Rory McIlroy salvaged his opening round with a superb finish as Sepp Straka defied his own “very low expectations” to share the Scottish Open lead. <\/p>\n
Austria’s Straka, chasing his third PGA Tour win of the year, was joined on six under by American Jake Knapp, Frenchman Victor Perez and Nico Echavarria of Colombia at the Renaissance Club.<\/p>\n
Home favourite Bob MacIntyre began his title defence with a two-under 68 to sit alongside McIlroy, one adrift of world number one Scottie Scheffler and Ludvig Aberg.<\/p>\n
Scotland’s Calum Hill, who posted a blemish-free 65, and Englishman Marco Penge are one shot off the top.<\/p>\n
Straka belied his poor Scottish Open record – missed cuts on both previous visits – as a razor-sharp short game helped him shine in sun-baked East Lothian.<\/p>\n
Starting on the par-five 10th, he got the ball rolling with back-to-back birdies and was four under at the turn.<\/p>\n
Three birdies in a row followed from the third to give the European Ryder Cup player the outright lead before he immediately wobbled with successive bogeys.<\/p>\n
The response was magnificent, though, as he chipped in from left of the eighth green to complete a fine day’s work.<\/p>\n
“The game’s been in really good shape coming into here,” Straka said. “The low expectations come from just not having performed at this course.<\/p>\n
“My short game was really nice. I chipped it really well, made some putts and I hit the ball okay. Driver was a little bit squirrely, but short game saved me today.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rory McIlroy salvaged his opening round with a superb finish as Sepp Straka defied his own “very low…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}