Jul 24, 2025, 07:16 PM ET<\/p>\n
BERKSHIRE, England — Steven Alker<\/a> had six birdies and an eagle on his way to a 7-under 63 on Thursday on the Old Course at Sunningdale, giving him a one-shot lead in the Senior British Open, the final major of the year on the PGA Tour Champions.<\/p>\n Alker has twice won the Charles Schwab Cup and has nine PGA Tour Champions titles, but he has only one senior major, the Senior PGA Championship in 2022.<\/p>\n He led by one shot over Mark Hensby<\/a> of Australia. Defending champion K.J. Choi<\/a> and Joe Durant<\/a> were three shots behind at 66.<\/p>\n “I was just efficient today. Drove it in the fairway when I needed to and iron play was solid and just made some putts, especially on the back nine, just kind of kept things rolling,” Alker said. “Always need momentum. It’s a nice opening round for the Senior Open.”<\/p>\n Padraig Harrington<\/a> and Ernie Els<\/a> were in the group another shot behind. Justin Leonard<\/a>, who made the cut last week in the British Open at Royal Portrush, was among those at 69.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jul 24, 2025, 07:16 PM ET BERKSHIRE, England — Steven Alker had six birdies and an eagle on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":90553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[1430,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-90552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114912205508770749","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}