The first round of the 2026 Players Championship is just about complete, with five players currently sharing the lead at 5 under.<\/p>\n
Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are not among that group as they both struggled a bit on Thursday. Scheffler finished his first round with an even-par 72 and had some issues off the tee throughout his round. McIlroy, meanwhile, was able to play after dealing with a back injury<\/a> but he finished with a 2-over 74.<\/p>\n Maverick McNealy, Lee Hodges, Sepp Straka, Sahith Theegala, and Austin Smotherman all have a share of the lead. Smotherman, however, will have a 14-foot birdie putt on the par-5 ninth hole (his 18th hole) on Friday morning that would give him the lead as he was unable to finish his round due to darkness.<\/p>\n Catch up on all of the first round action with our live blog from the day. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first round of the 2026 Players Championship is just about complete, with five players currently sharing the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-472531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472531","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=472531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}