East Lake, Atlanta, GA …. FedEx Cup front-runner Dustin Johnson signalled his intentions in muscling his way to a share of the lead on day one of the season-ending Tour Championship here in Atlanta.

DJ, who was out in the last group of the day, finished the opening round on top and sharing the lead after a four under par 66 with countryman Kevin Chappell and Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama.

Matsuyama capped his round with a hat-rick of birdies early and finished with birdie on the par-5 18th while Chappell joined them with a bogey-free round.

Johnson is coming off his third victory of the year at the BMW Championship two weeks ago and the current US Open champ is clearly the player to beat for the $US 1.5m first prize and the $US 10m FedEx Cup bonus purse.

FedEx Cup front-runner Dustin Johnson signals his East Lake intentions right from the outset.

“I thought I played pretty solid today,” he said.

“I hit a lot of good shots, hit a lot of greens. I felt like — I don’t know how many fairways I hit. I thought I hit a decent amount of fairways.

“You know, this golf course is very difficult, and I felt like I played it pretty solid, hit a lot of nice iron shots. You know, wasn’t real aggressive, but some of these flags, you can’t really be aggressive.

“You’ve just got to try to hit it 20 feet one side of it and have an uphill putt. But I thought I wedged it nicely today and hit a lot of quality iron shots.”

And if Johnson had any challenges there was not many as he mentioned:-

“Well, driving it in the fairway is the most challenging part out here,,” he said.  “It’s a premium for sure. This rough’s deep. The ball sits on the bottom every time. So you really got to hit it in the fairway.

“The golf course isn’t real long, but if you’re in the fairway — I mean, if you’re in the fairway, you know, you get a decent amount of short irons in your hand, but if you drive it in the rough all day, it’s just no fun.”

It is Johnson who has control of the East Lake reins and whatever he does over the next three days somewhat controls the destiny of the four players behind him on the FedEx Cup points table.

And they include in FedEx Cup standing order: Patrick Reed, Adam Scott, Jason Day and England’s Paul Casey.

Each of them can pull the FedEx Cup red carpet from under the feet of DJ with victory.

So how did they each perform on day one of the year’s final event.

Reed – 73; Scott – 69; Day – 67 & Casey – 68.