NAPA, Calif. — After taking a much-needed seven-week break from the PGA Tour to hit the reset button, Lucas Herbert showed little rust on Thursday.
The 27-year-old Australian reeled off six straight birdies on the back nine at Silverado’s North Course to post 9-under 63, matching his career low and grabbing a two-stroke lead over S.H. Kim after the first round of the Fortinet Championship.
“Found a little groove there,” said Herbert, who just started practicing again less than two weeks ago. “It felt like anything I did poorly seemed to work out nicely for me and the good shots got rewarded as well.”
Herbert, who won twice in 2021, including his third start as a member on the PGA Tour, was mired in a slump last season that left him ranked 152nd in the FedEx Cup standings. With only the top 70 advancing to the Playoffs in August, Herbert shut his season down after missing the cut at the British Open in July.
“Golf’s been getting me down pretty hard this year. It was just a tough stretch there where I had a lot going on both in my life and on the golf course as well,” he explained. “I didn’t really want to think about golf or talk about golf for about a good month there, just needed to get away from the game and refresh everything. Yeah, it sucked, I’d love to be here or up on the FedEx Cup standings as we speak, but hopefully taking that good break, refreshing, have a little reset gives me a better chance to play well in the fall season and get some better results and get into the bigger events again next year.”
Herbert said he spent time in Maine, including meeting members of his girlfriend’s family for the first time, and enjoyed playing guitar and working on the home he bought in Orlando in March.
“I went and spent some time around people where I wasn’t the main focus of everyone’s life for the day. I was able to go and be a part of other people’s lives, which is something we don’t get to do as golfers,” he said. “I feel like coming here this week I was ready to play again. I think for a while there it felt like if my flight got canceled to a tournament and there was no other way to get there, I would have been happy to go home, like, oh, good a week off. I feel like if that happened this week, I would have been upset, I was ready to go. That sort of tells me I was back in a good frame of mind to be able to come out here and just deal with adversity when it comes on the golf course.”
Here are four more things to know about the first round of the Fortinet Championship.