cemented one of the year\u2019s most remarkable sports stories when he signed for a three-over-par 74 at the Palmerston Golf Course. <\/a>He was seven shots off the clubhouse lead held jointly at four-under (67) by Jack Munro and New Zealand\u2019s Jimmy Zheng.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/HIRES_20241024-Guan_Jeff_injury_-DT2_8784-1024x576.jpg\")
Guan embraced the interest in his inspiring story and has been gracious with media, officials and fans. Picture: David Tease\/Golf NSW<\/p>\n
Although he was T-100 after the morning wave of the first round, he had tied with, and beaten, some seasoned tour pros. Guan had talked about how excited but nervous he was before teeing off [watch below]. <\/p>\n
A 74 in his first tournament round in 11 months is astonishing considering he has vision in just one eye and was facing considerable rust competing in professional tournaments.<\/p>\n
The Bexley, Sydney product began with an impressive 6-iron to 20 feet on his first approach shot of the day, having teed off from the 10th at the Darwin course. That shot steadied the nerves and Guan made two opening pars.<\/p>\n
Making golf more difficult was the fact the NT PGA field faced heavy fog in the morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was weird,\u201d Guan said of conditions. \u201cI took out my rangefinder on the first tee and I was trying to laser the tree at the back and then all of a sudden it was only eight metres. I\u2019m like, Oh, okay. That\u2019s a great start. It didn\u2019t help that after I hit the ball, I had no idea where it was either. It was a bit of a weird, rough start as well as some unfortunate breaks on the fairways on the early holes, but that\u2019s just golf. That\u2019s just the game. That\u2019s why I enjoy it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three bogeys in his next four holes dropped Guan down the leaderboard but he didn\u2019t let a bad break, finding a divot from an otherwise excellent tee shot at the 12th, frustrate him.<\/p>\n
Guan rallied on his back nine with a birdie at the par-4 fifth. \u201cIt was a great tee shot,\u201d Guan said. \u201cAnd then I left myself a pretty nice putt. I holed a couple putts before that, so I was feeling good with the putter, and then as soon as that went in, my dad gave me a really big fist pump and said, \u2018Here we go. This is the turning point.\u201d<\/p>\n
He stumbled with a double-bogey at the par-4 eighth before a closing birdie at the par-5 ninth brought his score back to three-over.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeeing off [this morning] was genuinely a great feeling,\u201d Guan said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t nervous at all from what I predicted the past couple of days, but there was a lot of mistakes out there and heaps of room for improvement.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll definitely take this as a good heads up for the next couple of days and let\u2019s see if I can shoot a couple under par. I\u2019m sort of getting back into the form that I felt prior to the accident. I hit a lot of shots out the middle of the face, mainly off the tee, which probably was the highlight of the day.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy tee shots were very good, but then I hit some very loose shots towards the end around the greens. That cost me a double and then a couple shots that I could have saved. I think I\u2019ve got a good feel of the course now and then with what I\u2019ve done out there today, I know what I need to work on maybe this afternoon or tomorrow morning just to hopefully get that sorted.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to it again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Picture: Monica Marchesani\/PGA of Australia] Australian tour pro Jeffrey Guan kicked off his inspiring tournament comeback from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":104687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-104686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}