PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – Rookie Kurt Kitayama missed his last five cuts and seven of his last nine heading into the Honda Classic.
Veteran Rory Sabbatini said his days of going toe-to-toe with the game’s most powerful players are over, that he has to pick and choose his spots to be successful.
So of course the two are at the top of the leaderboard after tangling with the difficult Champion Course at PGA National Resort in Thursday’s first round of the Honda Classic.
Kitayama, ranked No. 289 in the world, began his round with three consecutive birdies and then strung together four in a row on his inward nine to come home with a 6-under-par 64. Sabbatini, the silver medalist in the Tokyo Olympics, shot his first bogey-free round in the tournament and shot 65.
Among other early finishers, three players were at 3 under.
Four-time major champion Brooks Koepka shot 68.
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Kitayama, who has two wins on the DP World Tour, hasn’t gotten off to a good start in his first year as a member of the PGA Tour. This season he’s missed six cuts and finished in ties for 45th and 65th. His best finish of late was a tie for 11th in the Korn Ferry Tour Championship last September.
“I felt like I’ve been playing well, and I’ve started to figure out my putting to kind of find this kind of round,” Kitayama said. “I think when you’re struggling, I think just that self-motivation to keep getting better and finding a way to figure it out. It’s kind of how you’ve got to keep going.
“I drove it well, hit 14 greens. I think that’s really important out here. Then my putter was pretty hot in those birdie stretches. Everything felt really solid.”
Sabbatini, ranked No. 123 in the world, was the tournament in 2011, the most recent of his six PGA Tour titles. The 45-year-old, who knew he had posted his first bogey-free round on the Champion Course in 37 attempts, said he can’t keep up with today’s firepower in the game and he has to rely on experience.
“I’m getting to that point in my game where I think I’ve gotten past where I feel like, I hate to say it, truly competitive out here,” he said. “There are too many guys out here that have much more firepower, so I’ve just got to kind of pick and choose my way around the golf course, so to me it’s become more of a chess game and less about throwing some darts out there. I think I’ve just learned to maximize what my abilities are and stay away from my inabilities.
“It’s been quite a rapid transition over the last two years. When you’re playing with two guys in your group and their combined age is less than yours, you’re thinking, wow, this is not my sport anymore.”
It was on Thursday, however.
“Every time I missed, I missed it in the right spot, so I kept the stress to a minimum,” he said. “But this golf course isn’t going to let you get away with three more rounds like that, so I’ve got a lot of cleaning up between today and tomorrow and going forward.”
Sabbatini said the silver medal “is somewhere safe” and winning it “was like putting sprinkles on top of ice cream.”
“It was that little added bonus at the end,” he said. “When I’m out here I’ll keep running the course as long as I can, but it’s kind of like, it’s getting to that time where it’s getting close to me being bucked off and I’ve got to go find something else to do.”
