SOUTHPORT, England The wind came up a little on Friday, enough to give Royal Birkdale some teeth it had kept sheathed on Thursday, gusting to eighteen miles per hour under the same mostly sunny sky. It should have made the golf course harder. For one player, and briefly for a second, it did the opposite. By evening the second round of the Open Championship had produced two of the lowest scores the majors have ever seen, and a new name at the top of the board.
Lucas Herbert shot 62. So did Sam Burns. Neither number had a precedent it could beat.
The lowest round the majors allow
An eight-under 62 is the lowest single round ever recorded in major championship history, and on Friday two men reached it on the same afternoon. Herbert got there to greater effect, his 62 carrying him from the pack to the outright lead at eight under, two clear of the field. Burns arrived at the same number from further back, a 62 that followed an opening 73 and pulled him from the margins into a share of fifth. Between them they recorded the fifteenth and sixteenth rounds of 63 or better in the history of this championship, the first since Jon Rahm's 63 at Royal Liverpool in 2023, and they joined Branden Grace, whose 62 here at Birkdale in 2017 remains one of the most famous rounds the Open has known.
Herbert's had a front nine for the archives. He went out in 28, six under par, a number that ties the lowest nine holes ever played at an Open Championship, matching the mark Denis Durnian set on this same course in 1983. The rest of the round asked only that he not undo it, and he did not.
The new man in front
Herbert has spent little of his career this close to a major's summit. The 62 gives him the first lead he has held after any round of a major, his previous best a share of twelfth at the halfway point of the 2022 Open, and the round was a departure in its own right; his lowest score in any major before Friday was a 67. He arrives at the weekend carrying more than his own ambitions. No Australian has won this championship since Cameron Smith at St Andrews in 2022, and only two have ever won it at Royal Birkdale, Peter Thomson in the 1950s and 1960s and Ian Baker-Finch in 1991. Herbert, playing his sixth Open and ranked seventieth in the world, would be the third.
Two shots back, at six under, sits a group that includes the man who led after Thursday. Jackson Suber followed his opening 65 with a 69, a round that surrendered the lead without surrendering the tournament, and he shares second with Cameron Young, the world number four who has now posted 67 twice, and Ryan Gerard, playing his first Open a year after the Barracuda Championship gave him his only TOUR title. A shot further back, at five under, wait Burns, Si Woo Kim, and Bryson DeChambeau.
A shot behind them again, at four under, gather nine players, and among them the loudest local hope of the week. Tommy Fleetwood, born in Southport, made the weekend in front of his own crowd, alongside fellow Englishmen Matt Wallace and the TOUR rookie Alex Fitzpatrick; no Englishman has won this championship since Nick Faldo in 1992. Francesco Molinari, the 2018 champion at Carnoustie, is there too, still chasing the second Open that would make him the event's first multiple winner since Ernie Els in 2012. And in the same group waits the defending champion, Scottie Scheffler, the world number one, four back and still pursuing the first successful Open title defense since Padraig Harrington in 2008.
The ruling that followed Bryson
DeChambeau's place at five under came with an asterisk earned after the fact. Following his round, he was assessed a two-stroke penalty on the fifth hole under Rule 8.1, for inadvertently improving the area of his intended swing. It is the kind of ruling that changes a number quietly, hours after the shot, and it left the two-time U.S. Open champion three off the lead rather than one. He has two top-10s in eight Open starts and remains well inside the tournament; the penalty is a footnote, but at a championship this tight, footnotes have a way of being read later.
The cut, and who fell the wrong side of it
The cut came at one over, and it fell hard on the tournament's history. Both men who have lifted the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale went home early: Padraig Harrington, the 2008 champion, and Jordan Spieth, who won here in 2017. Matt Fitzpatrick missed as well, at four over, ending a streak of twenty-eight consecutive made cuts, the same number Hideki Matsuyama now carries as the longest active run on TOUR. None of the ten amateurs in the field survived to the weekend.
Not every marquee name that stayed did so comfortably. Rory McIlroy made the number with room to spare at one under, seven off the lead, his weekend now a matter of how far and how fast rather than whether at all. He is a six-time major champion, and none of that history changes the arithmetic of a seven-shot deficit with 36 holes to play.
What tomorrow demands
Herbert leads by two, but a two-shot lead at the halfway point of an Open is a soft thing, especially at eight under with a weekend of weather still unwritten. The wind that stirred on Friday is only a suggestion of what this coast can do, and the leaderboard behind him is stocked with players who have been here before, and one, in Suber, who has proved he can post the number even if he has never held it to the finish.
For now the story is a 62, matched twice on a single Friday, and an Australian who found the lowest round the game allows at exactly the moment he needed it. Royal Birkdale has given up its scoring. The weekend will be about whether it asks for any of it back.