SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. The WM Phoenix Open opened in a February desert on its best behavior: mostly cloudy, 80 degrees, a southeast breeze that never asked a hard question of anyone. What the day could not supply was light. Play was suspended at 6:06 p.m. with nine players still on the course, and the first round was not officially complete until 8:43 the following morning, by which point the second round had already begun on schedule and the man atop the leaderboard had long since made his point. Chris Gotterup leads the tournament at 8-under 63, without a bogey on the card, at a golf course that had never before let him play the weekend.
The lead, and the man who took it
The number is remarkable mostly for what it is not: an outlier. The 63 tied the second-lowest round of Gotterup's PGA TOUR career, behind only the 61 he posted on the way to winning the 2025 Genesis Scottish Open, and it extended a stretch of golf that has quietly become the best early-season form in the game. He won the Sony Open in Hawaii last month, finished T18 at the Farmers Insurance Open last week, sits first in the FedExCup standings through three events, and arrived in Arizona at No. 16 in the world, the highest ranking of his career.
What he had never done, in 70 previous TOUR starts, was lead after 18 holes. That is a strange gap in the record of a three-time winner, and it says something specific about how Gotterup has built his career: from behind, on the weekend, without ceremony. Thursday inverted the pattern. He led the field in Strokes Gained: Approach at 3.479, ranked third in Strokes Gained: Putting, and left TPC Scottsdale with the one credential he lacked.
The venue makes the round stranger still. Gotterup missed the cut here in 2024 and missed it again in 2025. Whatever this course had been refusing him, it surrendered all at once.
Twenty-nine, going out
Two shots back at 6-under 65 sits Matt Fitzpatrick, who compressed his entire day into his first nine holes. Starting on the tenth, he played Nos. 10 through 18 in 7-under 29, tying the back-nine scoring record at TPC Scottsdale. Seven players had done it before him, most recently Scottie Scheffler in the third round in 2022, a comparison Fitzpatrick will happily accept, since Scheffler went on to win that week.
The symmetry of the scorecard was less kind. Fitzpatrick played his first 16 holes without a bogey, then dropped shots at the eighth and ninth, his final two holes of the day. A 29 and a 65 is an odd pairing, the sound of a round that gave back just enough to keep its author honest. It still left him alone in second.
The men at five under
The quartet at 66 is a study in players arriving from different distances.
Michael Thorbjornsen, 24, sits inside the top five after 18 holes for the fifth time in his career, and his 39 starts as a professional already include eight top-10 finishes and a pair of runner-up results. Nicolai Højgaard went around without a bogey in his second appearance here, and has now placed himself inside the top five after the opening round at TPC Scottsdale two years running; last year that start dissolved into a T36, which is presumably the part he intends to edit. Sam Stevens built his bogey-free 66 on three birdies and an eagle at the par-5 13th, the kind of card that suits a player coming off a career-best season of 10 top-25 finishes and two second places.
And Pierceson Coody, playing this tournament for the first time, simply continued what has been the most consistent start to the season anywhere on TOUR. He finished second at the Farmers Insurance Open last week and is one of only three players, with Ryan Gerard and Si Woo Kim, to open 2026 with three straight top-20 finishes. He leads the Aon Swing 5 standings, which makes this week, the final qualifying event for the next two Signature Events, worth more to him than the purse alone.
One behind them, Scottsdale resident Jake Knapp opened with 67 for the second consecutive year at this tournament, at home in every sense: he is No. 14 in the FedExCup after top-15 finishes in both of his starts this season.
The champions, becalmed
This field carries seven past champions of the event, and Thursday treated them as a group with something close to indifference. Hideki Matsuyama, the winner in 2016 and 2017, fared best at 3-under. Gary Woodland stands at 2-under, Nick Taylor and Rickie Fowler at even par, Webb Simpson at 1-over.
Then there are the two names the week was supposed to orbit. Scottie Scheffler, the world No. 1, two-time champion here, winner of his last two starts and chasing a third consecutive victory for the first time in his career, shot 2-over 73. Brooks Koepka, a champion here in 2015 and 2021 and playing his first TPC Scottsdale rounds since rejoining the TOUR, shot 75. Scheffler owns the longest active made-cut streak on TOUR at 65, and it now requires his attention rather than his autopilot. A first round is not a verdict on players of this size. It is, however, a bill that comes due on Friday.
What Friday asks
The second round was already under way before the first one formally closed, which lends the day a compressed, contingent feeling: 123 professionals, 32 of the world's top 50, and a cut waiting at the end of it. For the men at even par and worse, the arithmetic is plain enough. Scheffler has spent two seasons making the low Friday round look like a standing appointment; he has rarely needed one this much.
At the other end, the question is subtler. Gotterup has never slept on a lead before, and the record suggests he has never needed one. His three wins were all built from somewhere in the pack. Friday will tell us whether the front of the field suits him as well as the middle always has, on a golf course that spent two years turning him away and has now, abruptly, let him in.