Standing in the middle of the 17th fairway after pumping a 373-yard drive, Lucas Herbert was thinking of eagle, reaching 11-under, and needing just a par on the last to shoot the first ever round of 59 in major championship golf.
A birdie-par or even par-par finish would still give him the lowest round in major championship history, but after being pinpoint with his iron-play all day, he pulled his approach badly left and though he got a lucky break to find a good lie, he left himself just outside 10 feet for his birdie.
The putt drifted left, so thoughts of 59 switched to thoughts of 60 and 61, but a scrappy final hole left him needing to clean up a five-and-a-half-footer for history, but it wasn’t to be.
Instead, it was a record-tying 62, joining Branden Grace, who first broke the ’63’ ceiling at this very venue back in 2017, and Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffele and Shane Lowry, and a two-stroke advantage at the top of the leaderboard.
“I’m absolutely disappointed, and at the same time, so proud of today,” Herbert said. “Very, very proud to put my name on that list of guys that have shot 62 in a major championship. So it’s kind of holding two emotions there at the same time. It’s a tricky one, and I’m sure once the dust settles, I’ll be able to sort of decompress it a little bit.
“Right now I’ve sort of got both going on, and it’s a pretty good problem to have too, to be disappointed you shot 62.”
He admitted that once he got off to a fast start and birdied the first three, the record was in his sights.
“I thought it when I hit it to about five feet on the third hole,” he said. “I’m a golf nerd anyway, so I know all the numbers, all the records, everything like that.
“I don’t play a schedule that is four majors a year consistently anyway, so the opportunities I do get to play majors, and you get an opportunity to get off to a hot start on a golf course that’s a par 70 — not that I wanted the thoughts to come into my head, but it was honestly when it came in.
“So it was a bit of fun for the rest of the day just trying to acknowledge the fact that there was a chance but just to try to continue to go about what I was doing normally and naturally as best I could.”
Johnny Miller was the first player to shoot 63 in a major when he did so in the final round of the 1973 U.S. Open at Oakmont, and for 44 years, it was a number nobody could beat.
But now they’re coming like proverbial buses, because shortly after Herbert signed for his, Sam Burns followed him into the scoring hut with a card that also added up to 62 strokes.
While the Australian bogeyed his final hole to shoot his, the American holed out from a greenside bunker, but unlike Herbert, he was blissfully unaware that he’d just tied the major low-round record.
“Yeah, I had no idea until they told me up there,” Burns laughed. “I didn’t realise that was the case. Yeah, I’m very pleased with it.”
Burns hadn’t even expected to be present at Royal Birkdale as his wife and he were expecting their third child, but an early arrival and encouragement from his spouse saw him make the late decision to travel across the pond.
“Yeah, I thought there was zero percent chance,” he admitted. “Brett, my agent was like, I’m just going to sign you up just in case, but I was like, you can, but I’m probably not going to be able to play. Then we ended up having her on the 3rd. Even then, I still wasn’t expecting to play by any means. Had a bunch of conversations with my wife, and she encouraged me to come over here and play, and here we are.”
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