Ian Poulter, Martin Laird tied for lead at The Players Championship

Ian Poulter, Martin Laird and Blake Adams have one thing in common: their path to professional golf didn't orginate from a posh, country-club background.

But once they became PGA Tour players, the similarity ended there.

What they have in common at the moment is their position atop The Players Championship leaderboard. Poulter shot 31 on the back nine of the TPC Sawgrass Players Stadium Course Thursday, with birdies at Nos. 16 and 17, one-putted an incredible nine greens in a row during one stretch, and finished with a 7-under-par 65.

Laird matched that in the afternoon with nearly the same formula, shooting 32 on the back with birdies at Nos. 16 and 17, and he one-putted six of his last seven greens to catch Poulter.

Adams was the most unlikely member of the trio. An oft-injured 35-year-old Georgia native, Adams birdied five holes in a row on the front nine and shot 66 in his second Players start.

A pair of Tour players with reputations as deliberate, to say the least, are tied at 5-under, Kevin Na and Ben Crane. Na started on the back, matched the course record for the second nine with a 30, and overcame a double-bogey at No. 1 to finish among the leaders.

Crane, who manages to find himself in the mix at the Stadium Course, played his last eight holes at 3-under.

There's a crowd of solid players at 4-under, including St. Simons Island, Ga., residents Matt Kuchar and Jonathan Byrd, 2004 Players champion Adam Scott, 2003 British Open champion and recent Tour winner Ben Curtis and defending FedEx Cup champion Bill Haas.

Phil Mickelson, the 2007 Players champion, had a pedestrian 71. Last week's break-through winner, Rickie Fowler birdied his first hole on a 40-foot putt but did little else on his way to a 72.

Tiger Woods finished a round in the Players for the first time since the third round in 2010 but it wasn't much to crow about: a 74 that was his second-highest opening-round score at the Stadium Course.

The three men at the top got their start in golf in modest ways.

Poulter, a native of Hitchin, England, used to have to pay his own greens fees at the public course where he was an assistant pro. Laird, a native of Scotland who won for the first time on the PGA Tour at last year's Arnold Palmer Invitational, played college golf at Colorado State, hardly a hotbed of young talent. Adams, a native of Dalton, Ga., was a four-sport start in high school and has been scrounging a living at golf since 2001, after he played at Georgia, then transferred to Georgia Southern.

It took Adams six years to get to the Nationwide Tour but he won twice there in 2009 to earn his PGA Tour card and has made the PGA Tour playoffs in each of the last two seasons.

But Poulter and Laird, both PGA Tour winners and international stars, clearly have enjoyed the good life once they arrived. Poulter lives in the posh Orlando gated community of Lake Nona and Laird is a member of the equally ritzy Whisper Rock Golf Club in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Adams? He had a golf hole built on a parcel of the land he owns in the town of Nunez, Ga., which has a population of 130, with no red lights and one store, Hook's.

He practices on his own land, wearing no shoes, with a radio blasting country music (preferably Luke Bryan, who went to Georgia Southern with Adams and his wife Beth), hitting battered balls that his two children and a dog chase and bring back.

When Adams wants to play 18 holes at home, he simply goes to the Georgia Southern golf course.

"When I go home, I'm a million miles from everything and everybody," Adams said. "We are just simple folks and we like the quietness. Last week [in Charlotte], I missed the cut and my caddie and I went back and we fished every day and went riding around looking for something to shoot."

For the record, Adams said turkey is in season in Nunez.

Adams was clearly on target in the first round of The Players. He lasered iron shots all day, hitting 13 greens, and during his birdie streak from hole Nos. 5-9, he made a pair of 20-foot putts and three of less than 10 feet.

"My goal every week is to hit as many fairways as I can, hit as many greens as I can and make every putt," said Adams, who is ranked 239th in the world. "That was my whole mindset -- to just go out there and have fun."

Poulter and Laird certainly did, especially on the greens. Poulter needed only 26 putts to beat his previous best round at the Stadium Course by two shots, in his ninth start, and Laird, who had only 24 putts, shot in the 60s for the first time in four starts.

"It's a proper challenge," said Poulter, who was The Players runner-up in 2009. "That was probably one of the top-10 rounds of golf I've ever played."

Laird was at a loss to explain his putting on a course where the greens have baffled him in the past.

"I've always struggled on these greens," he said. "But last week at Quail Hollow, where I've also struggled, I putted really, really well for some reason. I don't know what it was."

The relatively benign conditions resulted in a first-round scoring average of 72.373, with 27 players breaking 70 and 54 breaking par. But the wind turned tricky in the afternoon and resulted in most of the 18 water balls at the par-3 17th hole, the most in the first round since 2008.

Garry Smits: (904) 359-4362