Venue: Royal Troon Dates: Thu 18-Sun 21 July
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After a Tuesday media conference when Rory McIlroy met all questions of his failure in the US Open at Pinehurst and his 10-year pursuit of a fifth major with zen, once again people are simply asking – when?
After his opening round at Royal Troon – a stumbling, disconsolate 78 that summoned memories of Portrush in 2019 – the only logical response to that query is ‘not this year’.
Conditions were brutal, it’s true.
The wind switched from the practice days, the sunshine of Wednesday was replaced by 20mph winds and persistent rain on Thursday, the course played savagely long, the greens were hard and everything was a grind.
McIlroy had one birdie, one ball out of bounds and two double bogeys.
His deficit is in double digits, the main focus for him now, by his own admission, is a grim battle to make the cut on Friday. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
The drive out of bounds came on the 11th. The thing was still in the air when the look of horror that we first saw when he left it in the bunker on the Postage Stamp for double bogey returned with a vengeance.
Horror and, you have to say, something approaching resignation.
It was a day when every player had to find something within themselves to help them stay in the fight.
Some managed it, plenty didn’t. Many stellar names among them. When McIlroy dug deep he found nothing.
The 18th summed it up, a miserable day in microcosm, a round that saw him turn up in the interview area in the aftermath on the understanding that he would answer three questions and three questions only.
“Yeah, difficult day,” he said. An understatement.
On 18, he drove it into the bunker on the left then took his medicine when splashing back to the fairway.
McIlroy stood over his approach. He studied the wind, the rain and the remaining distance between him and the pin.
He reached into his back pocket to retrieve his yardage book but in the process his scorecard blew away on the Ayrshire breeze, his caddie Harry Diamond scampering forward to collect it.
It was a fitting end. When not just your round but your scorecard is getting away from you then it’s never good. And this was never good for the Northern Irishman.
“I felt like I did OK for the first part of the round and then missed the green at the Postage Stamp there and left it in [the bunker] and made a double,” he said.
“But still, I felt like I was in reasonable enough shape being a couple over through nine, thinking that I could maybe get those couple shots back, try to shoot even par, something like that.”
‘I just didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions’
Two-over at the turn was no disgrace. Far from it.
This was a different golf course to the one they took apart in practice, an altogether different beast with the wind and the rain in play.
The outward nine is supposed to be where you make your score, the inward nine the stretch of links where you defend.
On Thursday, everybody was up against it on both nines. It called for a bit of dig and a bit of dog.
The brilliant unpredictability of links golf brought confused looks. All week the wind blew one way on the front and another way on the back. On Thursday, it flipped.
McIlroy was one of the many who struggled awfully to cope with the curveball from Mother Nature.
“Even though the wind on the back nine was helping, it was a lot off the left,” he said. “I was actually surprised how difficult the back nine played. I thought we were going to get it a little bit easier than we did.
“You have a strategy that you think is going to help you, but when you get a wind you haven’t played in, you start to think about hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practice. I just didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions.
“Your misses get punished a lot more this week than last week [at the Scottish Open] or even, geez, any week, whether you miss it in a fairway bunker or even the rough.
“The rough… the balls that I hit in the rough today, the lies were pretty nasty.”
McIlroy was speaking at the same time as his playing partner, Tyrrell Hatton. His body language couldn’t have been mistaken for cheery either.
“It’s one of the worst rounds I think I’ve had this year in terms of how I’ve hit the ball,” he said. “It wasn’t a fun experience.”
The difference between Hatton and McIlroy, though, is that the Englishman battled to a 73, five shots fewer than one of the pre-tournament favourites.
McIlroy said post-Pinehurst that he’d exorcised the demons, that he’d taken himself away deep into Roryland and had come to terms with it.
The process, he said, was remarkably easier than most people might have imagined.
Maybe it just felt easier because he hadn’t fully completed it. Maybe there were still grains of Pinehurst still in him.
His travails on Thursday were part technical – wind has always been a challenge to him, some days more than other days – and part psychological.
We could have stood here beyond the allotted three questions and asked three hundred more and the truth, probably, is that at the end of it we’d have been none the wiser about what goes on inside the head of this gifted but flawed genius on days like these.
