Rory McIlroy says he is spoilt for choice over potential new caddie

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Alex Beach played a practice round with Luke Donald, walked off the ninth green and signed autographs.

Adam Scott gets his PGA Championship first round underway at 3.05am AEST and Marc Leishman begins at 3.20am.

And deservedly so. About a year ago at this time, he was in a hospital. He says he hasn’t felt this way since the 2015 U.S. Open at Chambers Bay, right after he won the Masters for his first major.

The word’s best players are at Quail Hollow for the final major of the year – the USPGA Championship.

“It’s kind of the underdog story”. That’s a good thing. We, the players, feel very strongly about our signature event and we feel it should stand on its own. Not quite a wire-to-wire victory as he only nosed ahead on the Friday but he was menacingly close to the summit of the leaderboard from the get-go.

But in terms of coping with the cumulative pressure of knowing exactly how colossal is the goal, there have been only three Career Kings of Slam – Gary Player finished it in the 1965 U.S. Open, Jack Nicklaus in the 1966 British Open, and Tiger Woods in the 2000 British. But he hasn’t cracked the top-10 otherwise, sharing 21st at the US Open, 37th at the British Open and 39th last week in Akron. The Northern Irishman’s appearance in this week’s US PGA Championship marks only his second outing since he split from his long-time bagman, JP Fitzgerald. Omar Uresti won it in June at Oregon’s Sunriver Resort, beating Dave McNabb in the second hole of a playoff.

“Yeah, it’s great”, Harman said. “As long as you keep improving, you’ll have that great run again”.

Snead once said in a television interview that had he shot 69 in the final round in each of the 31 U.S. Opens he played, he’d have won nine of them. The Englishman has struggled this year as he adjusts his swing to try and lessen the impact on his back, but a runner-up finish at The Masters and his world class putting means that he could well be in the mix if the tricky weather conditions hit Quail Hollow as expected that will help lessen the gap between the front-runners and Rose. “I think it’s a little bit of both”. “This sounds bad but I’m trying to get this week out of the way before I start to think about that. It’s hard when you feel like the year’s kind of gone, it’s hard to kind of pick yourself up”, said Day.

The sense thus created was that this was a tournament for Americans, invariably played on luscious, sun-drenched parkland courses, and more likely to be won by a Tin Cup slugger from Idaho than a household name on the European Tour. One large question is how participation might be affected in Ryder Cup years, especially for a US -hosted Ryder Cup.

Every year since 1972, the PGA has been last on the schedule of majors. “I think that’s where Jordan doesn’t have to deal with that coming into this week”.

The Canadian pop star, as far as we know, was last in Charlotte in January 2013 as part of his “Believe” tour, which sold out what was then called Time Warner Cable Arena. “And I’m looking forward to the next step”.