Jacob Bridgeman has had a busy few weeks for someone who keeps insisting he feels rusty. He won the inaugural Biltmore Championship at the Cliffs at Walnut Cove, holed the putt that clinched the Presidents Cup for the United States at Medinah, flew to Maine for his sister’s wedding, and then got on another plane for his first trip to the PGA Tour’s lone stop in Japan. On Thursday at Yokohama Country Club, with the wind doing its best to make the Baycurrent Classic awkward for everyone else, Bridgeman opened with a bogey-free 63 that put him a shot clear of the field before most players had finished their second cup of coffee.
Rusty is not the word anyone watching would have reached for. He started on the back nine, made three pars to settle in, then turned in three-under 32 before reeling off four straight birdies from the fifth through the eighth. A lip-out at the par-5 fourth, his second-to-last hole of the day, was the one blemish on an otherwise tidy scorecard, and he said afterwards he was “kind of bummed not to birdie” that one given how well he had struck his approach. It is a measure of the round he was playing that missing a putt for a sixth birdie in nine holes counted as the low point.
A conservative plan that still produced fireworks
Bridgeman was candid about how he got there, and it was not through aggression. He said he did not change his game plan and played conservatively all day, which in practice meant leaving himself mostly uphill putts from good positions on the greens rather than firing at every flag. It is the kind of description that undersells a bogey-free 63 in blustery conditions, but it also explains why the round held together. He leads the field in the putting numbers for the week and sits first on Tour in Strokes Gained: Putting for the season, and Thursday looked like the natural extension of that, a player comfortable enough with his flat stick to let the score build quietly rather than chase it.
He did allow that the rust was real, even if it never showed up on the card. “I still felt a little rusty, but I felt good over my iron shots,” he said, pointing to a few things he still wants to sharpen on the range before the next round. For a player who has made 23 of 24 cuts since his breakthrough win at the Genesis Invitational in February, shot 64 or better in each of his last three competitive rounds, and added four top-fives and eleven top-25s along the way, rusty is evidently a relative term.
England’s Jordan Smith gives chase, with a crowded group behind
Jordan Smith was the closest challenger after round one, a shot back at seven under on the strength of his own clean round, though he was frank that the week had not started smoothly off the course. “My sleeping’s been all over the place, to be honest,” he said, citing the adjustment since arriving in Japan, which made a 67 a tidier outcome than his week so far might have suggested. Behind him, a group at six under included Max Homa, Pierceson Coody, Mac Meissner and Ricky Castillo, with Keith Mitchell, Michael Thorbjornsen and Andrew Putnam among those a further shot back. It is a leaderboard with plenty of players who know how to finish a week strongly, which should make the next three days at Yokohama worth following even for a tournament that tends to sit quietly in the PGA Tour’s autumn calendar.
What makes Bridgeman’s start notable beyond the number itself is the company it keeps. This is the third of eight FedExCup Fall events, the stretch where players outside the top 100 are fighting to save their cards for next season and every shot carries a different kind of weight. Bridgeman is not one of those players. His two wins this year mean he arrived in Japan with nothing at stake beyond pride and curiosity, having chosen the trip specifically because he played the Toyota Junior World Cup in nearby Nagoya as a teenager and wanted to come back as a professional. There is something fitting about a player with that little riding on the week producing the best round of the day, a reminder that form, once it arrives, does not always ask permission from the stakes.
What Thursday says about the rest of his season
Bridgeman’s year has had a clean narrative arc since February: a maiden win at Riviera, a run of consistency through the summer good enough to finish ninth at the BMW Championship and fourth at the Tour Championship, a Presidents Cup debut in which he went one win, two losses and no halves but still made the putt that mattered most on Sunday, and now a second PGA Tour title at the Biltmore Championship to close out September. A 63 in Japan does not change much about how the season is already being remembered, but it is a reminder that the player who delivered at Medinah two weeks ago has not simply been coasting on the goodwill of that putt. He still has a tournament to finish at Yokohama, and a one-shot lead with three rounds to play settles nothing by itself. It is, at least, a start that matches the rest of his autumn.