Clarke (65) Not Only Straits Shooter

Darren Clarke is a fine golfer from Ireland and, one could argue after Thursday, full of the blarney.

Clarke spoke so menacingly of the golf course at Whistling Straits before the 86th PGA Championship, you wondered if the lad would even show up for his 7:50 a.m. tee time.

“Brutally difficult,” Clarke had said Monday.

“I didn’t realize there was that many par sixes on one golf course,” he’d groused.

It was a different Clarke who strode into the interview tent after firing a seven-under-par 65 to seize the first-round lead in golf’s last major of the year.

“Very pleased to get off to such a good start,” Clarke said.

Good start?

Based on Clarke’s assessment that Whistling Straits was actually a par 77, not 72, he shot 12 under.

“Everyone is going to make bogeys because your chance of making birdies are not that many,” Clarke had said Monday.

Thursday, he made nine birdies.

So what gave, other than conventional wisdom?

Clarke did a low number on Whistling Straits and he had company.

Justin Leonard and Ernie Els whistled off after shooting six-under 66s, and Vijay Singh, Scott Verplank and Luke Donald were two shots behind Clarke after firing five-under 67s.

Phil Mickelson, who has finished first, second and third in the three majors this year, shot a 69 and is four shots back.

Lou Holtz never poor-mouthed an opponent the way pro golfers did Whistling Straits.

The question after Day 1 was whether the world’s best golfers had collectively conned the PGA into setting an easier course for fear of another uprising.

Remember, we are only two months removed from the near revolt during the final round of the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, at which conditions were allowed to drift from coarse to comical.

For Thursday’s opening round of the PGA, three tees were moved up to shorten the course from 7,514 to 7,369 yards.

Officials adjusted the par-four eighth hole from 507 yards to 468, the par-five 11th from 618 to 563, and the par-four 18th from 500 to 449.

Els said that, with all the pre-tournament talk about big, bad Whistling Straits, officials probably feared six-hour rounds and the prospect of sending out rescue teams to find wayward strikers in the 156-player field.

“There’s a lot of teeth still left in this golf course,” Els insisted. “They can stretch it out and make it really very tough, but for the first or second round, to get the field moving, I think they did the right thing.”

The combination of favorable tee placements and relatively mild winds pretty much knocked the incisors out of Whistling Straits.

Not to say everyone took advantage.

Tiger Woods, showing signs of late that he might be ready to bust out of his major drought, opened with a disappointing 75.

John Daly, his playing partner, shot an 81 that included a quadruple-bogey 8 on No. 18.

Contrary to early fears, though, the birdies all but flew onto players’ scorecards.

In the players’ defense, few knew what to make of Whistling Straits, a 6-year-old course making its first major appearance.

Assessments of the course were based on practice rounds played in howling winds on unknown terrain.

Thursday, with the tees up and the winds down, Whistling Straits played like a different course.

Get this: The 7:50 a.m. group that included Clarke, Leonard and K.J. Choi fleeced the joint for a collective 17 under par.

Choi opened with five birdies; Clarke had four.

Leonard, feeling left out on the front nine, shot 31 on the return.

“They were playing so well I kind of got sucked into it on the back nine,” he joked.

Everyone talked about what a monster the 500-yard 18th hole was going to be all week.

In his practice round Tuesday, Els said, he needed to hit a driver and a three-wood to reach the green.

Thursday, from the forward tee and with the hole playing downwind, Els got to the green with a three-wood and an eight-iron.

Same story on the par-four fourth hole. Els needed only a three-wood and a nine-iron to get there Thursday. Tuesday, he’d had to muscle a driver and a three-iron.

The leaders, though, are taking nothing for granted.

They expect the PGA to counterpunch today with more difficult tee positions and pin placements.

Clarke, trying to become the first European to win the PGA since the format switched from match to medal play in 1958, is apologizing for nothing.

He simply took from Whistling Straits while the taking was good.

Clarke could not have played much better.

He had only two bogeys, averaged 318.5 yards on his drives, hit 11 of 14 fairways, 15 of 18 greens in regulation and needed only 25 putts.

That said, he expects conditions to change.

“If the wind keeps blowing, the greens dry out, then I think there won’t be that many low scores this week,” he said.

Understandably, no one wants to admit publicly that Whistling Straits was a pushover because that would only rankle the pin setters.

“Do you want someone to come and beat you upside the head with a hammer if you did something good?” Verplank said.

The last thing anyone wants is a repeat of Shinnecock Hills, where the U.S. Golf Assn. retaliated for low scores early in the U.S. Open by baking the greens to the point of ridicule.

Verplank, trying to make the Ryder Cup team, says Whistling Straits is fine the way it is.

“I think about the time this is over ... I don’t think the scores are going to be all that low, is what I’m saying,” he said. “But they are not going to have to do something completely idiotic, like the USGA did.”