Scheffler, Hovland and Conners Share the Lead at P.G.A. Championship

PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Justin Rose, the golfer you bear in mind however perhaps haven’t thought all that a lot about currently in main tournaments, had hit two fairways all day. He had birdied as typically as he had bogeyed.

And when he walked off the course on Friday, his event rating at one beneath par, he was positioned to contend on the P.G.A. Championship this weekend. He had figured, he mentioned, that 4 beneath might win the event at an Oak Hill Country Club the place the fairways appear to be awfully onerous to search out.

“There are chances,” mentioned Rose, the 2013 U.S. Open winner who solely in February ended a four-year drought of PGA Tour victories. “If you do drive the ball in play, there’s a few fun pins. Those are the moments in your round you have to pick up three, four birdies and then ride some of the tougher holes and tough breaks that you’re going to get out there.”

So it went throughout the second spherical at Oak Hill, which had been hardly susceptible to compromise on Thursday and stayed fearsome on Friday. By dusk, solely 9 males within the 156-player subject had been beneath par; the 2008 P.G.A. Championship was the final with fewer than 10 gamers under par after two rounds.

Corey Conners, Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler shared the lead at 5 beneath, whereas Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Suh trailed by two strokes and had been tied for fourth.

The par-70 course has by no means yielded a significant champion who was not within the prime three after the opening two rounds.

“It’s nice to be back to have a chance, but at the same time, we’ve got a lot of golf left,” Hovland mentioned. “We’re only halfway, and a lot of things can happen.”

The reduce, the highest 70 golfers plus ties, claimed the rising stars Tom Kim and Sungjae Im and the reigning U.S. Open winner Matt Fitzpatrick. Jordan Spieth, who wants a P.G.A. Championship victory to finish the profession Grand Slam, and Justin Thomas, who gained final 12 months’s event, simply made the reduce at 5 over, together with Phil Mickelson and Zach Johnson, the captain of this 12 months’s American Ryder Cup staff.

Through his first two rounds in suburban Rochester, Rose was by no means in a lot hazard of becoming a member of them. But it has been an up-and-down decade since his Open victory at Merion. There had been two runner-up finishes at Augusta National Golf Club, however by no means one of many inexperienced jackets that Masters Tournament champions don. He completed the 2018 British Open at Carnoustie two strokes behind Francesco Molinari, who missed this week’s reduce. There had been a number of prime 10 showings at P.G.A. Championships, a third-place efficiency at a U.S. Open and the sustained aggravation of going winless for thus lengthy on tour.

A renewal of confidence got here at Pebble Beach, the location of that third-place Open end, in February, when he lastly discovered a victory.

“Just the fact of knowing I can do it again is important,” mentioned Rose, who’s in search of to change into the primary British participant to win a P.G.A. Championship in 104 years.

So far at Oak Hill, he has discovered his iron play pleasing and his placing encouraging, however his sport nonetheless in want of some tightening. A dose of hard-won realism most likely didn’t damage, both.

“When I did catch a bad lie in the rough, took my medicine and pitched out and tried to avoid the big number,” he mentioned. “I felt like making a bogey or two around here is no big deal.”

He was most likely proper, since even the leaderboard’s highest reaches had been speckled with inexperienced, bogey-signaling squares on Friday. Dustin Johnson, who shot a 67 within the opening spherical, raced downward on Friday, when he stumbled to a 74. Less than per week after a victory in an LIV Golf event in Oklahoma, Johnson had 4 bogeys and a double bogey, his frustrations eased solely by a pair of birdies.

Min Woo Lee, however, used a day of remarkable placing to make 5 birdies on Friday’s entrance 9 to succeed in even par. Brooks Koepka performed the primary half of Friday’s spherical to par however had 5 birdies on the again 9 to maneuver to 2 beneath, a four-stroke swing from Thursday. Patrick Cantlay, the highest-ranked participant on this planet (No. 4) with out a main event victory in his profession, gained three strokes to face at one over.

“If you hit great shots all day, you can play a good round, and if you just get a little off all day, you can play a round like I did yesterday where I shot four over par,” Cantlay mentioned on Friday. “It’s just the line is that small. You’d better be on the right side of it.”

Michael Block, the pinnacle professional at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club, southeast of Los Angeles, was simply above Cantlay on the leaderboard, at even par, a rating greater than adequate for him to make the P.G.A. Championship reduce for the primary time.

“People out there, they understand: They’ve hit that ball out into the bushes on the right side and they don’t know what’s happening, but the lucky thing about me is I figured it out pretty quick where I was going wrong,” Block, who’s showing in his fifth P.G.A. Championship, mentioned. “Club pros, I always heard, figure it out within a couple shots. Tour pros figure it out within one shot, and I was lucky enough to figure it out within one shot this time.”

Oak Hill has slim fairways — No. 18’s is as skinny as 20 yards — and surging winds made them even trickier to stay on Friday than they’d been on Thursday, when Rory McIlroy, the No. 3 participant within the Official World Golf Ranking, landed in solely two. On Friday, pictures that rocketed off the tee and appeared promising steadily tumbled right into a tough virtually inevitably described as penal.

“I had a couple back-to-back drives on 16 and 17 where I thought it was dead in the middle, landed in the perfect spot, and just the fairways are so firm, it just rolled right in the rough,” mentioned Sepp Straka, whose 71 on Friday introduced him even for the event. “There’s not much stopping the ball out there right now other than the rough, and when you get in the rough, it’s really tough to score.”

Weather situations are anticipated to worsen Saturday, when rain and wind might batter the course.

“I think that’s going to throw off the comfort level again,” Rose mentioned. “This is just going to be four days of kind of getting the most out of each day.”