The first-round leader at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson at the end of Thursday’s play was not the player whose name made the most noise on the morning of the round. Brooks Koepka’s bogey-free sixty-three, which led for most of the day and produced the back-of-a-cupboard putter story the rest of the field is still talking about, eventually got passed late in the afternoon by a number one stroke better. Taylor Moore closed his round with a birdie on the par-five ninth to sign for a nine-under sixty-two, the lowest eighteen-hole number of his PGA Tour career, and a number that, by the time the last group walked off, had given him the outright lead at TPC Craig Ranch for Friday morning.
The number is the kind of opening round that produces a Saturday and Sunday a player wants to remember the rest of their life. The number is also, on the strict accounting of Moore’s last three years, the fourth time the thirty-two-year-old has held an eighteen-hole lead or co-lead on the PGA Tour, and the first three of them did not, on the Sunday evening, produce a win.
What Moore did, and how he did it
Moore is a Texan, born in San Angelo, who played his college golf at Arkansas and turned professional in 2016. He came up the slow way, through the PGA Tour Canada, then four years on the Korn Ferry Tour with a stretch lost to a collapsed lung, then up to the PGA Tour in 2021. His one win on the big tour is the 2023 Valspar Championship, which he produced on a Sunday in which he closed with a sixty-seven and held off Adam Schenk by a stroke and Jordan Spieth by two. The Valspar was his forty-sixth career start. It is, in the three seasons since, his only one.
The round he produced on Thursday at Craig Ranch had the shape of a player playing freely on a course he knows well. The new Lanny Wadkins contours on the greens, which have rerouted what the field can do with most of the pin sheets, did not appear to be in Moore’s way on the front nine. He made the turn at five under. He birdied the tenth from inside ten feet. He picked up another shot on the par-five sixteenth, where he laid up to a wedge yardage and stuck it. He kept his card clean on the closing stretch and rolled in the closing birdie on nine for the round of his career. The strokes-gained number on his approach play was the best in the field. The number on his putter was second. He missed three fairways. He missed two greens. He gave back nothing.
The thing about fourth leads
The detail that becomes interesting, in a player having the round of their career, is the detail that puts the round in a longer sequence. Moore has held an opening-round lead or co-lead three times before on the PGA Tour, and on each of the three the Sunday did not produce a Tour win. The Valspar in 2023 is the round on which he produced the closing day a Tour win requires. The other three were not.
The pattern that emerges from the ledger is not a pattern of a player who cannot win, because the player has won. The pattern is of a player who has, in the seasons since the Valspar, been finding himself near the top of the leaderboard more often than the average member of the Tour and converting at the rate the average member of the Tour does, which is to say not often. The numbers, on the broader accounting, are that since the Valspar Moore has piled up top-ten finishes at a healthy rate without finding the second Sunday in the last group with a putt to win. The win that would have been the second one has, on each of the chances it presented itself, not been the one that came.
The reading the player himself has given of the pattern, in the pre-tournament press at Craig Ranch on Wednesday, was the reading of a player who has thought about it. The line he produced, which is the line everybody on the tour produces about these things, was about staying patient and trusting the work. The other line he produced, which was more interesting, was about the difference between leading on Thursday and leading on Saturday. The leader on Thursday, in Moore’s reading of it, is the player with the round of their career and three days to play. The leader on Saturday is the player whose round of their career has stood up across three days and now needs a Sunday to make it permanent. The first is a position the field expects to catch the player in. The second is the position the player has to catch the field from. Moore, on Thursday evening, was on the wrong side of that distinction. He was leading. The field is now coming for him.
The course and the rest of the leaderboard
The other part of the round that mattered is the part of the leaderboard that sat on top of it. Koepka is one back. Si Woo Kim is one back. Jesper Svensson is one back. Scottie Scheffler is three back at sixty-six. The defending champion, who plays Craig Ranch as a home game and goes off in the early Friday wave grouped with Koepka and Kim, is the figure on the board most of the field will be glancing at for the rest of the week. The numbers Scheffler has produced this season suggest a player who will, on Sunday evening, be inside the last three groups regardless of where he was on Thursday night. Three back, on a course that has played as a low-scoring birdie-fest for most of the last decade and that, on the early evidence of the new contours, has not been pushed up as much as the practice-round chat suggested, is not a position from which the field can ignore him.
The course on the second day, by the morning forecast, plays under a light wind from the south-east and afternoon temperatures into the low nineties. The greens that produced sixty-two on Thursday are firmer overnight than they were in the morning practice. The pin sheet for Friday, by the players who walked the course on Wednesday and have seen Thursday’s positions, looks tougher in three or four spots and friendlier in two. The number to make the cut, by historical pattern at this venue, is probably going to come in around four under. The number to be in the last group on Saturday is going to be at twelve under or better.
What a Sunday would change
The argument that hangs over Moore’s week, on the broader accounting of where he sits in the Tour’s machinery, is the same argument that hangs over a lot of mid-tier Tour pros at this point in the calendar. A second win moves the maths on FedExCup points and the signature-event maths the Aon Swing 5 and the Next 10 will close in the autumn. A second win also, on the question of whether the Valspar in 2023 was the start of something or the high point of it, is the round of golf that supplies the answer. Moore is thirty-two. He has the kind of game, on the strokes-gained-approach numbers, that says the second win is reachable. The opening round at Craig Ranch is, on the player’s evidence to himself, the round that says it is reachable this week.
The Sunday is the Sunday. The Friday is the Friday. The piece of golf the rest of us get to watch, between now and the moment one of the players in the last group on Sunday afternoon walks off the eighteenth green with the lead and the others walk off without one, is the piece that, on Thursday’s evidence, has the chance to be the second one in Taylor Moore’s life. The first three eighteen-hole leads did not become a Tour win. The fourth is the one that, at the moment, the player is holding.
Friday will say the next thing about it. Sunday will, in the way Sundays always do at Craig Ranch, say the last.