldogs, both alums and current. They were Brendon Todd, 35, who ranks 39th in the world and shot 2 under par; Harris English, 31, 45th, 2 under; and Thompson, 21, who plays at Georgia right now and whom English has known since English was about 12, given that Thompson’s father, Todd, also played at Georgia and caddies here for his son. That’s so many Bulldogs that they might be out there debating why Kirby Smart faked that punt against Alabama.
[What makes Collin Morikawa a success? Ask his former business school prof.]
“Yeah, I was a little nervous,” the very younger Thompson said, “but once I hit that first tee shot, I was ready to roll.”
“You still had to be patient,” Todd said, “because it’s hard to birdie all of them out there.”
Well, that’s a relief.
Tiger Woods’s sampler collection of six pars, five birdies, six bogeys and one double bogey (on No. 18) added up to a 73 and one lost opportunity on a day when, he said, “They gave us a lot of opportunities with the hole locations.”
PGA champion Collin Morikawa’s 76 became a dim outlier requiring those ancient and terrible Thursday words to which Morikawa resorted, “A little work to do tomorrow.”
In general, though, merriment got so out of hand that the day saw two holes-in-one on No. 7 even if a spectator-less event meant no crowds to roar for either Reed or Will Zalatoris, the former Wake Forest player who qualified as the points leader on golf’s Class AAA tour, the Korn Ferry.
“It would have been nuts,” Reed said of his ace that bounced once and dunked in, only the second hole-in-one of his career after, he said, “the first at Shell on 16.” It’s nothing against the Shell Open, but Winged Foot does not breathe in the golf pantheon to have itself compared to regular tour stops named for oil companies.
Read more on golf: Phil Mickelson, five-time major winner, returns to the scene of his most famous failure Trump says he shot in the low-70s at Winged Foot. Really. In Cinderella story, ‘Caddyshack’ star caddies during U.S. Open practice round
