Nick Dunlap had a blistering, dynamite sort-of explosion onto the PGA TOUR a year ago with a win as an amateur – the first since 1991. He turned professional and then won again in the summertime, becoming the first golfer in the TOUR’s history to achieve such a feat.

That’s the Wikipedia stuff. It’s incredible, of course. And he’s just 21. A whole golfing lifetime ahead.

Alas, even for a wunderkind, golf has its way of humbling all those inside the ropes. Dunlap was no exception in 2025 until Thursday at the World Wide Technology Championship.

He shot an 11-under 61, tying the course and tournament 18-hole scoring record.

“Just kind of one of those days,” he said with a smile. “Golf's been very hard recently and today was the opposite of that.”

The 61 marked his best round on TOUR since he fired a 60 in the third round of The American Express last year, which he went on to win. In his previous 70 rounds on TOUR through 2025, he had broken 66 just once. His lone top-10 of the season couldn’t have come longer ago – it was at the Sony Open in Hawaii. He has the same number of early exits as he does made cuts this season.

Most of that can be attributed to his effort with the driver, where Dunlap sits 175th in Strokes Gained: Off The Tee. He’s 134th on TOUR in Driving Distance, and 173rd in Driving Accuracy.

Thursday, however, Dunlap hit every fairway. Fourteen of 14. The first time in his TOUR career he went 100 percent off the tee.

He also missed just one green in regulation, and, in a word, he was dialed.

Dunlap opened with five birdies in his first eight holes before adding birdies on Nos. 13 and 14 and Nos. 16 and 17. He notched an eagle on the par-5 18th to sign for a 61.

His eagle try on the closing hole was a microcosm of his day as a whole, where everything went his way. Dunlap said that if he hit the putt too hard it would go “10, 12 feet” past. Alas, he said it “came out perfect” and rolled into the hole.

His very good day started off the tee and he was off to the races from there.

“I think I hit every fairway, gave myself a ton of opportunities to attack some of these pins,” Dunlap said. “We had really scorable conditions this morning, greens were in great shape and I just kind of (hit some) iron shots to gimme range and made a couple good putts.”

Dunlap shot an opening-round 66 at the Bank of Utah Championship a few weeks ago but slipped down the board with a 76 on the second day to miss the cut. He said he was still able to take plenty of positives from there and had seen a few improvements come to fruition.

Dunlap said he’s tried not to make any of his struggles feel “personal,” and Thursday’s opener was a fine enough example on how good things were percolating underneath some hard work.

“Golf can make you be very, very hard on yourself, especially when you're putting a lot of work in, you're not getting good results, might get a couple bad breaks. Some days it just feels like you never have a good number or feels like every wind might make you uncomfortable,” Dunlap said. “Kind of seems like that's how it's been for me recently and today was a nice change of pace.”