KAPALUA, Hawaii — Hideki Matsuyama and Collin Morikawa placed on a stripe present Saturday at Kapalua, every of them posting an 11-under 62 at weak Kapalua that threatened to show The Sentry right into a two-man present within the PGA Tour opener.
Matsuyama had a shot at tying the course document with an extended eagle try from simply in need of the 18th inexperienced. He took two putts for birdie to keep up the one-shot lead he had over Morikawa at the beginning of the day.
Morikawa holed a 4-foot birdie putt on the par-5 closing gap for his 62. He briefly took the lead on the entrance 9 by beginning 5 below in 5 holes, together with a 25-foot eagle putt on the fifth gap throughout a show of elegant shotmaking.
Matsuyama caught him on the subsequent gap and so they had been tight the remainder of the way in which.
The 11 birdies for Matsuyama are essentially the most he has made in a spherical on the PGA Tour. He was at 27-under 192, a 54-hole document on the Plantation course at Kapalua.
It was paying homage to 2022, when Cameron Smith set the event document — and PGA Tour document to par — at 34-under 258. The situations had been abnormally calm that yr, and this yr wasn’t a lot totally different.
There was barely any wind on the western fringe of Maui, and the Plantation course was constructed for fierce wind out of any path. This turned goal observe for the world’s greatest participant, significantly on a course with the widest fairways on the PGA Tour.
Three years in the past, Smith and Jon Rahm had been tied for the lead 5 pictures away from everybody else. Matsuyama was one forward of Morikawa. Thomas Detry was subsequent at 22-under 197, one forward of Sungjae Im, who additionally had a 62.
The typical rating was 67.49, one other document since this event moved to Kapalua in 1999.
Detry had a 65 and wound up dropping floor.
“I shot 8 below right now, however didn’t actually really feel like I shot 8 below,” he mentioned. “Different programs once you shoot 8 below you actually fell like, ‘Oh, yeah, I performed unreal golf right here.’ I simply felt like I performed some actually regular golf.”
Matsuyama and Morikawa saved piling up birdies and pulling away. What separated them was the reachable par-4 14th, the place Matsuyama chipped to three ft for birdie and Morikawa drove right into a bunker, blasted out to 10 ft and missed the birdie putt.
On the sixteenth, Morikawa hit wedge that settled 20 inches from the cup. Matsuyama adopted with a wedge that landed towards the again of the inexperienced with simply sufficient spin to experience the grain and slope to eight inches away.
It was like that every one day, and there’s yet one more spherical to go.
