They made the most of those chances Thursday.
Lewis and English each shot 4-under 66 at PGA National, sharing the lead after the opening round.
“I didn't hit it my best, but I knew it was going to be one of those rounds you're going to have to grind it out,” said English, a two-time winner on the PGA Tour in 2013, but winless since. “It's windy out there, you're going to have a lot of cross-winds, and it played really tough. My short game was on point, and I made some really good putts.”
Sometimes, no putt was required: English holed out from about 25 yards on the par-4 11th, catching a great lie after a drop because his second shot came to rest on a sprinkler head.
“That was as good as I can do,” English said.
It was a rare easy-looking shot at PGA National. The average score was 2 over, on a day where wind gusts often topped 20 mph.
“It’s just live and survive, basically,” said
Lewis made his splashy entrance into golf headlines in 2011, when the then-amateur Englishman was a surprise co-leader after the opening round of the
Not much has gone right since.
“I struggled for a while, and then I think really things got so low that you couldn’t get any lower,” Lewis said. “So it was like, ‘Well, only good things can happen now.’”
Good things happened in bunches Thursday, when Lewis had a bogey-free round.
“It can just happen,” Lewis said, a few minutes before he sat in relative anonymity inside the resort’s hotel lobby and had lunch while fans walked by mostly oblivious to the fact that they were passing a co-leader. “Just one shot, one putt at the right time or good break and then all of a sudden it can snowball. I need to take a lot of belief from today.”
Plenty of others weren’t as chipper as Lewis and English were when their days at PGA National was over.
Third-ranked
“Didn't feel like I played that bad," Koepka said.
Defending champion
“It’s a fine line,” Fowler said. “Just got it going in the wrong direction.”
That happens at PGA National. Only 23 of the 144 players broke par.
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