PGA Championship: Tour rookie Eric Cole jumps ahead for solo lead at Oak Hill

Eric Cole came out of nowhere on Thursday afternoon.

While he wasn’t able to finish his round at Oak Hill Country Club, the 34-year-old rookie is the surprising solo leader at the PGA Championship headed into the second day.

Cole went 5-under through 14 holes in his first round of the second major championship of the year, which gave him a one-shot lead over LIV Golf's Bryson DeChambeau. Cole, who started on the back nine, marked his ball in the fairway on No. 6 once the horn blew to suspend the round due to darkness in Rochester, New York.

Cole, along with 29 others, will wrap up his opening round Friday morning before running right into the second later that afternoon.

“It's nice, I like it a lot,” Cole told reporters after seeing his name atop the leaderboard at a major championship. “Whenever you play, you want to compete to win. That's the spot I like to see my name at, and hopefully it is there more often.”

Cole has had a solid start to his rookie season on Tour. While he has missed nine cuts, including four straight to start the season, he has four top-25 finishes, including a T23 finish at the AT&T Byron Nelson last week. Cole went T5 at the Mexico Open last month and nearly won the Honda Classic in February.

Cole went 14-under on the week and forced a playoff with Chris Kirk in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, though he fell short on the first hole. The win for Kirk marked his first in eight years. Cole's runner-up finish earned him a check for nearly $1 million, which was more than double what he earned in his previous 14 PGA Tour starts combined.

That was a long way from where Cole was five years ago, when he was teaching lessons in Florida while trying to make it competitively as a golfer.

Despite it being his second major championship appearance — Cole missed the cut at the U.S. Open in 2021 — he looked very calm out on the course Thursday. He made three birdies on his front nine, which offset his lone bogey at the par-5 13th, and then sank three straight birdies early on his back nine. While Dustin Johnson and Adam Scott were jockeying for position on the leaderboard, Cole overtook them and grabbed the solo lead.

“I'm hitting my irons pretty well, I feel like,” Cole said. “The few opportunities that you have — because you don't have a ton, obviously. It's a hard course. When I did have an opportunity, I kind of felt like I happened to read it right and hit a good putt, and they went in today, so that was good.”

Cole still has a long way to go this weekend. He’s not even done with his opening round. But as long as he can hold steady Friday with some of golf's biggest names right behind him, there's no reason Cole can't stay in the mix deep into the weekend.

“I mean, I just have got to keep focusing on what I've been doing,” Cole said. “If the results happen, then they do. I hit 180 yards for my shot on No. 6, so I'm going to focus on getting ready to hit that shot for tomorrow morning.”