Couples, Duval Flawless

Guys like them have rounds like this, the remarkably stress-free, alternate-shot 61 Fred Couples and David Duval dropped on the rest of the Franklin Templeton Shark Shootout field on Friday.

They drew their clubs back and swung them effortlessly and after the first of three rounds lead by five shots over three teams, Andrew Magee-Jay Haas, Scott McCarron-Scott Hoch and Peter Jacobsen-John Cook.

Afterward, Couples and Duval fell casually into their chairs and said the whole thing was not that tough. “A pretty easy 11 under,” is how Couples described it, a round that might have been better had only a few more putts fallen on the slick greens of Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks.

“It’s easy when both players play well,” Duval said. “It just so happened that I hit it eight or 10 yards farther off most of the tees, so he hit my shots and that made me putt and I putted well.”

Duval, who shot a 59 at the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic in January, made four birdie putts and an eagle putt on the front nine. The pair shot a 29 on the front nine.

Couples, a noted achiever in golf’s silly season who teamed with Raymond Floyd for a 57 in this same format nine years ago, put Duval in putting range with accurate iron play.

“Basically, he did all the putting,” said Couples, who rolled in an eight-footer for birdie on No. 6 as the lead grew.

Meanwhile, McCarron and Hoch are five shots behind and pretty sure they have the game and the luck to catch the leaders.

They liked how McCarron drove the ball after the sixth hole, when they put him in the leadoff position and stopped him from swinging out of his soft spikes.

McCarron, at 165 pounds, finished the PGA Tour season tied for seventh in driving distance and was trying to put the hurt on Sherwood. He reined it in and the Scotts were four under on the back nine.

The last time Duval played the course was in August, when Tiger Woods beat him, 2 and 1, in an exhibition. Duval was all but closed out on Sherwood’s seventh hole, played as the 16th that day. He drove straight down the middle of the fairway, into a collection of boulders and bushes.

Early Friday afternoon, he hit a mammoth drive left of the same hazard, then dismissed the idea he might have stood on that tee box and considered his past misfortune there.

“You know,” he said wearily, “everybody made a big deal of it. I don’t care. My ball went into the rocks. I aim at it every time, still.”

It didn’t go into the rocks.

“Today was our day,” Couples said.