After starting with four pars, Lowry – who is without an individual victory since September 2022 – carded back-to-back birdies at the fifth and sixth holes.<\/p>\n
The former Open champion vaulted into a share of the lead with a run of five straight birdies from the par-four 11th before picking up a shot at the last to edge ahead of Nakajima. <\/p>\n
“It’s not that hard when you hit it in play out there, but you start missing fairways it becomes quite tricky, so I’m happy with that,” said Lowry. <\/p>\n
He added: “You need to shape it around the course, hit it in position off the tee and it’s all about your iron play. That’s one of my strengths and I took advantage of that today and managed to roll a few putts in on the back nine, which was nice.”<\/p>\n
Lowry added there was a “little bit” of Ryder Cup chat with playing partners Fleetwood and Donald. <\/p>\n
“We could hear the horns from the road, it was not as off-putting as the Bethpage [Black] crowd,” he said with a smile, referring to the hostile New York fans at last month’s Ryder Cup. <\/p>\n
Fleetwood mixed four birdies, an eagle and two bogeys to sit four shots back. <\/p>\n
Donald, who is playing his first tournament since his second Ryder Cup success as captain, carded five birdies and a bogey to match fellow Englishman Fleetwood and 2023 Open champion Brian Harman. <\/p>\n
Playing with McIlroy, US Ryder Cup player Ben Griffin opened with a 68 while McIlroy’s European team-mate Viktor Hovland signed for a 71. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After starting with four pars, Lowry – who is without an individual victory since September 2022 – carded…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-217546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}