'Two Bad Swings' Lead to Rough Start

Michael Thompson marks down a bogey 6 on his scorecard for hole #3

by Roz Roberts III

Michael Thompson's title defense at the Honda Classic got off to a rough start today.  Things started going a little sideways on the par 5 third hole when he snap hooked his second shot into the water hazard left of the hole which lead to a bogey.  After a bounce back birdie on the fourth hole he then went bogey-triple bogey before he was able to right the ship.

Michael started a streak of nine consecutive pars which included some of the most difficult holes on the course before he bogeyed the middle hole of the Bear Trap (hole 16).  He finished off the round with a 34 foot birdie putt on the 18th hole which will hopefully have some carry over momentum for tomorrow.  He finished four over par for the round and is tied for 133rd.  He will need a special round tomorrow to make the cut, but Michael has played some special rounds on this course before so it's not out of reach.

After the round, Michael sounded upbeat on Twitter:

'I played a lot better than my score showed today. I had 6 lip outs and 2 bad swings. Lots of positives out there. Excited about tomorrow.'

Tee Times
Michael will once again be playing with Lee Westwood and Robert Allenby.  They will begin round two on the tenth hole at 7:55am ET.

Video
Live@ returns with streaming coverage from the third hole.  Golf Channel will air the first two rounds and then NBC will join Golf Channel coverage for the final two rounds.

Golf Channel - 2pm - 6pm ET
Live @ - 8am-6pm ET

Online Links
The ThompsonTide reviews are in and we have two thumbs down for the new PGATour.com leaderboard.  Our complaints are too long to list but our top three are:  the page takes way too long to update causing scrolling to be painful; the wide lines and small fonts require you to scroll a lot which makes our first complaint even more aggravating; and it is just plain ugly,  We've found it pretty much unusable.

New Leaderboard
Shot Tracker Leaderboard
Michael's Scorecard
Michael on ShotTracker
Michael's Group on Shot Tracker
Live Map