It was about two hours into Rory McIlroy’s first round at the 152nd Open that you began to wonder if some little bit of him was asking exactly what he was doing out there on the links on a day summer skipped. It wasn’t long ago that McIlroy was walking the High Line along the west edge of Manhattan, cap down, earphones in, music on. “It was a good feeling,” he explained later, “to just be one of the herd going about your day.” In New York, no one cared whether he had just missed a putt or not, which was a welcome change for a man who has spent his entire adult life being the centre of everyone’s attention.
Watching him play Royal Troon, you wondered if he didn’t wish he was back there now, and whether he was quite ready to make his comeback to the major stage after his blow-up in the final round of the US Open at Pinehurst. He scored 78 here, seven over par, and 10 shots off Justin Thomas’s clubhouse lead. It was McIlroy’s worst round at the Open since the first day at Royal Portrush in 2019 when he scored 79. That year he followed up by scoring 65 on the second day but still missed the cut, and he admitted here that it would be all he could do to make it this time.
The round started badly with a bogey at the 1st when he missed a 10-foot putt. He managed to make that back with his one, solitary, birdie at the 3rd. It was only when he made it to Royal Troon’s famous 8th, the postage stamp, that things really took a turn for the worse. McIlroy’s tee shot caught on the right edge of the little green, wavered a moment, and rolled down into one of the unforgiving pot bunkers below it. He tried to splash it out, but misjudged the shot, and the ball trickled back down the slope and fetched up a few inches back in front of where he was standing in the sand.
At which point, you guess, he might well have wished he was back among all those oblivious New Yorkers rather than surrounded by a few thousand stony-faced Scots. McIlroy took two more to get in from there, then lumped his drive at the 9th into the rough, where he did well to save par. He dropped another shot at the 10th, and two more at the 11th where he played a provisional ball after his tee shot flew out of bounds on to the train tracks. The first one was last seen skittering along the rails towards Glasgow Central, pursued by a group of spectators who wanted to claim it as a memento. McIlroy, five-over, marched ahead, eager to forget it.
He did well to raise a smile for a group of kids calling out to him on the 12th. It was just about the only one he offered on the back nine. The funk seemed to be contagious. Max Homa had been playing horribly all day, veering from one clump of rough to the next, in and out of the gallery. Homa walloped his second shot at the 10th into the grandstand, but moved on to his drop without stopping to check on the man he had hit. Tyrrell Hatton, who had just about managed to hold his temper in check through the first 12 holes, finally snapped and started cursing a blue streak when he missed a putt at the 15th.
They were both doing better than McIlroy, mind you. He was waiting for a break that never came. He scored another bogey at 15 where he ended up in one fairway bunker, and another at 18, where he found another. If there was one good thing about it all, it was that everyone else seemed to be struggling too. The weather ran the gamut from dreary to miserable, the setup was long, the rough thick, the bunkers pitiless. “I was actually surprised how difficult I felt like the back nine played,” McIlroy said. “I thought we were going to get it a little bit easier than we did. The course was playing tough. The conditions are very difficult in a wind that we haven’t seen so far this week.
“I guess when that happens, you play your practice rounds, you have a strategy that you think is going to help you get around the golf course, but then when you get a wind you haven’t played in, it starts to present different options and you start to think about maybe hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practice.” His mistake, he said, was that he ought to have done a better job of adapting to the conditions. As he said himself, Troon is pitiless and doesn’t forgive anyone’s mistakes. This one means his championship is as good as over already.
