Malnati shot a career-best nine-under 61 to tie a tournament record in the first round of the final Classic, giving him a two-shot lead.<\/p>\n
When Malnati stood on the first tee, his caddie suggested leaving the driver in his bag to play it safe and set up a solid start.<\/p>\n
Malnati, though, went against the advice and used his driver to put a tee shot in the middle of the fairway, setting up his first of seven birdies on the front nine.<\/p>\n
“Even in the beginning, before I knew it was going to be a special day, I didn’t feel the same level of anxiety,” he said.<\/p>\n
With thoughts of a sub-60 round crossing his mind, he made a 55-foot putt for birdie at No.11 and was nine-under through 13 holes before missing some putts down the stretch in a bogey-free round.<\/p>\n
Detroit Golf Club has undergone a major renovation, including converting a couple of par-5 holes into par-4s and adding a lot of bunkers, in an attempt to restore Donald Ross’ vision for it more than a century ago, while making it more challenging.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I took advantage of a super-easy course,” said the 39-year-old Malnati, who has won on the PGA Tour in 2024 and 2015. “I played great.”<\/p>\n
He wasn’t alone. Rickie Fowler and Ryan Gerard shot 63s, putting them two shots back and one stroke ahead of Patrick Cantlay and Patrick Fishburn.<\/p>\n
Michael Brennan surged up the leaderboard after starting two-over through four holes with eight straight birdies – one shy of the PGA Tour record. He finished with a 65, putting him four strokes back with a pack of players that includes Keegan Bradley.<\/p>\n
Malnati will have to hold off a field that is stronger than usual in Detroit.<\/p>\n
Some of the top players in the field, though, did not get off to a good start. Cameron Young, the No.3 player in the world, shot a one-under 69 and US Open champion Wyndham Clark was one-over.<\/p>\n
Cam Davis (68) is the leading Australian at two-under, while Karl Vilips is a stroke behind and one ahead of Ryan Ruffels.<\/p>\n
The Classic and next week’s Wyndham Championship are the last two tournaments left before the top 70 advance to the FedEx Cup post-season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Malnati shot a career-best nine-under 61 to tie a tournament record in the first round of the final…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-834733","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\/834733","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=834733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}