Between August 2023 and April 2026 Rory Sabbatini played six competitive rounds of golf - on Thursday he fired a 67 at the ISPS HANDA Senior Open.
The Slovakian played no ranking golf at all in 2025 as he took a break which he admits he "loved" but on April 2 he turned 50 and became eligible for the senior game.
Within two weeks he was teeing off at the Senior PGA Championship and while he missed that cut, he has not missed another in seven appearances on the Champions Tour.
That run includes two top threes in his last three starts, meaning he arrived at The Gleneagles Hotel as one of the form senior players in the world.
The six-time PGA TOUR winner feels he is still "knocking the rust off" but after carding four birdies and a single bogey over the King's Course in round one, he could well be a contender over the weekend.
"It's good to be out here," he said. "Obviously I stepped way from the game for about two-and-a-half years, and I'm not going to lie, I loved that a lot. That was very enjoyable.
"Decided end of March to come back out here and been slowly working on getting some of the rust out of the game. It's getting there. It's getting closer.
"Obviously when you take two-and-a-half years off and you come back, I was showing up putting on marble greens and I was using a sledgehammer it felt like. I had no touch, no control. That started to come back.
"Knocking the rust off and cleaning up areas of the game. All of it is starting to come back into form. Yeah, definitely a lot of positives."
Sabbatini bogeyed the second but would not put another foot wrong with gains on the sixth, ninth, tenth and 17th.
"Overall, I drove the ball fairly well," he said. "You know, I never really got myself too much out of position, and then hit a lot of greens.
"Obviously these greens are very generous. They give you a lot of room to hit them.
"But you know, just picking and choosing your battles when you get them, and you know, if you can not have to rely too much on your short game and make some stress-free pars, it gives you those opportunities, and they will arise out of this golf course."
