PGA Championship 2017 live stream: How to watch Round 2 online

With four new holes added in a 12-week redesign, Quail Hollow leveled up from PGA Tour stop to PGA Championship host. On Thursday, the course lived up to major tournament standards.

A longer, meaner Quail Hollow left the majority of its players above par to open up the tournament Thursday. A plethora of tough pin placements, taking advantage of the course’s new faster, bigger greens, made two-putts an adventure and created a surplus of bogeys. The layout had world No. 2 golfer Jordan Spieth struggling to describe the physics of it.

“That makes no sense at all,” Spieth said after a missed putt on the fifth hole dropped him to +2. “It’s these new greens. They do two different things.”

Spieth, one of the top picks to hoist the Wanamaker Trophy Sunday evening, finished his opening round with a +1 72, five strokes off the lead.

Those changes — which also include narrowing fairways, lengthening holes, and removing trees — have transformed the course from a viable host of the Wells Fargo Championship into a proper challenge for one of the game’s four majors. Two years ago, Rory McIlroy torched the course for a -21 finish. With three more days of escalating difficulty remaining, it’s tough to see anyone getting near that mark in 2017.

While this year’s British Open champ struggled, the reigning U.S. Open titlist played his way into contention. Brooks Koepka found a way to tame Quail Hollow’s challenging greens en route to a -3 start. That landed him one spot behind Dane Thorbjorn Olesen, who took an early lead on his quest to win his first PGA Tour championship.

He wasn’t the only lesser-known golfer to make headlines. Jim Herman finished his day at -2, which wouldn’t be notable — except he owes his PGA Tour card to the current President of the United States. Herman was a former assistant golf pro at one of Donald Trump’s courses. After playing with the self-taught duffer, Trump decided to back his bid to play on the Web.com Tour.

Herman’s career has progressed steadily from there, and now he’s on the front page of the leaderboard at one of the game’s most prestigious events.

Herman will have big expectations on his shoulders now that his origin story has placed him under a microscope. He’s never finished higher than tied for 47th in a major, and the Championship is his first big four tournament of the season. History suggests he’ll have a tough time fending off a field that includes each of the world’s top 10 golfers — even if one of them is struggling with the unrealistic physics of Quail Hollow’s greens.

Here’s how you can watch all the action leading up to Friday night’s cut. All times are Eastern.

1 p.m. – 7 p.m. — TNT

8 a.m. – end of play — PGA Championship Stream

8:30 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. — Feature Groups and press conferences on the PGA Championship’s official app

Noon – 6 p.m. — Sirius XM PGA Tour Radio (Ch. 92/208)