Joe Pavelski opened the 37th annual American Century Championship in front on Friday, piling up 29 points to take the Round One lead and give the defending champion an early marker in the 54-hole celebrity event. He finished with an eagle on the par-5 18th and said he was “Thrilled with that number.”
The lead matters because this tournament is decided by Stableford points, not raw stroke count, and Pavelski’s total put him ahead of Mardy Fish, Stephen Curry, Tony Romo and Annika Sorenstam after the first round. Fish was second with 27 points, Curry had 25, Romo 23 and Sorenstam 22, but Pavelski still owned the top spot even though Fish posted the better stroke score on Friday, 68 to 69.
Pavelski’s opening push came in a four-birdie run from holes 4 through 8, the kind of stretch that swings a Stableford leaderboard fast because birdies are worth three points and an eagle is worth six. His 29 points were the second-best opening-round total in tournament history, behind Rick Rhoden’s 30 in 2005 and short of the record shared by Billy Joe Tolliver and Josh Scobee at 33 opening-round points.
There is also the matter of what the event is built to reward. The winner on Sunday will get the Stowers White Lab Coat, a prize modeled on the Masters Green Jacket, and American Century Investments says more than 40 percent of its proceeds go to the Stowers Institute for cancer research. That gives the weekend a little more weight than a celebrity scoreboard usually does.
Pavelski entered as the defending champion after winning for the first time last year, and he has now backed that up with a first-round lead one year after retiring from the NHL following an 18-year career. The rest of the field has Saturday to chase him, with the first tee time set for 7:25 a.m. and the last at 9:36 a.m. If Pavelski wants to stay out front, he will have to keep scoring while the same names who sat near him on Friday keep pressing from behind.
