Playoffs Start, but Someone Forgot to Tell the Course

JERSEY CITY — The tees were moved up, the scores went down and the PGA Tour playoffs for the FedEx Cup had a soft opening at the Barclays at the Liberty National golf club on Thursday. Overnight rains took just enough fire out of the small, undulating greens to allow opportunistic golfers to take dead aim, and some lower-ranked golfers happily obliged.

Leading the charge at six-under-par 65 were Sergio García, Steve Marino and Paul Goydos, none of whom were among the top 25 in the point standings going into the week. Trailing by one stroke at 66 were Charley Hoffman, Webb Simpson, Fredrik Jacobson of Sweden and Heath Slocum, a foursome in which only Hoffman, at No. 28, was ranked above 85th.
And at 67, two strokes off the lead, were 66th-ranked Padraig Harrington of Ireland; Ian Poulter of England, who was 34th; and David Toms, at 12th the highest-ranked player among the top 10 Thursday.
“Yeah, they were nice to us today,” said Marino, at No. 30 the highest ranked of the three leaders. “They could make this place play extremely difficult. And, you know, if we get some winds from that tropical storm that supposedly are going to come this weekend, you are going to see some carnage out there, that’s for sure.”
The reference was to Tropical Storm Danny, which is projected to brush Cape Cod late Saturday or early Sunday. As for golf carnage, there was very little Thursday. The course, which has the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty as a backdrop, played to a stroke average of 71.9, with 56 players in the field of 124 at par or better.
Among the top five players on the points list, No. 2-ranked Steve Stricker shot the lowest score of 69 and is in a tie for 21st. No. 1-ranked Tiger Woods shot a one-under-par 70, as did No. 3 Zach Johnson. Kenny Perry, No. 4, shot 71 and No. 5 Lucas Glover shot four-over 75.
The No. 6-ranked player, Phil Mickelson, who had five birdies and four bogeys in his round of 70, was fairly pleased with his day.
“I’ll tell you why I think this is a great course to hold this event is because the hard holes are ridiculously hard and the easy holes are pretty easy,” Mickelson said. “Because of that we are going to see lots of birdies and bogeys, which is exactly what happened in my round.
“I think it’s going to be exciting. That’s why we have rounds of 66 and 76, 78. It’s the way the course is set up. I think that’s going to make for exciting finishes on the weekend.”
Among the three players tied for the lead, the 89th-ranked García has the most ground to make up. His confident, aggressive play indicated he would just as soon pick up where he left off at the Wyndham Championship last week, where he finished fourth and moved up 26 spots to his current ranking.
Playing the back nine first, García went out in 31 and reached seven under par with three more birdies on the front nine, nearly holing his approach shots at No. 7 and No. 8 and birdieing each before a bogey at the last hole slowed him down. He did not see either of the shots land because the hole locations were obscured behind bunkers.
“You always try to make it,” García said, smiling. “Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn’t go as close as you want it. But that is the main goal, put it in the hole with the least amount of shots.”
With one round down and 15 remaining before a FedEx Cup champion is crowned at the end of next month in Atlanta, the picture will be murky for a little while. But what did come into focus on a partly cloudy day was that the golfers with the most to gain were setting a fast early pace on a course that can play much harder than it did Thursday.
Goydos, who has battled through a difficult year on the golf course and at home, appears to be in a good frame of mind as he tries to move deep into the playoffs. After making his first birdie of the day at the par-five 13th, he reeled off five birdies in six holes. He birdied the 16th and 17th, and, after a par at No. 18, he birdied No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3.
Combining his deadpan delivery with a little self-deprecation, Goydos strolled from the media center and said over his shoulder: “I’ll tell you how surprised they are about me leading. I’m being drug tested.”
In-competition testing for performance-enhancing drugs is done randomly on the PGA Tour, and Goydos’s testing number just happened to come up on the same day he hung a low number up on the scoreboard. It was surprising, but not as surprising as what is likely to happen when the playoffs really start to heat up.