HONOLULU, Hawaii The PGA TOUR season began on Thursday the way all seasons should, in trade winds and short sleeves, on a par 70 that measures 7,044 yards and plays honest in a breeze. The wind came out of the north-northwest at 10 to 15 miles per hour, gusting to 20, and the temperature topped out at 77. Comfortable weather, but not calm weather, and at Waialae Country Club the difference matters. By the end of the first day of the first of 34 FedExCup Regular Season events, two players had separated themselves from everyone else without dropping a single shot.
Nick Taylor and Kevin Roy each signed for a bogey-free 8-under 62. One of them has won here before. The other has never won anywhere.
The champion picks up the thread
Taylor's opening round was less a statement than a continuation. The defending champion has now played 17 consecutive rounds at par or better at Waialae Country Club, a stretch in which he stands a cumulative 68-under, and the last 12 of those rounds have all been in the 60s. Thursday's 62 was the second-lowest opening round of his career; the only lower one was the 60 that launched him toward the 2024 WM Phoenix Open title. This is his 10th start at the Sony Open in Hawaii, and his last four visits have produced nothing worse than a tie for 11th: T11 in 2021, T7 in 2023, T7 in 2024, and the win a year ago.
The history he is chasing is specific. No one has defended this title since Jimmy Walker went back to back in 2014 and 2015. Taylor spent Thursday making the pursuit look like routine, and there is a case that at this course, for him, it is. The rounds pile up, the bogeys do not.
The one number that complicates the picture: this is the fifth time Taylor has held or shared an 18-hole lead on TOUR, and he has converted two of the previous four, at the 2020 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and that 2024 Phoenix week. Half the time, in other words, a Thursday like this one has become a Sunday like the one he wants.
The man alongside him
Kevin Roy's 62 equaled the lowest round of his career, a number he has now posted three times, all in the last calendar year: the first round of the 2025 Puerto Rico Open, the first round of the 2025 Rocket Classic, and Thursday. The pattern in that sentence is worth noticing. Both of those earlier 62s also gave him a share of the 18-hole lead, and neither week ended in a trophy; he finished T6 in Puerto Rico and T8 at the Rocket. He arrives at this particular Thursday 0-for-2 at converting fast starts.
What distinguished this one was the short game. Roy led the field in Strokes Gained: Around the Green at 2.571 and scrambled perfectly, seven for seven, on a day when the wind guaranteed that everyone would miss greens eventually. He is making just his third start at this event, and the first two were forgettable: a missed cut in 2023, a tie for 45th last year. Whatever Waialae withheld from him before, it offered on Thursday, and he took all of it.
The players who moved
The group at 7-under 63 carries most of the field's pedigree. Chris Gotterup and Ben Griffin, two of the 14 players in the field who reached the 2025 TOUR Championship, sit tied for third. Gotterup has won in each of the last two seasons, the 2024 ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic and the 2025 Genesis Scottish Open, and Griffin won three times last season alone: the Zurich Classic of New Orleans alongside Andrew Novak, the Charles Schwab Challenge, and the World Wide Technology Championship. When the best players in a field open with 63s, the leaderboard tends to keep them in view all week.
Beside them sits a less familiar name having the best possible first day. John VanDerLaan's 63 was the lowest score among the 22 players in the field from the 2026 new member class. He earned his card by finishing No. 17 on the 2025 Korn Ferry Tour Points List, where the top 20 graduated, and he spent his first competitive afternoon as a TOUR member outplaying nearly everyone who has been here longer. S.H. Kim completed the quartet at 7-under.
There is also a housekeeping note with real stakes. The Sony Open is the first of four events counting toward the Aon Swing 5, which sends the five highest points earners not otherwise exempt into the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and The Genesis Invitational. For players like Roy, Kim, and VanDerLaan, this week is not only about a trophy; it is a door into rooms they are not yet invited to.
The oldest card in the field
The day's most remarkable arithmetic belonged to a man born in 1963. Vijay Singh, 62 years old, a World Golf Hall of Fame member and the 2005 champion of this event, posted a 2-under 68 in his first PGA TOUR round outside a major since 2021. He did it the hard way, absorbing double bogeys at the fourth and the tenth and playing the other 16 holes six under par. This is his 25th start at the Sony Open in Hawaii and his first since 2021, and he stands T41, comfortably inside the field he was expected merely to wave to.
A 68 with two doubles on the card is a strange, defiant kind of round at any age. At 62, it reads like a man refusing to be a ceremony.
What Friday demands
The leaderboard after one round is a study in opposites: a champion who treats this course like a savings account, and a grinder who has twice opened this fast and twice watched the week drift away. Behind them, the winners are already gathering, Gotterup and Griffin a shot back with the kind of recent form the leaders can feel.
Friday will ask a simple question of the men at the top: can the cleanliness hold? Thirty-six holes without a bogey is a rhythm, and rhythm at Waialae is everything; Taylor's four-year streak here says it can be sustained, Roy's two spent 62s say it usually is not. The trade winds will keep asking their questions, the cut will do its quiet sorting, and by tomorrow evening the season's first weekend will have its shape. On Thursday, at least, the year began with the defending champion exactly where he left off: at the top, unblemished.