Photo courtesy European Tour

By Kent Gray
Talk about keeping it in the family. Just hours after his U.S. Open winning brother Brooks Koepka grabbed the first round lead at the WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai, little bro Chase snared a share of the $350,000 Ras Al Khaimah 2017 Golf Challenge lead.

Chase rattled off five birdies in a four-under 68 at Al Hamra G.C. to join overnight leader Jurrian van der Vaart (France) atop the leaderboard through 36-holes of the European Challenge Tour’s penultimate stop of 2017.

“I heard about Brooks’ round in China so I just wanted to make sure I made a birdie on the last hole to make sure I’m on top of the leaderboard as well!” Chase told EuropeanTour.com 

Related: Brooks Koepka leads WGC-HSBC Champions after 64 in Shanghai

“It’s a good day to be a golfer called Koepka, but there’s not too many bad days to be a Koepka! Certainly not this year anyway.”

Brooks’ path to his maiden major at Erin Hills in June came via the Challenge Tour with the American winning four times before graduating to the European Tour in 2013. Chase has had five top-5 finishes in this year’s Road to Oman so is guaranteed to emulate his older brother by making it to the main tour and could do it with even more style as victory in RAK would give him a shot at the Challenge Tour title at next week’s €420,000 NBO Golf Classic Grand Final at Almouj Golf in Muscat.

“I’d love to top the rankings,” the 23 year said. “I think in order to do that I’ll need to win one of these last two events so that’s my goal. It’s been a great year anyway but if I can hopefully play well this weekend, I might be able to get that first win.”

Chase came close to winning the Challenge Tour’s “major”, the Kazakhstan Open last month, only to be pipped in a playoff by current order-of-merit leader, Tapio Pulkkanen. The Finnish golfer was in a share of 41st place at Al Hamra overnight.

“I’d love to win,” Chase, sixth in the moneylist entering RAK, continued. ” I was really looking forward to possibly getting that first victory in Kazakhstan – I actually didn’t get off to the greatest of starts there but I found my way into a play-off and it just didn’t quite happen. I feel like my game has been great for a while now. I missed the cut two weeks ago but I actually felt probably the best I’ve felt all season going into that week, which was quite strange.

“Then last week I thought I played my best golf of the year and I finished 20th, that’s just the way golf works I guess. This week, nothing’s really changed, I’m still playing really good golf and now the scores are there too.”