Detroit [US], August 1 (ANI): Akshay Bhatia making a start after taking a week off after the Open where he missed the cut, shot 2-under 68 for a modest start at the Rocket Classic. The left-handed Bhatia was lying T-48 and needed to stay steady to ensure passage into the weekend rounds.<\/p>\n
Another Indian origin player, Sudarshan Yellamaraju (69) was T-72 amidst a bunch of low scores and he was around the cut line. Two other top Indian origin players, Aaron Rai and Sahith Theegala are skipping the week.<\/p>\n
Peter Malnati, who had a rough season and missed more cuts than he has made this season, got a big boost as he shot a career-best 9-under 61 to tie a tournament record in the first round of the Rocket Classic, giving him a two-shot lead.<\/p>\n
Rickie Fowler and Ryan Gerard shot 63s, putting them two shots back and one stroke ahead of Patrick Cantlay and Patrick Fishburn.<\/p>\n
Bhatia had three birdies against one sole bogey. Starting from the tenth, he picked gains on the 14th, first and the sixth and dropped a shot on 16th, which was his seventh hole.<\/p>\n
Bhatia is currently 12th on the FedEx Cup rankings and has been in good form and won the Palmer Invitational, a Signature event earlier this season.<\/p>\n
Michael Brennan surged up the leaderboard after starting 2 over through four holes with eight straight birdies — one shy of the PGA TOUR record. He finished with a 65, putting him four strokes back with a pack of players that included Keegan Bradley.<\/p>\n
Some of the top players in the field, though, did not get off to a good start. Cameron Young, the No. 3 player in the world, shot a 1-under 69 and U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark was 1 over.<\/p>\n
The Rocket Classic and next week’s Wyndham Championship are the last two tournaments left before the top 70 advances to the FedExCup Playoffs.<\/p>\n
Detroit Golf Club underwent a USD 16 million renovation after last year’s tournament, including converting a couple of par-5 holes into par 4s and adding a lot of bunkers, in an attempt to restore Donald Ross’ vision for it more than a century ago while making it more challenging.(ANI)<\/p>\n
(This content is sourced from a syndicated feed and is published as received. The Tribune assumes no responsibility or liability for its accuracy, completeness, or content.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Detroit [US], August 1 (ANI): Akshay Bhatia making a start after taking a week off after the Open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":45142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[415,1751,8926,827,144,8927,2136,2117],"class_list":["post-45141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-aaron-rai","tag-aaron-rai","tag-akshay-bhatia","tag-detroit-golf-club","tag-pga","tag-pga-tour","tag-rocket-classic","tag-sahith-theegala","tag-sudarshan-yellamaraju"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}