PEBBLE BEACH – Two fans in puffy vests, with “transfusion” cocktails in hand, walked upstream among the 10th hole’s gallery as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am opened Thursday.
“Ah, Scheffler. That’s why there is a crowd,” one of the middle-aged men said to the other.
Scottie Scheffler, the world’s No. 1-rated golfer since May 2023, indeed should be the No. 1 attraction this week, aside from the heavenly landscape.
He was the odds-on favorite, until his even-par debut sank him into a tie for 64th in the 80-man field, where almost all others seized on idyllic sunny weather, with rain forecast for Sunday’s final round.
Leader Ryo Hisatsune went 10-under in his first-ever round at Pebble, and of the 10 golfers who finished 7-under, six played Pebble Beach while the others conquered Spyglass Hill.
Only two other golfers, each at 2-over, scored higher at Pebble than Scheffler.
“I feel like typically I’m good at scoring and today I felt like I didn’t score at all,” Schefter said after making birdie on the 18th. “Anything that kind of went wrong seemed to be going that direction, and I just felt like I scored poorly.
“I actually feel like I’m playing pretty well. Just one of those days.”
The day came and went without a sighting of Taylor Swift, whose fiancé, Travis Kelce, worked the pro-am circuit at Spyglass Hill, along with 49ers legends Steve Young and Alex Smith – the few recognizable faces in what had been an annual celebrity carnival but now serves as the PGA Tour’s first Signature Event this season.
Also at Spyglass was defending champion Rory McIlroy, who holed out from the 14th hole’s front bunker to go 4-under through five, and that’s where his final score rested.
Scores were so low that a third of the field — 27 golfers — emerged 5-under or lower.
Scheffler’s line: three birdies, three bogeys, and one putter flip in disgust after missing a birdie and settling for a tap-in par on 15th. He also had a “huge mud ball” that detoured his second shot on the second hole.
“When you’re playing later in the day it can be tough to hole putts on these greens,” said Scheffler, who played into the wind most of the back-nine before finishing at 3:25 p.m. “I need to take advantage of holes early in the round and I wasn’t able to do that, knowing that the wind was going to pick up and then we were going to turn into it on the back nine.”
Hisatsune, the first-round leader, birdied 5-of-7 out the gate. Even better were the six consecutive birdies to open by Chris Gotterup, Sunday’s WM Phoenix Open in a playoff against Hideki Matsuyama, who went 5-under as Scheffler’s playing partner Thursday.
One magnificent shot among Scheffler’s even-par 72 verified his world No. 1 stature: After a southerly breeze carried his approach past the green and back bunker, his ball stopped a yard shy of the lateral-hazard line and 2 yards from a pit of doom, where a creek separates Pebble’s southern-most hole from a $40 million home once owned by late actor Gene Hackman.
Schefter’s delicate flop shop landed on the 10th green’s fringe and he saved par with a 7-foot putt.
“If that ball lands on the green with how soft the greens are, probably a 15-footer for birdie,” Schefter said of his wind-derailed, 154-yard approach. “It lands about a foot into the fringe and not only doesn’t go in the bunker, it hops over that bunker. Fortunately, in spite of the hazard, I was able to make par. Little stuff like that is what I was going up against today.”
A week earlier, Scheffler opened the WM Phoenix Open with a 2-over 71. He rallied to threaten the leaders and finished tied for third.
Can he repeat those dramatics here?
“It’s a little bit easier to do around that golf course versus this one the way the scores are shaping up to be,” Scheffler said. “But around these places you never know what the weather’s going to turn out to be like. I’ll need a little bit of help up there from the weather. If we get a few more days like this, it’s going to be pretty tough for me to be able to catch up. You know, overall go out there tomorrow on Spyglass and see what I can do.”
Three weeks ago, he won The American Express tournament in La Quinta, his 20th PGA Tour win in a career that’s seen him finish atop the world rankings the past three years.
Scheffler has finished top 10 in 17 straight PGA Tour events. Here, he tied for sixth in 2024 and tied for ninth last year. This is a no-cut tournament for the pros, so Scheffler certainly can try climbing the leaderboard.
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