BLAINE, Minn. Friday at the 3M Open began under a mostly cloudy sky with the wind building toward afternoon gusts of 25 miles an hour, and it ended with a number that will outlast the tournament itself. Michael Kim, who opened Thursday with an ordinary 3-under 69, played the back nine of TPC Twin Cities in a blur and signed for a 12-under 59. It is the lowest 18-hole score in this tournament's seven-year history and the 16th sub-60 round in PGA TOUR annals. Kim's 128 total sits three strokes clear of a three-way tie for second, and the 36-hole cut fell behind him at 3-under 139, with 66 of 144 starters surviving into the weekend.
The moment the round turned
There was no single turn to Kim's round so much as a sustained, uninterrupted assault. He made 12 birdies, one shy of the PGA TOUR record for a single round, needed only 21 putts, and closed his card with a 24-foot 4-inch birdie putt on the 18th. He gained 10.882 strokes on the field for the day, leading everyone in Strokes Gained: Approach the Green, Strokes Gained: Putting, proximity to the hole, and fewest putts. It was not one department carrying the round. It was every department, at once.
The number's place in history is worth sitting with. Only Jim Furyk's 58 at the 2016 Travelers Championship sits lower on the all-time list; Kim's 59 now shares second with fourteen other rounds, and he is the first player anywhere on TOUR to reach that territory since Jake Knapp did it at the 2025 Cognizant Classic, 512 days earlier. Before Friday, Kim had managed exactly three rounds in the 60s in 13 career trips around TPC Twin Cities, with a previous best of 67. His own career-low on TOUR, before this week, was 62, a number he had reached three times, most recently at this year's RBC Heritage. He is in his 11th season on TOUR and his 275th career start, still seeking a second PGA TOUR title, and in five previous 3M Open appearances he had made exactly one cut.
The players who moved
Three players share second place at 11-under 131, each having arrived by a different route. Ben Kohles, Thursday's leader after a career-low 62, added a 69 to stay inside the top five for the second time in his last three starts; the five-time Korn Ferry Tour winner is still chasing his first PGA TOUR title in his 122nd start. Emiliano Grillo, who tied his own career high with nine birdies on Thursday, followed with a 67 for his best 36-hole score of the season, extending a run at TPC Twin Cities that already includes three top-10 finishes across six prior appearances. And Chandler Phillips, a third-year TOUR member still seeking his first win in his 78th start, posted a 65 built on the best Strokes Gained: Around the Green figure of anyone through 36 holes.
One shot further back, at 10-under 132, Jackson Koivun and Troy Merritt share fifth. Koivun, playing in just his 13th start on TOUR, sits inside the top 10 after two rounds for the second time in his short career. Phillips and Merritt are the only two players in the field to card 66 or better in both of the first two rounds, a quieter kind of consistency next to the loudest round of the year.
The players who slipped
Slipped is not quite the right word for Scottie Scheffler's Friday, but the leaderboard read that way regardless. The World No. 1 followed his bogey-free 65 with a 1-under 70, four birdies against a bogey and a double bogey, and dropped to a tie for 13th at 7-under, seven shots off Kim's pace. History offers him a specific kind of reassurance: Scheffler has come from seven or more strokes back after 36 holes to win three times on TOUR, at the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, the 2022 Arnold Palmer Invitational, and the 2025 Procore Championship. None of those, though, required catching a round like the one Kim just played.
Kurt Kitayama's title defense fell further behind. The 2025 champion sits nine back in a tie for 31st, still trying to become the first repeat winner in this tournament's history.
The round that mattered beyond the leaders
Minnesota native Muzzy Donohue answered his own PGA TOUR debut with an 8-under 63, the second-lowest round of the day and, on almost any other Friday, the story of the week. The 25-year-old Boston College product, who won the 109th Minnesota State Open two weeks earlier, moved to a tie for 24th at 6-under. Mackenzie Hughes played his final ten holes of the second round in 7-under to shoot himself onto the right side of the cut line, one of 66 players from a field of 144 to survive at 3-under 139.
What tomorrow demands
The 3M Open has a short and mostly cautionary history for 36-hole leaders: in seven editions, only two players who held the halfway lead or a share of it went on to win, Lee Hodges in 2023 and Michael Thompson in 2020. Kim now carries that burden along with the heaviest number in the field's memory, and with it a question that has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with temperament: can a round this extraordinary be followed by two ordinary ones, or does Saturday ask for more magic than any player has a right to expect twice in the same week? TPC Twin Cities gave up five rounds of 62 or better a year ago. Whatever ceiling this golf course has, nobody found it Friday. Behind Kim sits a leaderboard with real weight in it, Kohles still seeking a maiden win, Grillo hunting a third title, Phillips a first, and further back, the game's best player with a documented habit of closing large gaps. A three-shot cushion built on a 59 is a considerable thing to defend. It is also, on this course this week, far from safe.