CROMWELL, Conn — Wyndham Clark won last week’s U.S. Open with a score of 10 under, but this week at the Travelers Championship, four players reached that mark before 11:45 on Friday morning, and most players in the field are not showing any signs of slowing down.
TPC River Highlands, at 6,852 yards in length, is short by Tour standards and yielded 603 birdies in the opening round. It was only the fourth time this season that a course on the PGA Tour has yielded over 600 birdies in a single round, but it is the fifth time since 2008 that it has been done here.
Rory McIlroy added five birdies to Thursday’s total, plus a hole-in-one on the par-3 eighth, en route to shooting a pedestrian 68, six shots higher than his opening-round 62 here last season. On Friday, starting his day on the back-nine, McIlroy immediately surged up the leaderboard by making birdies on 11, 14, 15, 17 and 18 to make the turn in 30. As the crowd around McIlroy, Tom Kim and Viktor Hovland grew, fans buzzed about potentially seeing a 59. He reached 7 under with six holes to play after he birdied the second and third holes.
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But their hopes, and McIlroy’s, were dashed when he hit into the pond in front of the 177-yard eighth hole, but a second-round 64 has moved McIlroy into the mix as players like Denny McCarthy (60-65), Eric Cole (64-65), Zach Blair (65-65) and Adam Scott (62-68) continue the birdie barrage.
“Everything was just a little bit better today. I played more solid, gave myself more opportunities, you know, eradicated most of the mistakes I made yesterday,” McIlroy said.
The biggest difference for McIlroy came on the greens. A 19-footer for birdie on 11 (his second hole), made it. A 13-footer on the 14th, got it. Fourteen-foot bird putts on 17 and two, drained ’em. McIlroy also made a 25-foot birdie putt on the third hole and finished the day making 124 feet of putts.
“I think when you can get out in the morning here, the greens are so much better,” McIlroy said. “They haven’t started to seed yet and they’re not quite as bumpy as the afternoon. [Yesterday] there were a lot of 20-footers in the afternoon that you’re just trying to finish by the hole because you don’t want to have the 3- and 4-footers on way back. You can be a little more aggressive with your putts [in the morning], and that paid off for me this morning and I holed quite a few.”
This is Rory’s fourth tournament in a row, but he flew home to Florida on Monday and did not come to Connecticut until Wednesday afternoon. After grinding at the U.S. Open, McIlroy needed rest. Once he arrived at TPC River Highlands, he tested some new TaylorMade wedges, worked with Brad Faxon briefly on the practice green, signed autographs for kids and then played his pro-am, which he’d had rescheduled to 4:30 Wednesday afternoon.
“You know, I think two days at home in between LA and here was nice to not really do anything,” he said Friday. “Actually, for my fourth week in a row, I feel okay, which is a pleasant surprise.”
With rain in the forecast over the weekend, scores are likely to get even lower, and McIlroy was seven shots behind McCarthy’s lead after the morning wave. He will need more rounds in the low 60s if he is going to win here for the first time. But he, and everyone else, knows they’ll be out there.