Herbert writes his name into major history at Royal Birkdale
The par putt was inside five feet. Lucas Herbert stood over it on the eighteenth green, one stroke from a record that had never belonged to anyone alone. The ball slid past. He tapped in for 62, and with it matched the lowest round ever recorded in a men's major championship. Lucas Herbert, the Australian from Melbourne, had come to the second round of The 154th Open and rewritten history without quite finishing the sentence.
The round began in a rush. Herbert birdied four of his opening five holes, added another from forty feet at the seventh, then picked up a shot at the ninth to reach the turn in 28. That outward half equalled the lowest front nine in the history of The Open, a mark set by Denis Durnian at this same course forty-three years earlier. The putter, cold for so many, was warm in his hands.
He kept moving. Back-to-back birdies from the eleventh, then a ninth of the day at the par-four sixteenth, carried him to nine under and left a par-par finish to break the record outright. The seventeenth, a reachable par five, offered the eagle that would have taken him toward numbers rarely spoken aloud. He missed from ten feet. Then came the eighteenth, and the short putt that stayed above ground.
A record shared, twice over
History did not wait. Two groups behind, Sam Burns of the United States reached the turn in 32 before finding the same rare form on the back nine, closing with a hole-out from the greenside bunker at the last to match Herbert's eight-under 62 around twenty minutes later. On one afternoon at Royal Birkdale, the lowest round in men's major history was equalled not once but twice. Herbert became the fifth man to card 62 in a major; Burns the sixth.
"It was very cool to experience that, and the nerves coming down the stretch," Herbert told Sky Sports afterwards. He admitted that, standing on the seventeenth, he had briefly let himself think of a round of 59.
The symmetry runs deeper than the number. The feat matched Branden Grace, who posted the first 62 in a men's major on this course in 2017. The lowest scores in the game keep returning to England's Golf Coast, and Herbert now belongs among them. For a player who built his game on the wind and firm turf of home, links golf has always suited the eye. Friday confirmed what the trajectory suggested: a competitor capable, on his day, of the sport's outer edges.
One putt short of standing alone, Lucas Herbert instead stands beside the finest rounds the game has known. The record is shared. The afternoon was his.
