{"id":671635,"date":"2026-05-15T02:01:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T02:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671635\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T02:01:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T02:01:11","slug":"scottie-scheffler-shares-seven-way-lead-on-congested-us-pga-leaderboard-us-pga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/671635\/","title":{"rendered":"Scottie Scheffler shares seven-way lead on congested US PGA leaderboard | US PGA"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was gridlock on the opening day of the US PGA<\/a>, where the leaderboard was backed up like Philly traffic. By the time it was all over, seven men were tied in the lead on three-under par, and another 42 were within three shots of them. Altogether a third of the field was within easy reach of the lead. It was record for a major championship, and they have been playing them since 1860. There are 16 major winners spread among them, including, ominously for everyone else, that man Scottie Scheffler. All the talk before the tournament was that it would be a turkey shoot, but it turned out to be one long tailback. The only thing missing was the traffic police.<\/p>\n

Actually they had one of them, too, or something near enough. A rules official on the first tee gave the 27-year-old South African Garrick Higgo a two-shot penalty for arriving 30 seconds late from the practice green. He still shot a 69. The really odd thing was that in a field where even a man who dropped two shots because he missed his tee time managed to end the day in contention, a couple of the biggest names in the game wound up all but out of it.<\/p>\n

Rory McIlroy finished on four-over after scoring four straight bogeys on his last four holes for the first time in his major career. Asked to sum up his round in the moments after he had finished he offered a single-word verdict: \u201cShit.\u201d Aronimink can do that to you. The course, which last hosted a major back in 1962, is laid out around a natural basin. It is all canted fairways and cambered greens, and the players spent most of the day tilting over the ball like they were playing on the deck of a listing ship in a heavy swell.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started missing fairways,\u201d McIlroy said when he was asked to expand on his thoughts. \u201cFrom there, it\u2019s hard.\u201d It was only a couple of days ago that he was insisting that the course didn\u2019t require any particular strategy off the tee beyond \u201cbash the driver down there and figure it out\u201d. He was good enough to admit that he had got that one wrong, which he realised after his opening drive landed in such deep rough that he could only chop his next shot a hundred yards on along the fairway. \u201cThat lie,\u201d he said, \u201cwas as bad as I\u2019ve seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t the only one who suffered. Bryson DeChambeau finished six-over. He did say recently that his top priority was to grow his YouTube following. All he needs now is a grabby title for the highlights package of his first round. \u201cThis CHANGES Everything! An expert reveals five mistakes most players STILL make!\u201d maybe, or \u201cI SNEAKED into the PGA Championship\u2026 and THIS happened!\u201d perhaps. Lowlights included an iron shot that hit the grandstand at the 17th, another that landed on the porch steps of the bar by the second, a 30ft putt that rolled 60ft past the hole at the 11th.<\/p>\n

Bryson DeChambeau hits out of the rough on a tough day for some at Aronimink Golf Club. Photograph: Laurence Kesterson\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

DeChambeau, who recently explained that if the LIV tour falls through what he would really \u201clove to do\u201d is begin translating his videos into different languages, finished on six-over, and may well have the weekend to work out the Mandarin Chinese for \u201canother missed cut\u201d.<\/p>\n

All this wayward play made for a brisk day in the medical tent. There were as many ouches as there were ooohs from the gallery, as yet another shot flew long into some unsuspecting spectator. McIlroy was out playing with Jordan Spieth and Jon Rahm, who caught one volunteer marshal in the shoulder with a divot when he was trying to make an air-swing in frustration about the awful shot he had just hit on the seventh. It was that sort of a day. McIlroy, Rahm and Spieth have more major victories between the three of them than they managed birdies during their round.<\/p>\n

Unlike McIlroy, Rahm and Spieth did manage to scramble around, and both finished among a thicket of players on one-under. It was a day for grinding away. \u201cThe pace of play was incredibly slow,\u201d complained Nicolai H\u00f8gaard, and he wasn\u2019t wrong. By the end of the day they were finishing in five-and-a-half hours. H\u00f8gaard was another on one-under, along with Brooks Koepka, Jason Day, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas and Cam Smith, who just has sacked the coach he has had since he was a little kid after missing the cut in each of his past six major championships. Xander Schauffele and Patrick Reed were among the group one shot ahead of them, and then came Scheffler and the other six \u2013 Aldrich Potgieter, Stephan Jaeger, Min Woo Lee, Ryo Hisatsune, Martin Kaymer and Alex Smalley \u2013 tied for the lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was gridlock on the opening day of the US PGA, where the leaderboard was backed up like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-671635","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\/671635","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=671635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}