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PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland – Tiger Woods already has one major in his pocket this PGA TOUR season. Will he make it two this week at The Open Championship? We’ll have hole-by-hole updates from Tiger’s first round at Royal Portrush, as he tees off at 10:10 a.m. ET Thursday with American Patrick Reed and Englishman Matthew Wallace. Check this file often as Tiger plays his first competitive round in Northern Ireland. RELATED: Leaderboard | Tee times | Woods ‘not quite as sharp’ as he wants entering The Open

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ATLANTA — Scottie Scheffler might have had a roller coaster of an opening round Thursday at the TOUR Championship if only he had been paying attention to the scoreboards. Scheffler started with a two-shot lead as the No. 1 seed in the FedExCup. He led by as many as six shots on the front nine. Then his lead was down to two. And when he finished with three straight birdies for a 5-under 65, he was five strokes ahead of Xander Schauffele. “I didn’t know any of that,” he said. “I was just trying to go out and shoot a good number.” Rory McIlroy’s day at East Lake was far more wild. And he knew it. A two-time FedExCup champion, McIlroy started six shots behind. He teed off in a downpour and hooked his tee shot over the fence and out-of-bounds. He reloaded and found a bunker. He missed a 6-foot putt and took triple bogey, and just like that was nine shots behind. And then he went rough-to-rough to make bogey on the next hole. McIlroy had only one par on the front nine and remarkably salvaged a 67. “Not the best way to start,” McIlroy said. “The golf course is really gettable, so I knew there was a lot of holes out there that you could birdie. I knew my game was good. It was just one of those things. Not the ideal way to start, but proud of how I bounced back from that.” Equally impressive was Open Championship winner Cameron Smith, playing for the first time since the opening FedExCup Playoff event because of a hip injury that gets aggravated in soft conditions. East Lake wasn’t quite a real lake, but overnight rain and the downpour made for a good walk spoiled. And so began the final leg in the chase for the FedExCup and the $18 million prize. Scheffler has had the best year with his Masters victory among three wins against strong fields. He would love nothing more than to finish it off, and he played that way. His 3-iron from 230 yards up the hill to 15 feet led to eagle on the sixth hole. He dropped only one shot, going from bunker over the green at the par-3 ninth and having to make an understated 10-foot putt to escape with bogey. And then he had a big finish, capped off by going from the left rough over the water to 30 feet for a two-putt birdie to reach 15-under par (which accounts for his 10-under start). U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick finished with an eagle for a bogey-free 64 and was six shots behind — he matched the best round of the soggy day and gained only one shot on Scheffler — while Joaquin Niemann (64) and defending FedExCup champion Patrick Cantlay (70) were another shot behind. Schauffele is dangerous as ever, and his record at East Lake is astounding for someone who has never left Atlanta in possession of a trophy. This was his 21st round in the TOUR Championship, and his 19th round under par. The other two were even-par 70s. He had the low 72-hole score in 2020 but started too far behind to catch Dustin Johnson. “It’s a weird event,” Schauffele said. “We do this once a year, and it’s one of the bigger events for us to do it. Because of those things, you just have to try your best to stay in the present and not get ahead of it. Tuck your head and play your best golf.” Weirder still was an injury that Scheffler mentioned from the weekend at The Open, where he went into Sunday in the mix and shot 74. He had never disclosed it and wasn’t entirely comfortable getting into the details except to say he was in pain. “I had what’s called a pilonidal infection. It’s an infection at the top of your butt crack,” he said, trying not to crack a smile. “You can look it up. It was really hard for me to bend down. It was really hard for me to make a swing on Sunday. Walking was actually extremely difficult. “Just one of those things that happened.” All part of what already has been a remarkable year, and now is 54 holes away from becoming even more memorable.

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Joel Dahmen took 68 strokes to complete his first round at the Wyndham Championship. Three of them came from the same spot. It resulted in a triple-bogey on the par-4 14th, Dahmen’s fifth hole of the day. He bounced back with five birdies and no bogeys the remainder of the way, however. Entering this week, there had been just 11 rounds this season in which a player shot 68 or lower with a triple-bogey or worse (Patton Kizzire and Chris Kirk each had two apiece). So, what happened on 14? His caddie, Geno Bonnalie, explained the situation on Twitter, writing, “Ball was sitting … perfectly on top of a tuft of Bermuda. Took a practice swing a foot from the ball, and the ball fell to the bottom. Had to replace it (1 stroke [penalty]). Then went right underneath it the 2nd time and it didn’t move. 3 strokes from the same spot. Golf is hard.” In another tweet, Bonnalie said they were “not certain he caused it to move, but not certain he didn’t either.” Dahmen penalized himself because he could not be certain that his actions did not cause the ball to move. He was penalized one stroke under Rule 9.4, “Ball Lifted or Moved by Player,” which states that a player is penalized one stroke and must replace his ball if he causes it to move. Dahmen, who earned his first PGA TOUR victory at this year’s Corales Puntacana Resort & Club Championship, is 76th in the FedExCup standings. Statistically speaking, Dahmen lost -1.4 strokes around the green on that one hole. This is how ShotLink described the triple-bogey: Shot 1: 316 yards to right fairway, 195 yards to hole Shot 2: 185 yards to right rough, 60 ft. 3 in. to hole Shot 3: Penalty Shot 4: 19 in. to right rough, 58 ft. 10 in. to hole Shot 5: 89 ft. 1 in. to green, 30 ft. 2 in. to hole Shot 6: putt 28 ft. 5 in., 23 in. to hole Shot 7: in the hole

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