Every July, the John Deere Classic turns TPC Deere Run into the PGA Tour’s great scoring festival, a week when birdies pour in, leaderboards go deep red, and the question is never whether someone will go low, but how low. It is fitting, then, that the tournament’s course record sits at golf’s most magical number, and that it has been reached not once but twice.
The John Deere Classic course record is 59, a 12-under-par round at TPC Deere Run shared by two players: journeyman Paul Goydos, who shot it in the first round in 2010, and rookie Hayden Springer, who matched it in the first round in 2024, complete with a front-nine 27 and a holed 55-yard pitch for eagle. That makes Deere Run one of the only courses in PGA Tour history to yield two sub-60 rounds, and remarkably, neither man went on to win the tournament. The 72-hole record belongs to Davis Thompson, whose 256 in 2024 rewrote the scoring book the very same week as Springer’s 59.
The chart below breaks down the John Deere Classic course record: the full record book, the two 59s side by side, Springer’s round hole by hole, and how it all compares to golf’s lowest rounds. Take a look, then we’ll tell the stories.
Contents
The record: 59, twice
The lowest round ever shot at the John Deere Classic is 59, twelve under par at TPC Deere Run, and it belongs to two players. Paul Goydos got there first, in the opening round of the 2010 tournament, posting what was at the time only the fourth sub-60 round in PGA Tour history. Fourteen years later, in the first round of the 2024 edition, rookie Hayden Springer matched it shot for shot, recording the fourteenth sub-60 round the Tour had ever seen.
The parallels between the two rounds are almost eerie: both came in the first round, both on a rain-softened course playing with lift-clean-and-place rules, and, in the great cosmic joke of the John Deere Classic, neither man won the tournament. It is a record that says as much about the venue as the players: very few courses in the history of the PGA Tour have surrendered two rounds in the 50s, and TPC Deere Run is one of them.
Goydos’s 59, and the 60 that beat it
Paul Goydos’s 2010 round is one of the great “yes, but” stories in golf. The 46-year-old journeyman, a two-time Tour winner known more for his wit than his firepower, torched Deere Run for a 12-under 59 in round one, joining Al Geiberger, Chip Beck, and David Duval as the only men to break 60 in Tour history to that point. It should have given him a massive lead. It gave him one shot.
Playing the same soft golf course the same day, Steve Stricker shot 60, the greatest single-day one-two scoring punch a PGA Tour event had ever seen. Stricker, the tournament’s defining player of that era, kept his foot down all week, built a record six-shot 54-hole lead, and won his third consecutive John Deere Classic. Goydos, the man who shot 59, finished as a footnote to someone else’s history, an outcome that still defines the tournament’s anything-goes scoring culture.
Springer’s 59: the 27 and the pitch-in
Hayden Springer’s 2024 round might be the more improbable of the two. A 27-year-old rookie who had missed the cut in six of his previous seven starts, and had never shot below 61 in his life, Springer opened the tournament on July 4th by scorching the front nine in 27 strokes, eight under par, tying the lowest nine holes in tournament history. An eagle at the par-5 second, a chip-in birdie from the rough at the third, and five more birdies had golf’s magic number in play before he made the turn.
Then came the stall: five straight pars from the 10th, and the chance seemed to be slipping. It was rescued by one of the most outrageous shots ever hit by a player chasing 59, a holed 55-yard pitch from the left rough for eagle at the par-5 17th. Needing birdie at the last, Springer striped a 308-yard drive, hit his approach to 12 feet 8 inches, and rolled it in: eight birdies, two eagles, no bogeys, 59. Like Goydos, he could not convert the round into the trophy; Davis Thompson ran away with the title while setting the tournament’s 72-hole record of 256, twenty-eight under par, in the same week.
Why Deere Run yields such low scores
The John Deere Classic is annually one of the lowest-scoring events on the PGA Tour, and the reasons are baked into the venue. TPC Deere Run, a D.A. Weibring design laid over a former Arabian horse farm along the Rock River in Silvis, Illinois, is a par 71 of roughly 7,289 yards, short by modern Tour standards, with soft, receptive conditions common in Midwest July and generous birdie chances throughout. On Springer’s record day in 2024, only 13 players in the 156-man field finished over par.
Add in the tournament’s calendar slot, the week before The Open Championship, which historically drew a field heavy on aggressive young players chasing a win, and you get a perfect scoring storm nearly every year. It is no accident that the tournament record book is a catalog of extremes: the two 59s, Springer’s 27, Thompson’s 256, and Michael Kim’s eight-shot demolition in 2018 (a 257 that stood as the record until Thompson beat it).
Where 59 sits in golf history
A 59 remains one of golf’s rarest feats, even as it has grown less mythical: only around fifteen sub-60 rounds have ever been shot on the PGA Tour, from Al Geiberger’s original “Mr. 59” round in 1977 through the modern cluster. The all-time record is Jim Furyk’s 58 at the 2016 Travelers Championship, and Furyk remains the only player with two career sub-60 rounds. That TPC Deere Run accounts for two of the Tour’s handful of 59s is a genuine distinction almost no other course can claim.
And the record is under some threat every single July. With the 2026 John Deere Classic being played this week, soft summer conditions and a birdie-happy field mean a 58, or lower, is never off the table at Deere Run. If anyone finally breaks the tie between Goydos and Springer, this page will be the first thing we update.
Final Word
The John Deere Classic course record is 59, shared by Paul Goydos (2010) and Hayden Springer (2024), both first-round masterpieces at TPC Deere Run, and both, incredibly, rounds that failed to win the tournament, with Stricker’s same-day 60 in 2010 and Thompson’s record 256 in 2024 stealing the trophies. Add Springer’s front-nine 27 and Kim’s eight-shot rout and you have one of the deepest record books of any regular Tour stop.
Few courses anywhere have given up two rounds in the 50s, and at the Tour’s annual birdie-fest, the next piece of history always feels one soft morning away. For the champions who have tamed Deere Run, see our full list of John Deere Classic past winners.