'American Pickers' star Frank Fritz dead at 60

Rory’s historic statement in three-way battle as Aussie Day in $38m hunt after ‘dramatic’ turnaround

Four-time major winner Rory McIlroy matched a course record with 10 birdies to share the early lead with reigning Olympic champion Xander Schauffele and Wyndham Clark while Australian Jason Day is lurking close behind after Thursday’s opening round of The Players Championship.

Schauffele fired a bogey-free, seven-under par 65 and was level with McIlroy atop the US PGA Tour leaderboard after 18 holes at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

The 30-year-old American, who hasn’t won since the 2022 Scottish Open, found nine of 14 fairways in his first bogey-free round of 15 at the Players.

“The bogeys, or the scares of a bogey, come when you miss the fairways,” Schauffele said. “The rough is pretty thick. Shockingly thick in some cases. You’ve just got to keep it on the short grass.”

World number two McIlroy, the 2019 Players winner, stumbled to a 76 in his final round last week at Bay Hill but bounced back after working on his irons.

“Overall I’m really happy with how the day went,” McIlroy said.

“Much improved from Sunday at Bay Hill. Put a lot of work in over the last three days. Feel like I saw a lot of progress out there.”

“Iron play was much improved and that’s something I’ve worked a lot on. I hit balls for five hours on Monday to try and figure it all out and I feel like I got somewhere. It was a continuation of the other things I had been doing well, putted well the last three rounds last week and that fed into today. Just really happy to see some iron shots go close again.”

Elsewhere, Clark could have taken the outright lead with a birdie on the last hole but couldn’t get his radar working and instead had to settle for par to finish on 65 alongside McIlroy and Schauffele.

“I was really patient out there. I don’t feel like I did anything spectacular, I just kind of potted it around and made putts when I needed to,” Clark later told Sky Sports Golf.

“I really had a stress-free, ho-hum round. I didn’t make too many bogeys and didn’t have too many putts to make for par, so it was a pretty easy round.”

Day, meanwhile, had a five-birdie, no-bogey 67 to sit just two behind McIlroy and Schauffele in the hunt for the event’s $US25 million ($A38 million) purse.

It was an impressive bounce back effort for Day after last week’s T36 finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

“It’s great,” Day said.

“A bit of a dramatic difference between my hitting from last week to this week. Obviously it’s only the first day, but felt like I did a lot of good quality work with [coach] Chris [Como] at the start of the week.

“Drove it nice. I think that’s probably one of the most crucial things is to drive it well here. Even though it’s not like overly long, getting it in the fairway is important.It was nice to be able to capitalise on the par-5s today, keep the 5s off the scorecard and birdie those.”

Of course, Day is a previous winner of The Players Championship having triumphed in 2016, although the Australian doesn’t see an advantage in his previous success.