Gary Woodland’s tee shot on Thursday drew a bigger cheer than most opening shots at Bellerive Country Club get, and by the time he signed for a six-under 64 five hours later, the reason was obvious to anyone who has followed his last three years. Woodland shares the first-round lead of the BMW Championship with Wyndham Clark, Rory McIlroy and J.J. Spaun, all at six under, with Ludvig Åberg two shots back after closing his round with three birdies in his last four holes. Whatever happens across the remaining three rounds, Thursday alone was worth pausing on.
A round that means more than most
Woodland is playing the BMW Championship for the first time in six years. In September 2023 he had brain surgery to remove a lesion that had been causing seizure-like episodes, and doctors were only able to take out part of it. The years since have not been a clean recovery story with a tidy finish line. He has spoken candidly about still being startled by sudden movement on a golf course, a walking scorer approaching from behind or a cart he catches out of the corner of his eye, the kind of thing that would not register with most players and still occasionally does with him.
None of that showed on Thursday. Woodland played the back nine in 30, closing it out with an eagle at the reachable par-five 11th, where his second shot from 97 yards checked on the green and spun back into the cup. He has already won once this year, at the Houston Open in the spring, and added four other top-ten finishes including one at the U.S. Open, but he has said this stretch of golf, not the major championship he won in 2019, is what he is proudest of. Thursday’s round did nothing to argue with that.
Scheffler’s rough start
The round on the other side of the leaderboard belonged to Scottie Scheffler, and it did not go the way anyone watching would have expected after his eight-shot win at the FedEx St. Jude Championship a week ago. He opened with two pars before three consecutive bogeys at the 3rd, 4th and 5th, the first time all season he has made three in a row on the PGA Tour, and turned in a three-over 39. A gutsy up-and-down at the par-three 6th, where a wayward tee shot left him an 82-foot recovery, stopped the morning getting away from him completely, and he settled from there. Even so, he heads into Friday well off the pace he is used to setting himself, which for a player defending this title and sitting one win short of Tiger Woods on the career money list is a stranger position than he has occupied for most of 2026.
A leaderboard with plenty still to say
There is no 36-hole cut at the BMW Championship. All 50 players in the field will play all four rounds, so nobody goes home early this week regardless of Thursday’s number. The competition that matters for most of them sits lower down the board, where the top 30 in the FedExCup standings after Sunday advance to the Tour Championship at East Lake and the other twenty see their season end in St. Louis. Every score at Bellerive this week is doing double duty, deciding both the tournament itself and who gets to keep playing for the FedExCup.
For Woodland, none of that changes what Thursday already meant. Sharing the lead at a tournament he was not playing in as recently as last summer, on a course he had never seen a competitive shot on before this week, is the kind of detail that would be a footnote in most players’ seasons and is closer to the headline in his. Three rounds remain, and nobody would be surprised if the leaderboard looks completely different by Sunday evening. But Thursday belonged to him, and it will keep belonging to him regardless of how the rest of the week goes.