GREENSBORO, N.C. — Brandt Snedeker predicted low scores at the Wyndham Championship – but not this low.
Snedeker shot an 11-under 59 on Thursday, falling one shot shy of matching the PGA Tour record.
He made a 20-foot putt on his final hole to become the 10th player in tour history to break 60. Jim Furyk set the record with a 58 in the final round of the Travelers Championship in 2016.
“I better be smiling,” Snedeker said. “I don’t do this every day.”
This is the third consecutive year the PGA Tour has had a sub-60 round. Snedeker is the first to shoot 59 since Adam Hadwin in the third round of the 2017 Careerbuilder Challenge.
It gave him a four-stroke lead after one round. Ryan Moore and John Oda shot 63s, and Martin Flores, D.A. Points, Brett Stegmaier, David Hearn, Abraham Ancer, Ollie Schniederjans and Jonathan Byrd had 64s.
Snedeker – who said a day earlier that the tournament would turn into a “birdie-fest” – began the round with a bogey at No. 10 and took off from there. He played the front nine in 27, including an eagle 2 on the par-4 sixth hole when he holed out from 176 yards.
After that shot, Snedeker said a 59 felt like a real possibility. He remembered playing in a non-tour event in China in which he was one putt from that score, but those thoughts “got in the way.”
“To know what you’re trying to do and step up and have a 20-footer (on the final hole) and know what it means, I was very aware of what was going on, and to knock that putt in was really special,” Snedeker said.
LPGA: Lizette Salas matched the course record with a 10-under 62 in the Indy Women in Tech Championship at Indianapolis, scoring birdies on the final three holes for a two-stroke lead over fast-starting Angel Yin and Nasa Hataoka of Japan.
Yin birdied eight of the first nine holes in her morning round for a front-nine 8-under 28 – one short of the LPGA Tour’s nine-hole record. It matched the third-lowest nine-hole score in relation to par.
Salas eagled the par-5 second in the afternoon and added three straight birdies on Nos. 4-6. She birdied Nos. 12 and 14 before reeling off three more to close, waiting out a late 77-minute suspension for an approaching storm.
Salas matched the course record set by Mike McCullough in the PGA Tour Champions’ 1999 Comfort Classic.
EUROPEAN: Clement Sordet of France opened with four straight birdies to shoot an 8-under 62 and take the first-round lead of the Nordea Masters at Gothenburg, Sweden.
“I wasn’t really focusing on the score. I was just enjoying it,” said Sordet.
The Frenchman, who shot his lowest European Tour round, has a two-stroke lead over Scott Jamieson of Scotland and Lee Slattery of England.
Hunter Stewart is the highest-placed American after a 5-under 65 left him on a four-way tie for fourth place with Christofer Blomstrand, Tapio Pulkkanen and Richard Green.
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