Canadian Conners takes the lead on the PGA Tour, two strokes clear | Sports | USA Edition

The Canadian Corey Conners emerged this Thursday as the great surprise figure of the first round of the PGA Tour Championship by registering 77 strokes (-5) that left him at the top of the classification with two of advantage over a group of six golfers who they had 79 (-3).

Conners showed solidity with his long shots off the tee and on the green to make six birdies, which he distributed in both halves of the course and bogey on par four of the ninth hole when he missed to hole the ball.

But Conners, amid the wind and chaos on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, gave a whole semblance of simplicity in the way that he completed the tour of the Ocean Course with birdie on every pair 5.Conners also made a pair of long putts for birdie.

With a strong wind in his face during his last five holes, the 29-year-old Canadian played the difficult final stretch at 2 under par, one of those birdies being a putt of just over 16 meters from just before the green.

He led by two shots over half a dozen players. That group included Americans Brooks Koepka, who started his day with a ghost double and didn’t get into trouble the rest of the way; and Australian Cameron Davis, who overcame a triple bogey on the sixth hole.

Americans Keegan Bradley, Aaron Wise and Sam Horsfield along with young Swede Viktor Hovland also finished with 69 shots apiece.

The seven players over 70 were the fewest for the first round of the PGA Championship since there were five at Hazeltine in 2002.

Among them were not the Chilean Joaquín Niemann, who was the best Latin American golfer, nor the Spanish Jon Rahm, third in the world, who is looking for his first major as a professional, but both did not end up a victim of the harshness of the course and with records of 71 ( -1) and 72 (even) were positioned to overcome the cut when tomorrow, Friday, the second round will be played.

Niemann, with four birdies and three bogeys, finished in sixteenth place, which he shared with 14 other players, while Rahm, who had two birdies and two bogeys, occupied the thirty-first place in the ranking along with nine other golfers.

The Mexican Carlos Ortiz with a signed card of 73 strokes (+1) was the best Latin American player with the highest ranking, in position 41, after Niemann, and with options to overcome the cut like his compatriot Abraham Ancer (74, +2 ), which finished in twenty-second place.

More complicated will be the Colombian Sebastián Muñoz, the Argentine Emiliano Grillo and the Spanish Sergio García who finished with a record of 77 strokes (+5).

Neither were some of the favorites to the title like the Americans Justin Thomas, second in the world ranking who finished with 75 strokes (+3) and the number one, his compatriot Dustin Johnson was worse when delivering signed card of 76 (+4) .

The first round also saw the withdrawal of American Sam Burns with a back injury.

The 24-year-old came as one of the best golfers of the moment after winning the Valspar Championship three weeks ago, then finished second at the AT&T Byron Nelson last before the second major of the year.

Burns played his first nine holes at 5 over par that included a triple bogey and a double bogey before withdrawing from the tournament.

While his compatriot John Catlin received a rare penalty for slow play that cost him a stroke and have a final record of 75 (+3) on the Ocean Course.

Catlin, an American who plays on the European Tour and is making his major championship debut, received a pace-of-play warning for the first time on the 16th hole (the seventh) of the match for him, where it took 74 seconds for his second. threw.

As expected, at the Kiawh Island Ocean Course, which broke the mark of being the longest course, 7.2 kilometers long, to have hosted one of the four main professional tournaments of the season, it imposed its harsh conditions on the that the players were always subdued and that it was very difficult for them to achieve a minimum of control, with the exception of Conners and that is why he finished as a deserved leader.