The Big Easy certainly made golf look easy on Friday, as Ernie Els birdied 10 holes during a 10-under-par 62 to take the first-round lead at the PGA Tour Champions’ Principal Charity Classic at Wakonda Club in Des Moines, Iowa.
The sterling round marked the South African’s career-low score on the PGA Tour Champions circuit and tied the tournament record.
“Listen, you shoot 62, you should have a smile on your face,” Els said. “So I’m happy obviously, things went my way. I hit it quite well and obviously made a lot of putts. So just one of those rounds that you just want to keep going kind of a thing.”
Els has a two-shot lead entering the weekend. Defending champion Stephen Ames of Canada, Ricardo Gonzalez of Argentina and Vijay Singh of Fiji shot eight-under 64 to open the tournament.
Els went out in six-under 30 after birdies on five of his last six holes on the front nine, punctuating the spree with a birdie at the par-three ninth. He added four more coming in and would have broken the tournament record with a birdie at 18, where he settled for par.
The former World number one felt it coming after tying for third at the Regions Tradition and tying for sixth at the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship, both majors, in his past two starts.
“Yeah, I’ve been trending in the right direction,” Els said. “Started hitting the ball nicely the last couple of weeks that I played, the Regions Tradition was nice and obviously last week at the Senior PGA was good, just wanted to keep that going.”
Ames, Gonzalez and Singh joined Els in posting bogey-free rounds. Gonzalez picked up an eagle at his penultimate hole, the par-five eighth, to skip up the leaderboard.
Tied for fifth at seven-under 65 were Rod Pampling of Australia, Billy Mayfair, Heath Slocum and Rob Labritz.
Retief Goosen was in a share of 13th on five-under-par 67, while David Frost was a shot further back on 68 in a share of 18th.
