PALM HARBOR, Fla. The Copperhead Course at Innisbrook opened the Valspar Championship on Thursday in sunshine and a stiff north-northeast breeze, 10 to 15 miles per hour with gusts to 23, the high reaching only 73 degrees. At 7,352 yards and a par of 71, Copperhead in a March wind is a course that asks for patience and accepts nothing on account. By evening it had allowed exactly one man past 6-under, and he was among the least likely candidates in the field to be there.
Sungjae Im signed for 7-under 64. It was his third competitive round of any kind since a wrist injury interrupted his January, and the first two starts of his return, at the Arnold Palmer Invitational and THE PLAYERS Championship, both ended at the cut line on Friday. Whatever a wrist remembers, his has apparently remembered everything.
The round that came back with him
Im's 64 was built on the two holes Copperhead offers as genuine chances and on iron play that led the field outright. He eagled the first and the eleventh, added six birdies, and gave back bogeys at the sixth, eighth, and sixteenth. The arithmetic is honest work: two eagles and six birdies against three dropped shots, for a score two shy of the 62 that stands as his career low, a number he has posted four times, most recently in the third round of the 2025 Sentry.
The quality underneath the score was in the approach play. Im gained 3.847 strokes on the field with his irons, the best figure in the tournament, which is the statistic that tends to travel from Thursday to Sunday better than any putting week. The world ranking says No. 82, which is what happens when a player misses two months. The résumé says two TOUR titles in 211 starts, at the 2020 Cognizant Classic and the 2021 Shriners Children's Open, and a T4 at this event in 2019.
The caution comes from the record book. This is the fourth time Im has held or shared the lead after 18 holes on TOUR, and the first three produced no wins, most recently the 2022 3M Open, where he finished second. A Thursday lead is an argument, not a verdict. But for a man on his third start back, it is a better argument than anyone expected him to have.
A sixty-five without a blemish
One shot behind sits the day's most improbable scorecard. Brandt Snedeker, nine times a winner on TOUR and making his fourteenth appearance at this tournament, opened with a bogey-free 6-under 65, the best first-round score he has ever produced at the Valspar Championship, and by a margin of four; his previous best opener here was 69, a number he had posted five times.
The context makes it stranger still. Snedeker has played four tournaments this season, at The American Express, the Farmers Insurance Open, the Cognizant Classic, and the Puerto Rico Open, and missed the cut at all of them. He arrives at Innisbrook without a weekend to his name in 2026 and leaves the first tee sheet with a clean card and second place alone. Golf's timing has never been obligated to make sense.
The players who moved
Davis Thompson posted 66, third alone, with an eagle at the par-5 eleventh doing the heavy lifting. He owns one top-5 in six starts this season, a fourth at the Puerto Rico Open, and his Thursday suggested the form is holding. At 67, three back, sit Billy Horschel, Pierceson Coody, and Andrew Putnam. Horschel's six previous visits here peaked with a T4 a year ago; the Florida product has never needed an introduction to this grass.
The heavier names kept themselves within sight. Jacob Bridgeman, the FedExCup leader, and Xander Schauffele, at No. 7 the highest-ranked player in the field, opened at 3-under, tied for seventh. Jordan Spieth, the 2015 champion here, eagled his opening hole, the first, on his way to 2-under 69; remarkably, it is the second time he has opened a TOUR round with an eagle, and the other occasion was also at this tournament, a year ago.
And then there is the teenager. Blades Brown, 18 years old and playing on the strength of his third-place finish at the Puerto Rico Open, posted 69 and sits tied for seventeenth. The stakes for him are unusually concrete: he has 149 non-member FedExCup points this season and needs roughly 105 more to unlock Special Temporary Membership and the unlimited sponsor exemptions that come with it. A solo fifth or better this week would do it. He is nine holes into a career and already playing for his schedule.
The players who slipped
Slipped is a relative word on a day when the wind kept the field bunched, but the two most decorated names on the property will play Friday from the middle of the pack. Viktor Hovland, the defending champion, managed 1-under 70, tied for 37th. Brooks Koepka, whose five major titles make him the most accomplished player in the field, opened with an even-par 71, tied for 47th. Neither is out of it; both have surrendered the margin for error that Copperhead rarely returns.
Two swings on consecutive holes
The oddest line on Thursday's ledger belongs to Corey Conners, who eagled the eighteenth and then eagled the first, back to back, and in doing so became the first player on record to make consecutive eagles at the Copperhead Course, and just the 70th on TOUR record to do it anywhere. That put him alongside Im as the only players in the field with two eagles on the day, and it carried him to 2-under 69 despite everything else on the card.
The raw power exhibit belonged to Wyndham Clark, who launched a 446-yard drive at the tenth, the longest recorded on TOUR this season and the longest at this tournament since 2003; the previous mark was Gary Woodland's 411-yarder on the same hole in 2013. Clark stands at 1-under. Copperhead has a long memory for such things and very little sentiment about them.
What Friday demands
The wind is the variable and the cut is the deadline. With the lead at 7-under and only six players within four of it, Copperhead is playing like itself: scores are available in small denominations, and the field behind the leaders is dense.
For Im, Friday asks the question his record keeps asking: three times he has slept on an 18-hole lead, and three times the week drifted away from him. For Snedeker, the demand is more basic, a made cut, his first of the season, and then whatever a 45-year-old with nine titles is still permitted to imagine. Hovland and Koepka need to move before the weekend hardens the leaderboard above them.
The first round belonged to a man playing his way back from injury, hitting his irons better than anyone in the field. Friday will tell us whether that was a round or the beginning of a week.