Another day, another cluster of players gathered atop the leaderboard at the 2025 Hero World Challenge. Akshay Bhatia, Hideki Matsuyama, Wyndham Clark, J.J. Spaun and Cameron Young make up the five-headed monster sitting at 10 under midway through the proceedings at Albany Golf Club in the Bahamas.
Bhatia bounced back from a bogey on his penultimate hole with a birdie on his last to join the four others on top. This as world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler stumbled slightly with a double bogey on No. 16 due to a wayward drive, dropping from 11 under to 9 under, where he ultimately finished.
Scheffler sits in a tie for sixth place alongside Alex Noren and Sepp Straka, while Justin Rose matched an opening 68 with another on Friday to get within two of the lead heading into the weekend.
“I think you can always take good momentum from playing well,” Scheffler said. “I wouldn’t look too far into it if I didn’t have a good week this week, I wouldn’t really try to carry that momentum even further. But overall, I feel like it’s a good place to kind of see where my game’s at and then kind of get ready for the season. It feels like a good warmup event.”
Making the biggest move of the bunch was Scheffler’s Ryder Cup teammate, Young, who followed up an opening 70 with a second-round 64 — the lowest of the 20 players in Round 2. The big-hitting right-hander cruised into his day before finding another gear around the turn, playing Nos. 12-17 in 6 under. If not for a bogey on the last, Young would have fired a sub-30 score on his second nine.
“Made a couple putts late, but it is just one of those courses where, I actually said it to Kyle yesterday, I felt like we played pretty well and comfortably could have shot 4, 5, 6 under, and the scoring made 2 [under] feel kind of bad yesterday,” Young said. “But the reality is, day to day out here, you just can have runs of holes where it starts to feel easy, and it’s not that different to yesterday. I feel like I played pretty similarly and just made a couple putts down the stretch.”
Young’s co-leader, Clark, mentioned he has not putted well through two rounds, and the statistics back up his thoughts as he ranks 16th out of 20 players with the putter in hand. Coincidentally, it is another co-leader in Spaun who ranks last in the field, making the current U.S. Open champion a dangerous proposition moving forward if he figures that club out.
For Clark, however, his play all stems from what he does with his full swing. Noting he has started working with a swing coach for the first time in a long time, the three-time PGA Tour winner is making sure to bring only one swing thought to the golf course, leaving the rest for the driving range. And so far, it has been a thought that has worked for him.
“Right now, I just have one swing thought when I play,” Clark said. “Like when I’m on the range, I’m thinking of a couple things that I want to do, and then while I’m playing, I’m just thinking about the heel leading the toe coming in so I have an open face. It’s just one simple thought, and that’s what I’m going with.”
The Year of Young?
A breakout star coming out of the Ryder Cup, Young has kept his game in good order over the last two months. The Wyndham Championship winner is among the leaders in the Bahamas, and he has a chance to follow in the footsteps of prior tournament champions, using this event as a springboard for their upcoming year.
In 2022, Hovland won this tournament the year before his FedEx Cup victory, while Scheffler used this week to test out a couple of tweaks in his game ahead of his all-time campaigns in 2024 and 2025. Young appears to have a similar mindset on these 72 holes and how valuable they could prove despite their laidback nature.
“It certainly can. I’m kind of not using the week as practice, but I’m using the week to try to build on some things that we’ve been doing and less so looking at the results just because I haven’t played any competition in the last couple months,” Young said. “So, it’s more just an opportunity to keep building on what we were doing mentally. I don’t think the result is necessarily going to dictate the outcome. I think it’s going to be more kind of how we go through our process and how we attack the golf course.”
Possible bookends
Matsuyama made noise in the opening week of the year with a record-setting performance at the Sentry en route to victory … and then was not heard from since. Without a top 10 finish in his PGA Tour season after his victory at Kapalua, the man from Japan aims to bookend his 2025 in style with another win this week.
What has been interesting about Matsuyama’s play through 36 holes is the way in which he has gotten the job done. He tops the field in terms of driving accuracy and is inside the top five of putting — thanks in large part to his Friday showing — while checking in near the bottom in terms of iron play, where he typically thrives.
“I’ve been working on everything … we won the first in Hawaii, but didn’t play well the rest of the season,” Matsuyama said. “So, trying to play well [the] next two days and looking forward to next season.”
