Kurt Kitayama plays a shot on the ninth hole during the first round of the Shriners Children’s Open 2024 at TPC Summerlin on October 17, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Orlando Ramirez/Getty Images)
As a Las Vegas resident and former UNLV golfer, Kurt Kitayama has pretty much seen it all at TPC Summerlin. But even he admitted, “Wasn’t really ready for this.”
By this he meant the wildly windy conditions that turned TPC Summerlin into a house of horrors on Friday. But Kitayama pieced together one of the rounds of the day, posting a bogey-free 3-under 68 to improve to 8-under 134 and can kick back and relax at home until his late Saturday tee time.
Asked if he envisioned a bogey-free round before he teed it up, he said, “No, definitely not. I was thinking it was going to play really hard and I had to limit big numbers. But luckily when did I miss I missed in the right spot; was able to just grind it out.”
That included at the seventh hole, his 16th hole of the day, where he holed a 17-footer for par. “That was a big putt,” he said.
Kitayama, who won the Arnold Palmer Invitational in 2023, made the weekend for the sixth time in his last seven cuts and is well positioned to improve on just two top-10 finishes this season and perhaps win for the second time and do so in his adopted hometown.
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