Thursday at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am: Who are those guys?

It’s a recurring theme at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am: the first round goes into the books on Thursday evening, and the universal reaction to the name at the top of the leaderboard is “Who?”

Mind you, I’m not talking about the fans walking back to their shuttle buses at the end of the day, or the punters propping up the bar at the 19th Hole—I’m talking about in the media center, where some of the finest minds writing about golf today are gathered to ponder, pontificate, and promulgate their wisdom via the various forms of media, social and otherwise.

This phenomenon has been known to extend through Friday and Saturday, and even persist to the final round—who can forget Vaughn Taylor in 2016; or maybe the ultimate “Who dat?” winner, Ted Potter, Jr., the Orlando Mini-tour King, in 2018? (Potter’s win is even more remarkable when you consider the group that tied for second behind him, which included Jason Day, and multiple Pebble Beach champions Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.)

This year’s first-round leaderboard treated fans and the media to such well-known names as Knous, Hoge, Putnam, Malnati, Lipsky, and Eckroat. You can be forgiven for thinking that this lineup sounds more like a firm of auto-accident lawyers that advertise on local cable than the top of the leaderboard at a prestigious PGA Tour event.

To be fair, the absence of most of the biggest names in PGA tour golf has left the venerable Del Monte Forest beach bash awash in lesser-known players, so the odds are good that this year’s winner could be someone with a low recognition factor.

A veritable who’s-who of men’s professional golf, most of whom could have been reliably counted upon to be in the field here at Pebble Beach, decamped to Saudi Arabia to play for a smaller purse ($5M vs $8.7M) but big appearance fees (reportedly larger, in some cases, than the winner’s share here at Pebble Beach).

The list includes five-time Pebble Beach winner Phil Mickelson; two-time winner Dustin Johnson; Graeme McDowell, the winner of the 2010 U.S. Open, held here at Pebble Beach; and sundry other golf luminaries and recognizable names such as Bryson DeChambeau, Tony Finau, Sergio Garcia, Henrik Stenson, Ian Poulter, Bubba Watson, Patrick Reed, and several more.

The biggest names in the field this week at the Clambake are Jordan Spieth, who is among the stable of players affiliated with presenting sponsor AT&T; #3-ranked Patrick Cantlay, a California kid (if SoCal…) who acknowledged, but resisted, the temptation of Saudi gelt and came to Pebble Beach this week because he loves the place; Maverick McNealy, local boy and Stanford Men’s golf star who grew up in a house on Pebble’s 16th fairway before his family moved to Hillsborough; and former World #1 Jason Day, who showed some long-missing form at the Farmer’s Insurance Open at Torrey Pines last week before fading over the closing holes of the final round.

There is an old saying that goes: “The race doesn’t always go to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—but that’s the way to bet”, so the chances are good that one of the four names I mentioned in the preceding paragraph will top the leaderboard come Sunday evening. The odds are even better that, even if none of them do top the field, one or more of them will be in the hunt on Sunday, and will end up in the Top 5 after 72 holes are played.

As far as Round One went, an 11-year pro from North Dakota by way of Texas Christian University (“Go Frogs!”) named Tom Hoge (pronounced “hoagie”, like the sandwich) topped the leaderboard after 18 holes.

Starting on the tenth hole at Pebble Beach Golf Links under clear skies in a dead calm, Hoge opened with birdies at 10 and 11, carded another at 18, and went on a six-hole birdie run on holes 3 through 8 after pars at 1 and 2. His clean-card 9-under 63 is one off of the tournament course record of 62 that is jointly held by Dave Kite (1983 – win), David Duval (1997 – runner-up), and was most recently equaled by Patrick Cantlay in last year ’s first round.

Hoge is trailed by Irishman Seamus Power, who carded an 8-under 64 at Spyglass Hill, and NorCal’s own Austin Smotherman, a native of Loomis, CA, a small town straddling Hwy 80 just east of Sacramento, who carded a 7-under 65 at Pebble Beach, more than offsetting a pair of bogeys with eagles at the par-5 sixth and eighteenth holes. Swede Jonas Blixt, who played at Spyglass Hill today, is tied with Smotherman at 7-under.

Patrick Cantlay is the highest-place of the bigger names in the field, T-5 at 6-under after his opening round at Spyglass Hill; Jason Day is T-14, 3-under at Pebble Beach; Jordan Spieth sits at T-31 after a 3-under round at MPCC, and Maverick McNealy is T-51 with a 2-under round, also at MPCC.