Scheffler, Hovland and Conners share the PGA Championship lead

PITTSFORD, NY – Justin Rose, the golfer you remember but may not have thought much of lately at major tournaments, had hit two fairways all day. He had made as many birdies as he had bogeyed.

And when he left the court on Friday, his tournament score one under par, he was positioned to compete in the PGA Championship this weekend. He had thought, he said, that Four Under could win the tournament in an Oak Hill Country Club where the fairways seem very difficult to find.

“There are opportunities,” said Rose, the 2013 US Open winner who only ended a four-year drought of PGA Tour wins in February. “When you hit the ball into play there are some nice pins. Those are the times in your round when you need to get three, four birdies and then drive some of the harder holes and tough breaks that you’re going to get there.

So it went during the second round at Oak Hill, which had hardly any compromises on Thursday and remained terrifying on Friday. By nightfall, only nine men in the field of 156 players were under par; the 2008 PGA Championship was the last with less than 10 players under par after two rounds.

Corey Conners, Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler tied for the lead five under, while Bryson DeChambeau and Justin Suh trailed by two strokes and tied for fourth.

The par-70 course has never yielded a major champion who was not in the top three after the first two rounds.

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

The cut, the top 70 golfers plus ties, was claimed by rising stars Tom Kim and Sungjae Im and reigning US Open winner Matt Fitzpatrick. Jordan Spieth, who needs a PGA Championship win to complete the Grand Slam career, and Justin Thomas, who won last year’s tournament, just made the cut at five, along with Phil Mickelson and Zach Johnson, the captain of this year’s American Ryder Cup team.

During his first two rounds in suburban Rochester, Rose was never in much danger of joining them. But it’s been a decade of ups and downs since his Open win at Merion. There were two runners-up finishes at Augusta National Golf Club, but never one of the green jackets worn by Masters Tournament champions. He finished the 2018 British Open at Carnoustie two strokes behind Francesco Molinari, who missed this week’s cut. There were a few top 10 shows at PGA Championships, a third-place finish at a US Open, and the lingering annoyance of going winless on tour for so long.

A newfound confidence came to Pebble Beach, the site of that third-place Open finish, in February when he finally recorded a victory.

“Just knowing I can do it again is important,” said Rose, who is aiming to become the first British player to win a PGA Championship in 104 years.

So far at Oak Hill he has found his iron game pleasant and his putting encouraging, but his game still needs some fine-tuning. A dose of hard-won realism probably didn’t hurt either.

“When I caught a bad lie, I took my meds and threw them out and tried to avoid the large number,” he said. “I felt like there’s no problem getting a few bogeys here.”

He was probably right, as even the top echelons of the Friday leaderboard were littered with green, bogey-signaling squares. Dustin Johnson, who shot a 67 in the opening round, raced down Friday, when he stumbled to a 74. Less than a week after winning a LIV Golf Tournament in Oklahoma, Johnson had four bogeys and a double bogey, his frustrations only mitigated by a few birdies.

Min Woo Lee, on the other hand, used a day of exceptional putting to make five birdies on Friday’s top nine to reach even par. Brooks Koepka played the first half of Friday’s round to par, but had five birdies on the back nine to advance to two under, a four-stroke swing from Thursday. Patrick Cantlay, the highest ranked player in the world (No. 4) without a major tournament win in his career, won three strokes to be one over.

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

Michael Block, the lead pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club, southeast of Los Angeles, was tied just above Cantlay on the leaderboard, a score more than enough for him to clinch the PGA Championship for the first time.

“People there, they understand: they hit that ball in the bushes on the right and they don’t know what’s happening, but the lucky thing about me is that I found out pretty quickly where I went wrong,” said Block, who participates to his fifth PGA Championship. “Club pros, I’ve always heard, find out in a few shots. Tour pros find out in one shot, and I was lucky enough to find out in one shot this time.”

Oak Hill has narrow fairways – No. 18 is as thin as 20 yards – and the strong winds made them even harder to hold on Friday than on Thursday, when Rory McIlroy, the No. 3 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, landed in just two. On Friday, shots that shot off the tee and looked promising often tumbled into a rough that was almost inevitably described as punishment.

“I had a few back-to-back drives on 16 and 17 where I thought it was dead in the middle, landed in the perfect spot, and only the fairways are so firm it just rolled through the rough roll,” said Sep. Straka, whose 71 on Friday put him even ahead of the tournament. “There’s not much stopping the ball right now except the rough, and when you get into the rough it’s really hard to score.”

Weather conditions are expected to worsen on Saturday, when rain and wind can pound the course.

“I think that will reduce comfort levels again,” Rose said. “This will just be four days to get the most out of each day.”