P\u00e1draig Harrington shot a four-under round of 68, leaving him in a four-way tie for the lead after the opening round of the PGA Tour Champions’ SAS Championship.<\/p>\n
Harrington made five birdies in his round, dropping only the one shot, that on the 15th, to join Robert Karlsson, Chad Campbell and Stewart Cink at the head of affairs.<\/p>\n
Darren Clarke had a horrible start to his round, two doubles and two bogeys part of the story that ended with him carding a 78.<\/p>\n
The SAS Championship is the final event before the Champions’ three-event play-off to determine the winner of the Charles Schwab Cup. The top 72 players in the Charles Schwab Cup points standings after this weekend will advance to the first playo-ff event, the Dominion Energy Charity Classic next weekend.<\/p>\n
Cink and Harrington combined to win The Open Championship in three consecutive years, with Harrington winning it 2007 and ’08 before Cink won it in 2009 in a famed playoff with then-59-year-old Tom Watson.<\/p>\n
Echoing the sentiments of most of the field, Harrington pointed out the biggest challenge on the course: the greens.<\/p>\n
“I think they’re as fast as you could possibly get them,” said the Dubliner, seeking his 12th career Champions win.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, no, they’re the fastest greens, I’d say as fast as I’ve ever putted on anywhere at any stage at any time.”<\/p>\n
He added, “The goal today was hit as many fairways and as many greens as you could. Obviously just eliminate the stress of those three or four-footers with the pace of the greens.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"P\u00e1draig Harrington shot a four-under round of 68, leaving him in a four-way tie for the lead after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-192722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}